The Seducer's Diary (New in Paperback) by Updike John Kierkegaard Søren Hong Howard V. Hong Edna H

Author:Updike, John, Kierkegaard, Søren, Hong, Howard V., Hong, Edna H.
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

What I have to do now is, on the one hand, to organize everything so that the engagement is broken in such a way that I thereby secure a more beautiful and significant relationship to Cordelia; on the other hand, I must utilize the time to the best of my ability to delight in the loveliness, all the lovableness, with which nature has so abundantly equipped her, delight in it, but nevertheless with the restraint and circumspection that forestall the anticipation of anything. When I have brought her to the point where she has learned what it is to love and what it is to love me, then the engagement will break like a defective mold and she will belong to me. Others become engaged when they have arrived at this point and have the good prospect of a boring marriage for all eternity. That is their business,

Everything is still in statu quo, but scarcely any engaged person can be happier than I; no miser who has found a gold coin is happier than I. I am intoxicated with the thought that she is in my power. Pure, innocent womanliness, as transparent as the sea, and yet just as deep, with no idea of love [Kjœrlighed]! But now she is going to learn what a powerful force erotic love [Elskov] is. Just like a king’s daughter who has been elevated from the dust to the throne of her forefathers, so she will be enthroned in the kingdom to which she belongs. And this will take place through me; and in learning to love, she will learn to love me; as she develops the rule, the paradigm will sequentially unfold, and this I am. As she in love becomes alive to her entire meaning, she will apply this to loving me, and when she suspects that she has learned it from me, she will love me two-fold. The thought of my joy overwhelms me to such a degree that I am almost losing my senses.

Her soul is not diffused or slackened by the vague emotions of erotic love, something that keeps many young girls from ever learning to love, that is, definitely, energetically, totally. In their minds they have a vague, foggy image that is supposed to be an ideal by which the actual object is to be tested. From such incompleteness emerges a something whereby one may help oneself properly through the world. —As erotic love now awakens in her soul, I see into it, I learn to know it by listening to all the voices of erotic love in her. I make sure of the shape it has taken in her and form myself in likeness to it; and just as I already am spontaneously included in the story that love is running through in her heart, so I come again to her from the outside as deceptively as possible. After all, a girl loves only once.

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