Kierkegaard, "Cordelia"

An excerpt from one of the more famous works by this philosopher and native of Copenhagen.  The original Danish volume can be found here.

It was today that my eyes first came upon her.  Sleep is allegedly capable of making an eyelid so heavy that it can no longer close.  Maybe my gazing upon her had something of this form.  My eyes pull shut and still feel the breath of dark powers within her.  She does not see that I see her.  She feels that I see her, feels it over her entire body.  My eyes do not close, and it is night.  But within her is the light of day.

I must rid myself of Edward.  He goes to extremes, so I expect at any moment that he will accost her with a declaration of his love.  No one could know this better than I, his confidant, who with diligence praises him to high heaven so that he can have more of an effect on Cordelia.  But letting him get so far as to confess his love would be too risky.  For I know that the answer will be no; and yet the story will not end there.  He will certainly take the matter very personally.  This may, in turn, serve to touch Cordelia, to move her emotions.  Although in such a case I need not fear the worst, that is, that she undo what has been done, her soul’s pride might all the same be affected by compassion.  Should that happen, then success and Edward will never meet.   

My relationship with Cordelia is beginning to take a dramatic turn.  Something simply has to occur; no matter what, I can no longer relegate myself to observation and there is no time to lose.  She might be surprised, yet that is a necessary step.  But when one wants to surprise her, one has to be ready in position.  That which would generally surprise other women would perhaps not have the same effect on her.  As it were, she has to be surprised in such a way so that the reason for her surprise would be contained in that first instant, whereby something quite ordinary would occur.  Then it must be demonstrated that there is something implicitly surprising in it.  This is the constant law and this same law applies to all my movements involving Cordelia.  When you know the element of surprise, you have already won the match.  For a moment, one suspends the energy in question, makes it impossible for her to act, and then one uses either the unusual or the usual.  It is with no small satisfaction that I still recall a foolhardy attempt with a woman of distinguished family.  For a while I skulked around in vain looking for a riveting way to break the ice when, one day around noon, we came across one another on the street.  I was sure that she did not know me, nor knew that I was a local.  She was walking alone.  I slipped past her so that we came face to face.  I gave way to her, but she did not budge from her flagstone.  At that moment I shot her a wistful glance; perhaps a tear even grazed my eye.  I removed my hat and she stopped.  With a wavering voice and dreams in my eyes I said: “Dear Lady, do not be so upset that the likeness between your outline and a being I once loved with all my soul now living far from me is so remarkable that you cannot forgive my peculiar behavior."  She thought I was just another admirer, and every young girl likes a bit of admiration, especially when she also senses her superiority and deigns to smile at the man in question.  So she smiled, which suited her so indescribably well.  With noble superciliousness she greeted me and smiled.  Then she continued on her way, but she had hardly taken two steps when I was by her side.  Some days later I met her and allowed myself to greet her.  She laughed at me … Patience is a priceless virtue, and he who laughs last … I think you know the saying. 

Various ways to surprise Cordelia came to mind.  I could try to raise an erotic storm which could eradicate trees from the ground.  If possible, I could try on this basis to win her over with arguments, run her down on the strength of our history, and seek in this agitation to evoke her passion with secret means.  The possibility of all this was not out of the question.  A girl with her passion could be made to do anything.  This would be, however, aesthetically unpalatable.  I do not want giddiness.  Such a condition is hardly recommended when dealing with a girl who by herself might so gain poetic reflection.  Therefore one must abstain from such pleasure; far too much confusion is the result.  Its effect would be completely lost on her.  After a couple of inhalations, I would have breathed in what I could have had for much longer a time.  Yes, the worst is enjoying with a cool head that which could have been fuller and richer.  Cordelia does me no good in exaltation.  I might surprise her at that first moment if I so chose, but I would quickly become satiated just because this surprise lay too close to her audacious heart.

A betrothal, pure and simple, would be of all methods the best and most prudent.  Perhaps she would still be less inclined to believe her own ears if she heard me spout off my prosaic declaration of love as I held her hand.  Less inclined still if she were to listen to the entirety of my eloquence, inhale my poisonous and intoxicating elixir, and hear her heart throb at the thought of abduction.

