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.

Bely, "Ночь"

A poem ("Night") from one of Russia's greatest prose writers, most famous for this unparalleled novel. You can read the original here.

As spring’s warmth passed, so too the wicked heat;
In vain I sought plain peace, elusive still.
And in a roaring wave the house went shrill
To Hayden’s heights flew forth one elite.

And arrogant he went, in hidden shame.
Contemned by fate, he blew above the dim
And wilted grass, his sighs now long and grim,
And wind beat pale the shacks through darkened panes.

What silence! What simplicity reigns whole!
What miserly and fireless sunrises bend!
So too will you pass on, o friend, poor friend,
Why then should seas of storms still flog our soul?

Pour down, o rain, in mutiny severe!
So sweet cascade the sighs of sumptuous trees.
And night’s effacing look talks in the breeze,
With suffering unheard and wind unnear.

Reversal of Fortune

You may be surprised to learn of the details of this crime, which has maintained its dual status of “unsolved” and “perhaps never occurred” for almost thirty years.  Rhode Island, 1980: we find ourselves among the well−to−do and deep of pocket and their world of disposability.  A relatively impecunious European nobleman called Claus von Bülow (whose cousin was a contemporary of this composer) has been married for fourteen years to Martha “Sunny” Crawford, an American heiress who also happens to be hyperglycemic.  By all indications, Claus seems to be no better or worse than his ilk, being interested in a comfortable career whose salary makes no difference to his well−being, the society of a select few, a large estate with all the amenities, and a modicum of respect from those who watch him with envy as he waltzes into a small store to purchase tobacco.  A graduate of the same college attended by Dryden, Marvell, and Nabokov, he tried his hand at law before his marriage but now feels restrained by his dear wife, their daughter (named after the woman who would marry both Claus’s cousin and Wagner himself), and Sunny’s two children from her previous marriage to another Germanic gentleman of title.  So, we are told yet again, Claus allegedly does what any good reader of murder mysteries would do: kill by using the person’s weakness against her.  Had Sunny been an avid skier, she would have met her frozen fate on a slope.  Owing to her blood sugar level, however, the weapon can only be one: insulin.

But Sunny does not die.  She still lies unconscious in the vegetative state induced by the insulin injected into her on December 21, 1980.*  As the person with the greatest motive and access, Claus is immediately fingered as the guilty party and brought to trial, resulting in a thirty−year sentence for attempted murder.  That von Bülow would seek to appeal the decision is hardly surprising; that he would turn to Alan Dershowitz, a Jewish lawyer from Harvard Law School, to do so, still seems a bit odd.  A self−made man, phenomenally successful law professor and civil rights attorney, and one of the state of Israel’s greatest supporters, Dershowitz initially wants nothing to do with this silver−spooned Dano−German snob whose family might have harbored more than a little tenderness for certain unwholesome forces in the 1930s and 1940s.  Nevertheless, maybe because von Bülow is so utterly convinced of his innocence, or maybe because no one else will take him on, Dershowitz consents to defend someone for whom he admittedly hasn’t a shred of sympathy.  The result is a book, as well as an absolutely marvelous film.

We meet a number of colorful characters, from prosecuting attorneys to spoiled European teenagers to a whole houseful of Harvard law students, but only three will ultimately give the film its shape: Dershowitz (the late Ron Silver), Sunny (Glenn Close), and Claus (an Oscar−winning Jeremy Irons).  Pictures of the original Sunny, an attractive, sprightly young thing, make you wonder whether the somewhat plain Close reflects director Barbet Schroeder's views on Claus’s guilt.  So too does Sunny herself, however accurately portrayed as a hypochondriac drunk whose moods alternate between belligerence, apathy, and self−loathing.  This is, in any case, the side of her that Claus wishes us and his lawyer to see.  Claus is not concerned with anything except maintaining his life as it is, free and unperturbed, and without any blot on his reputation among the few people who actually still talk to him.  His exchanges with Dershowitz, a man he looks down upon simply because he lives for his work (and even finds it more enthralling than Claus’s conversation), are superb in keeping with the personalities of the characters presented.  There can be no accord or understanding between these two worlds, only a joining of forces in the name of justice.

