The Joy of Missing Out by Svend Brinkmann

Author:Svend Brinkmann [Brinkmann, Svend]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509531561
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-03-26T04:00:00+00:00

Yes, it is sentimental. But how else would we express the fact that there is a world, a nature, a wholeness, that we did not create, which ‘is of no use to us’, and which we can only look at in silence and prostrate ourselves in front of? I see Knausgård as a contemporary voice trying to express the same thing Kierkegaard wanted to say, in a more archaic manner, with the story of the lily and the bird. Both are talking about something that we have almost lost the vocabulary to discuss – a kind of awe at the fact that the world exists, an awe that also has an ethical dimension.

This also applies to the kind of obedience Kierkegaard identifies, by which, of course, he means obedience to God, but which can also be interpreted more generally as a way of living that accentuates the factual, accepting that there is something that cannot be changed, and which we therefore must ‘obey’, even though we might prefer ‘alternative facts’ that support our own case.

Finally, there is the joy of being, which Kierkegaard writes about in a manner almost reminiscent of the ‘gratitude exercises’ in contemporary positive psychology: ‘that thou didst become a man; that thou canst see – only think, that thou canst see! – that thou canst hear, thou canst smell, thou canst taste, thou canst feel; that the sun shines upon thee … and for thy sake, that when the sun is weary the moon then begins, then the stars are lit’. He continues to enumerate many phenomena over which we should rejoice, before finally concluding: ‘If this is nothing to be glad of, then there is nothing to be glad of.’9

According to Kierkegaard (and Knausgård, in his way), silence, obedience and joy are demands placed on humankind that endow us with ethical character and dignity, but are also predicated on self-restraint rather than overstepping boundaries. It is not just the Christian thinker Kierkegaard who writes about this. The Danish cultural commentator and radical socialist Otto Gelsted wrote beautifully about it too, in his poem ‘Salmer’ (Psalms), published in the collection Enetaler (Monologues) from 1922. This time it is not the lily or the bird but the trees that serve as an ethical and existential inspiration:

Gazing at your navel

is but a poor life,

picking our sores

a bad pastime.

Look at the trees in the fence,

they are well worth seeing.

How tall, proud and silent

they all act.

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