The damned thing about getting engaged was the ethical side.  The ethical was as tedious in science as it was in life.  What a difference: in the world of aesthetics everything is light, pretty, and fleeting; when ethics are incorporated, everything becomes hard, angular, and endlessly boring.  Strictly speaking, a betrothal has, however, no ethical reality, just as a marriage is only valid ex consensu gentium.  This ambiguity can be very useful to me.  The ethical component is simply that Cordelia, in her lifetime, wishes to get the impression of passing beyond the boundaries of the ordinary.  So the ethics involved are not too serious, and I should feel nothing more than an uneasy shudder.  I have always had a certain respect for the ethical.  Never have I made to any girl a promise of marriage that was not in the end stamped out, as one might have guessed beforehand, because it was nothing more than a feigned gesture.  Thus I will arrange matters so that it will be she who breaks off the engagement.  My chivalrous pride has great disdain for promises.  I loathe when a judge promising freedom incarcerates a culprit upon the latter’s confession.  Such a judge renounces both his power and his talent.  In my practice, I still encounter the circumstance whereby I wish for nothing, which is freedom’s gift in the strictest sense of the word.  Let second-rate seducers use such means.  What do they gain by doing so?  He who doesn’t know how to accommodate a girl so that she loses sight of everything that one doesn’t want her to see, and he who doesn’t know how to invent himself for a woman so that everything quits her because he so wishes, this person is and will remain a bungler.  I will not begrudge him his enjoyment.  Such a person is and will remain a bungler, a seducer, a label which one can by no means affix to my broad brow.  I am an aesthete, an erotic who has grasped love’s essence and point, in that I believe in love and know it for the simple reason that it only has a private meaning reserved for me.  I also know that every love story lasts half a year at most, and that every relationship is over as soon as one has enjoyed the last.  All this is known to me; I also know that the greatest pleasure I could imagine is to be loved.  Being loved is greater than everything in the world.  Inventing yourself for a girl is an art, and creating yourself from her is a masterpiece.  But the last depends very much on the first.

Yet there was another way.  I could do everything in my power for her to become engaged to Edward.  I would become the family friend in this picture.  Edward would trust me unconditionally – after all, it was to me that he owed his happiness.  And I, I would benefit from this concealment.  But this wouldn’t do.  She could not get engaged to Edward without disparaging herself in some way.  And it would result in having a relationship with her that was more feisty than interesting.  The unending commonplaceness of an engagement is the echoless nadir of what could possibly be interesting.

Everything was more critical in the Wahlske house.  One plainly noted that a hidden life grazed our own from beneath the daily platitudes, and that it soon had to emerge as a similar revelation.  The Wahlske house was made for an engagement.  An outside observer would now think about the fact that there sat no one but a couple: the aunt and I.  What couldn’t be achieved in such a marriage for the expansion of agronomical knowledge for coming generations?  So here I became Cordelia’s uncle.  I was a friend of freethinking; and no thought was absurd enough for me to have anything against it, at least for a while.  Cordelia feared a declaration of love from Edward; Edward was hoping that such a declaration would be the answer to everything.  And now he can be sure of that.  So as to spare him the unpleasant consequences of such a step, I would simply have to beat him to the punch.  I now hoped to dispatch him quickly: he was truly in my way.  And today I felt right.  Today he did not look dreamy and lovesick enough for one to fear that he might suddenly get up like a sleepwalker, confess his love before all of mankind, objectively viewed, and get any closer to Cordelia.  Today I took a look at him.  Just like an elephant seizes what it wants with its trunk, so did I seize him with my gaze, long as it was, and threw him back.  Although he was sitting down at the time, I think he felt it in every part of his body.

Cordelia was not as sure towards me as she was before.  She would always approach me like a woman, sure of herself, and now she wobbled a bit.  This did not mean, however, anything of importance, and I would have little difficulty in getting things back to where they once were.  And yet, this is not what I want.  I just want an exploration, and then an engagement. That should present no difficulties.  Overwhelmed with surprise, Cordelia will say yes, and the aunt, amen.  She will be beside herself with joy for gaining an agronomist of this kind as a son-in-law.  Son-in-law!  Everything now hung together like peas and pods when one ventured into this area.  I would become not her son-in-law, as it were, but her nephew.  Or, more correctly, volente deo, neither of the two.

