Therapy

you start browsing in dictionaries, you never know where it will lead you. I noticed that Aarhus, the name of a port in Denmark, was given the alternative spelling of Århus. Further research revealed that this is the usual way the double aa is written in modern Danish, a single a with a little circle on top. So if Kierkegaard were alive today he would write his name as Kierkegård. More unsettling still was the discovery that all this time I’ve been pronouncing his name incorrectly. I thought it was something like Sor’n Key-erk-er-guard. Not at all. Apparently the o is pronounced like eu in the French deux, the Kierk is pronounced as Kirg with a hard g, the aa sounds like awe in English, and the d is mute. So the name sounds something like Seuren Kirgegor. I think I’ll stick with the English pronunciation.
    The a with the little circle on top reminds me of something, but I can’t for the life of me remember what. Frustrating. It’ll come back to me one day, when I’m not trying.
     
    I’ve also been reading Repetition, subtitled An Essay in Experimental Psychology. A rum book. Well, they’re all rum books. Each one is different, but the same themes and obsessions keep cropping up: courtship, seduction, indecision, guilt, depression, despair. Repetition has another pretend-author, Constantine Constantius, who is the friend and confidant of a nameless young man, and he’s a bit like A in Either/Or. The young man falls in love with a girl who reciprocates his feelings and they become engaged. But instead of being made happy by this situation, the guy is immediately plunged into the deepest depression (Constantius calls it “melancholy”, like Kierkegaard in his Journals). What triggers this reaction is a fragment of verse (the young man has ambitions to be a poet himself) which he finds himself repeating again and again:
     
To my arm-chair there comes a dream
From the springtime of youth
A longing intense
For thee, thou sun amongst women.
     
    The young man is a classic case of the unhappiest man. Instead of living in the present, enjoying his engagement, he remembers the future; that is to say, he imagines himself looking back on his youthful love from the vantage point of disillusioned old age, like the speaker of the poem, and then there seems to be no point in getting married. “He was in love, deeply and sincerely in love, that was evident — and yet all at once, in one of the first days of his engagement, he was capable of recollecting his love. Substantially he was through with the whole relationship. Before he begins he has taken such a terrible stride that he has leapt over the whole of life.” It’s a wonderfully barmy and yet entirely plausible way of cheating yourself of happiness. Constantius sums it up: “He longs for the girl, he has to restrain himself by force from hanging around her the whole day, and yet at the very first instant he has become an old man with respect to the whole relationship... That he would become unhappy was clear enough, and that the girl would become unhappy was no less clear.” He decides that for the girl’s own good he must break off the engagement. But how can he do this without making her feel rejected?
    Constantius advises him to pretend to have a mistress — to set up a shop-girl in an apartment and go through the motions of visiting her-so that his fiancée will despise him and break off the engagement herself. The young man accepts this advice, but at the last moment lacks the nerve to carry it out, and simply disappears from Copenhagen. After an interval he starts writing letters to Constantius, analysing his conduct and his feelings in relation to the girl. He’s still completely obsessed with her, of course. He’s become an unhappy rememberer. “What am I doing now? I begin all over again from the beginning, and from the wrong end. I shun every outward reminder of the whole thing, yet my soul, day and night, waking and sleeping, is incessantly employed with it.” He identifies himself with Job. (I looked up Job in the Bible. I’d never actually read the Book of Job before. It’s surprisingly readable — bloody brilliant, actually.) Like Job, the young man bewails his miserable condition (“My life has been brought to an impasse, I loathe existence, it is without savour, lacking salt and sense”), but whereas Job blames God, the young man doesn’t believe in God, so he isn’t sure whose fault it is: “How did I obtain an interest in