Philosopher of the Heart by Clare Carlisle

Author:Clare Carlisle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241283592
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

11

How to be Anxious

‘I am still very exhausted, but I have almost reached my goal,’ he writes in his journal in November 1848, as he completes The Point of View for My Work as an Author.1 ‘Recently I have been only a writer. My mind and spirit are strong enough, but regrettably all too strong for my body. In one sense it is my mind and spirit that help me to endure such poor health; in another sense it is my mind and spirit that overwhelm my body.’ His ideas are so abundant that he could write incessantly day and night, though if he did this he would soon collapse. ‘After becoming an author, I actually have never once experienced what I hear others lament over – the lack of thoughts, or that they would not present themselves.2 If that were to happen to me, I very likely would almost be happy that at last I had a day off.’

He is concluding The Point of View for My Work as an Author with a chapter on ‘Governance’s Part in my Authorship’. There he describes how he has ‘continuously needed God’s assistance day after day, year after year’, in order to write. When he starts to work he feels agitation, restless passion, ‘a poet impatience’ in his soul; he picks up his pen, but cannot move it. Then he seems to hear a voice telling him, like a teacher speaking to a boy, to write his assignment: ‘Then I become completely calm; then there is time to write every letter, almost meticulously, with my slower pen.3 Then I can do it, then I dare not do anything else, then I write each word, each line, almost unaware of the next word and the next line. Then, when I read it through later, I find an entirely different satisfaction in it. Even though some glowing expressions did perhaps elude me, what has been produced is something else – it is not the work of the poet passion or of the thinker passion, but of devotion to God, and for me a divine worship.’

With this account of his authorship, Kierkegaard is setting himself decisively, defiantly apart from the world, showing his disdain for worldly success. He has come to believe that ‘the world, if it is not evil, is mediocre.’ Nevertheless, the lure of this world is powerful, and as a writer he has had to struggle to avoid falling into ‘the untruth that, as it always does, would have secured for me money, honour, esteem, approval, etc., the untruth that what I had to say was “the demand of the times”, that it was submitted to the lenient judgement of a highly esteemed public, moreover, that it was owing to the approval and support and acclamation of my contemporaries that it prospered’. No, he has channelled his efforts into expressing the truth that his entire life makes indubitable for him: ‘that there is a God’. He has sought to understand ‘what it

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