Reconstruction

Each of us privileged enough to learn about the world from books and absorb it in travel has a special idealized place that persists, regardless of our heritage or life’s discourse, as the realest of worlds and our true home.  For Milton, it was a Homeric Greece everliving and everlasting; for Nabokov, the country estate of the progressive Russia of his adolescence; for Melville, it was the ocean itself, the sensation of movement free from the hum of men.  And it is to this place that each person who lives to write will turn for inspiration, because that place, however sentimentalized and flawless, remains throughout his life the endless font for his pen.  You may ask, and quite rightly, whether it is healthy to escape to realms of pure delight.  There are certainly abuses of this Elysium, and you will find them among the most abstract and pitiless writers (anonymous and cowled amidst these positive pages) who reject life’s plenitude in favor of an illusory paradise.  That is hardly the point.  Without ideals, without some brazen image of beneficence and beatitude, we are shells with the flesh of apes doomed to evolve only as much as chemistry permits.  To survive we must be redeemed by the grandeur of life, indeed a luxury for the majority of our fit species, and pursue it with full sail.  And if you have ever been to Scandinavia, especially to Copenhagen, you may understand the light that engilds my horizon when I think myself there.  Such is the fate of Alex David (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), the protagonist of this marvelous film.

Alex is a fortunate young man, and not only because he lives and breathes in Europe’s most beautiful city.  He is young, handsome, unpretentious, a successful photographer if a bit scruffy around the edges, and every night after snapping away to his heart’s content, the beneficiary of a fine apartment and an even finer girlfriend Simone (the lovely Marie Bonnevie).  In fact, just by being himself Alex provokes the envy of any older man, even one whose youth was filled with all the riches of modern European existence: artistic and political freedom, a life in a prosperous postwar city in the throes of an economic miracle, the deep inhale of a cigarette, the mouthful of the strongest liquor, and the exploration of every inch of a beautiful woman’s world.  Who would not want to trade places with Alex and relive our one youth, given to persons and places we often must leave behind?  What older man with a substantially younger wife would not fear Alex, his studied lassitude, his carefully groomed stubble, and that most seductive of professions, photography, through which any woman can gain immortality?  Yes, he has all the characteristics of a wife-stealer.  Which is precisely what esteemed Swedish novelist August Holm (Krister Henriksson) decides to make out of him.

We meet Holm, a solemn aesthete in his late fifties, and his stunning thirtyish wife Aimee (also played by Bonnevie) as they come to a posh Copenhagen hotel for the night.  Holm is to speak at some conference about his novels and compose, as he always does, while ignoring his immediate vicinity.  Accustomed to the role of second fiddle despite Holm’s obvious tender devotion, Aimee is left to find something to do with her evening.  What she finds is Alex, who understands their meeting as fate, follows her to her hotel room, and allows sensuality to take its course.  The next morning he awakens to find his life changed: Aimee is not around, his apartment is no longer his, and no one (including Simone) from his previous life seems to recognize him.  By entering Aimee’s world, he has lost his own; soon enough we become aware that Holm, whose soft, lush voiceover mocks the adultery it narrates, is pulling more than one string.  And Alex and Aimee, or maybe Simone in an alternative reality, have no option but to play along if they wish their love, which is indeed what both have waited for all their years to experience, to survive.

One reviewer was erudite enough to compare this tale to this ancient legend, which is a fair estimation of a modernized fable.  It is true Orpheus and Alex are both caught between two worlds, but only Alex is victimized by a lack of information and in love with two women (who are obviously the same actress, although the audience is left to wonder why they might resemble each other).  Orpheus knew the unusual conditions of his agreement and violated them absentmindedly; Alex has consented to nothing and cannot fathom why and how his life could have changed overnight.  Yet it was worth it because his love for Aimee is worth it.  Even if neither one were to exist outside the mind of their creator.

