some kind of clarity has dawned in my intellectual life, but like the light of the sun I can’t glimpse it directly. last post I wrote about Bertrand Russell, because I was inexplicably compelled to pick up the one book of his I have, Unpopular Opinions, and flip to an essay at random. as is often the case, the Book Angels arranged that the exact thing I needed to read in that moment is what I landed on. the call Russell makes in that essay, about the value of grappling with ideas, in solitude, without concern for what’s contemporary or modern, hit me squarely.
finding that the next essay I tried in Unpopular Opinions did not excite me at all, I put it down. on a whim similar to that which made me pick up Russell, I picked up Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. philosophy ought to be energizing, driving the reader to consider, practically, the aspects of their life they need to examine for the sake of making change. I’ve been in a bit of a rut about what reading means in my life; like almost everything, it’s become a habit that mostly serves to maintain a certain stasis, which is diametrically opposite what I crave from reading. the reason I love literature is because it, once upon a time, taught me what living could be, if I take seriously the questions posed through the ages by our artists, poets, and thinkers. by really grappling with the dilemma Hamlet faces, or considering what Ahab’s quest might reveal about my own approach to life, I might realize how little I’m actually “living,” and thereafter seek a new degree of radical engagement. this is an especially urgent question here in the contemporary world, where the arrangement of society effectively zombifies its participants, banking, as global consumer capitalism does, on a populace totally alienated from not only their labor but the reality of their individual experiences. the Spectacle not only doesn’t want you to know thyself, but it actively works to deny you that possibility. as such, the artifacts left by people who have tried harder than anyone else to know themselves—books, namely—must be protected and handled deliberately, for it is easy, under the sway of contemporary hegemonic ideology, to appear to be engaging with these questions while totally missing the volatile power of literature.
I won’t bother to recapitulate the meditation on faith, absurdity, responsibility, sacrifice, and morality that Kierkegaard, writing as Johannes de silentio, lays out in his analysis of Genesis 22:1-18, the Binding of Isaac. part of this analysis includes the impossibility of Abraham, the knight of faith, making himself comprehensible, in his embrace of the absurd, to anyone who might condemn him as a would-be murderer. I’ll briefly note that it became clear to me, in reading Fear and Trembling, that it is important for me to dwell on the question of faith and absurdity, seeing as I’ve lost some conviction that my creative pursuits, and the version of myself my creative pursuits reveal, are valuable, despite, or thanks to, the sacrifices they entail.
in a strange synchronicity, the day after I started reading Fear and Trembling, I met a young woman similarly seeking encouragement to pursue her creative impulses. her name? Faith.
the demiurge is not always one for subtlety.
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