After the Wedding

There is a certain melancholy in seeing how the impoverished live that cannot be set aside when you get home like a scarf or coat.  It is not provoked by guilt, because guilt is simply feeling bad for yourself: it is provoked by shame.  Shame for participating in a society that allows millions to have nothing, not even hope, and going about your daily business without any plan for changing the situation.  Shame for smiling upon moneyed persons and defending their wealth by claiming that they worked harder than anyone else to get it.  For your information, no one works harder than those who have nothing to lose and will plough a field for a day’s ration of bread.  They have nothing but a slim chance of sustaining themselves past a certain age, and their children are doomed to the same cycle of poverty (which one courageous soul decided to break a few decades ago by founding this bank).  Shame for permitting your petty imperfections to justify your lashing out at loved ones and friends, thinking of yourself as some kind of victim because you can’t quite get the most beautiful young woman in the office to go out with you, and wallowing in the existential angst that is the calling card of selfish, bloated postwar Europe.  Shame for not giving a damn about distant and irretrievably estranged countries that produce your entire wardrobe and the coffee you spend hundreds of dollars on per year, and which have the gall and cheek to ask you to support their children for a third of that daily latte budget.  Shame for sitting back and thinking that you deserve these privileges and opportunities more than other human beings. You may not quite believe these statements, but you would do well to consider their seriousness.  Disparities in global wealth are rather staggering and will continue in the years to come to thunder past our ingenuous notions of equality.  Some of us, braver than any man of violence, actually uproot our easy lives and travel to the less fortunate nations of the world with more than just a heavy heart, but to live and work and help.  Oftentimes it does not even take a lengthy stay to convince someone to amend his perspective on aid (as in the case of this rather dashing fellow), and we realize that if just ten percent of us either propagandized against greed or helped onsite, we could work absolute wonders.  And all these statements – every last one of them – could have been uttered by Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), the protagonist of this recent film.

Jacob is so good that our knowledge of humanity tells us he is either not human or making up for some blemish on his conscience.  As it were, neither assessment does justice to the breadth of his personality, which is idealistic, stubborn (no one is more stubborn than an idealist), and toned in just the right way as to avoid sentimentality and gushing pathos.  You and I know Jacob is a good man: he runs an orphanage in one of the more miserable parts of India, and he runs it passionately because he knows that few others would or could.  That noble assumption of responsibility drives him to rather extreme categorizations (no one is more categorical than an idealist), with a contempt for luxury and the rich that borders on the homicidal.  He is tempered in his hatred by Pramod, his eight-year-old ward whose life spans precisely the same period as that of the orphanage’s financial decline.  This may or may not be a coincidence (many numbers within a work of art are often repeated accidentally, especially if they don’t really matter), but it is certain that Jacob’s shelter may be crushed by the eternal evil of insufficient bankrolling.  He is desperate but positive (no one is more positive than an idealist), and he reassures Pramod and us that he will find a way to keep helping the abandoned, the poor, and the very unlucky.

With this type of setup we know full well what will occur, but perhaps not quite how.  Jacob will be tempted by the money he needs to retain his orphanage, yet this wonderful beneficence may come at the cost of his generous soul.  So when he is summoned to his native Denmark by a billionaire (Rolf Lassgård) interested in supporting his charitable endeavors, we understand that this will be a most fatidic encounter, and that a series of intertwined decisions will cincture him like barbed wire.  He will endure a lot of soul-searching before he either accepts or recants the devilish proposal laid out before him, and these trials and tribulations will compose the suet of the film’s pudding.  If you are very familiar with these sorts of films, you will know something else: that Jacob has a secret or two, as does the Mephistophelian robber baron who tasks him with an ethical quandary.  I am loath to reveal even the first of these twists as it may lead you to derive the last of them, which would preclude sitting through to the rather melodramatic end.  There is value in these moral adventures, not because instantiating shame in all of us is necessarily art’s concern, but because meticulous casting and a strong epicenter (Jacob) allow us to see how a good man can reflect on his life, admit his mistakes, and become in some ways even better.  And the wedding in the title?  That would feature the billionaire’s twenty-year-old daughter (Stine Fischer Christensen) and one of his business protégés.  They don’t really need to get married to propel the plot forward, but, in addition to being a rather harmless contrivance, it does shed some light on a couple of characters.  And just as much takes place before the nuptials as after, which leads Jacob to do something he hasn’t done in over twenty years, but he's a better man for it.  And in his case that is saying a great deal indeed.

Kira

Back in the golden days of necromancers and exorcists, a certain subsection of people was thought to be steered by unspeakable things.  They would rave and rant, act irresponsibly and unpredictably, and smash apart relationships, families, homes, and dreams.  Having successfully isolated themselves from everyone else, including those who loved them and wished them only happiness, they (collectively termed “the possessed”) would then almost invariably turn towards bolder violations of the law.  Idle hands are the Devil’s work, the Devil made me do it, I was not myself, and so forth.  And because we cannot possibly match wits with Old Nick, many of them met horrible deaths at the hands of inquisitors, mobs, and other enforcement teams.  Now it is believed that no demons were ever involved.  Brain damage and syphilis have replaced Beelzebub and succubus, and while these poor people (now known as “the mentally ill”) have not become any less helpless, society at large has become more empowered.  Lock up them in a sanitarium, apply copious amounts of uppers and downers in some secret binary combination, scare them straight with pictures of ink blots, and discharge them back into the world benumbed but docile.  Surely, they are many who are helped by modern science’s tools and techniques, but many others (American streets are often their residence) are set free of everything except themselves.  As a rule, they have only one or two goals in mind.  But these goals are necessarily unattainable, because they and their goals are so far from one another as to be in different worlds.  That they try nonetheless to achieve these aims, at whatever the cost, has become one of the most famous definitions of insanity.

Ole Christian Madsen’s Kira is about a woman (Stine Stengade), a young vibrant mother and wife, who is coming home.  We learn very early on where she spent the last year, and why her two little boys cannot possibly understand.  Her tall, handsome, praying mantis of a husband Mads (Lars Mikkelsen) is all too eager to have her back, perhaps because he wants to move on from some other part of his life, perhaps because he is tired of answering his children’s questions, but also because he really does love her.  He treats her to an old–fashioned hero’s welcome, as if she had been in a war and returned home decorated and revered.  Things turn predictably sour and the excuses and embarrassment, the sudden end to an otherwise civilized gathering, all of it comes rushing back.  And when Kira, with the utmost sincerity, threatens the life of their young and pretty au pair, we know why Mads looks and acts like a man of infinite burdens.  There is, of course, more to this story.  Kira is half-Swedish, and that Swedish half has little to do with his family now, preferring the company of frivolous women and cold drinks.  The chasm between father and daughter has widened to such a point that everyone – including, most unforgivably, Mads himself – sees Kira as the one at fault (after all, Kira’s father is morose, selfish and fractious, but at least he’s perfectly sane).  As such, Mads treats Kira like a delinquent and grounds her.  And just like a recalcitrant teenager, she then proceeds to doll herself up, wander into a bar, and take up conversation with a cynical Swede who is convinced that he will never again have a one night stand with a beautiful woman.  The next day, Kira calls Mads from Malmö to inform him that the Swede was wrong.

After a brief period of mourning and accusations, an uneasy truce is reached.  The upshot is that Mads needs to hold a business dinner and Kira wants to organize it.  All she wants is to be a good mother and wife, and that is precisely the one thing she is most incapable of doing.  She organizes it and Mads holds his breath, although by now he probably has been holding it for years.  Which brings us to the last part of the film, so remarkable and right in every way that I am loath to reveal anything.  I will just say that Kira writes a big, bold letter – as if, in fact, she were writing on an asylum wall – to her husband and is asked by a stranger whether she is mad.  The self-awareness of being mad is, we are told, impossible for the truly mad, but Kira’s response and subsequent behavior are quite interesting.  From here, a very good reason emerges for her illness (her father, bless his soul, has nothing to do with it); and, indeed, the usual English title is Kira’s reason: a love story.  The original Danish, however, is simply A love story, which is far more accurate.