In this regard, Irons, who possesses an innate ability to play aristocratic pariahs, could not be better cast.  And while I cannot take credit for one reviewer’s marvelous description of his smoking posture as that of hailing a taxi, I will say that what von Bülow has on his side is poise.  There is nothing, not one hair or button that evinces the slightest sign of fear.  Indignation in the hands of the wealthy and influential is one of the oldest and filthiest tactics, but Claus does not play that card, either.  He limits himself to the facts, as well as to the very logical supposition that he could have been framed by a large number of people, and does not seem to be in a hurry to get acquitted.  As the film progresses, Claus becomes its metronome, speeding it up when he gets excited (especially when he says his wife’s name in utter contempt), and slowing it down when opinions converge against him.  Since the whole story is based on true events, calling some of the details unlikely would be rather impish on my part, so I will refrain.  But what cannot be denied is Claus’s charm.  He is smooth, welcoming, and genuine about his innocence and the state of his horrendous marriage.  Even if he is the only one who really believes all that.

*Note: Sunny von Bülow, still in a vegetative state, succumbed to cardiopulmonary arrest on December 6, 2008.

Transparent Things

When I went to see this play, one of the finest ever written, at this theater a couple of years ago, I sat enraptured for four hours with one twenty-minute intermezzo, so magnificent was the acting.  This is the exception.  If poems are the dalliances of youth and epics the diaries of age, novels plausibly fit the middle road.  They are complete but rarely epic; and their breadth is attenuated by motifs that, unless the author is of staggering talent, have to be repeated to have any substance.  What then of the novella, that undernourished cousin of the novel so relevant to the cinematographic attention span we have developed over the last couple of generations?  Eighty to one hundred sixty pages of leanness, streamlined prosody whose brief glimpse often allows for sustained lyricism?  Sometimes it will be wasted on a short story drawn out in excruciating detail (I will spare you the names of the countless culprits); occasionally, however, you get a work of divine perfection, such as this novella.

Our protagonist is a humble American fellow by the name of Hugh – Hugh Person, as is the running joke.  The most interesting things about Hugh (according to Hugh) are that he has a Ph.D., is a confirmed Esperantist, speaks fluent French and is half−Canadian (which influences his accent in French).  He is accompanied in this, his fourth trip to Switzerland, residence of the novella’s author at the time of its writing, by an especially wraithlike omniscient narrator who shadows his every step.  The narrator is soon revealed to be R., an established novelist already in the silver years of life and the subject of Hugh Person’s previous trip to Switzerland many years before.  On that trip, as happens in novellas, Person finds Armande Chamar (her surname not quite a “peacock fan” as she claims), a lecherous excuse for an eternal, knee-wobbling beauty who becomes his wife, his pain, and then the reason it takes him so long to return to the Alps with a clear conscience.

Nabokov connoisseurs, whose company I probably deserve, will often say that a Nabokov story without death is a rarity.  So it is the next trip that proves to be fatal, and who can pity Armande when the narrator states:

Was she faithful to him throughout the months of their marriage spent in frail, lax, merry America?  During their first and last winter there she went a few times to ski without him … While alone, he forbade himself to dwell in thought on the banalities of betrayal, such as holding hands with a chap or permitting him to kiss her good night.  Those banalities were to him quite as excruciating to imagine as would be voluptuous intercourse.  A steel door of the spirit remained securely shut as long as she was away, but no sooner had she arrived, her face brown and shiny, her figure as trim as that of an air hostess, in that blue coat with flat buttons as bright as counters of gold, than something ghastly opened up in him and a dozen lithe athletes started swarming around and prying her apart in all the motels of his mind.

After such behavior (we are informed that his estimates were not far off the mark), there is little to do with dear Armande except end her treachery in the manner that all stage villainesses see their comeuppance.  Once the deed is done, Hugh is sent back home frail, lax, but not particularly merry.  His respite is a quarter of his life lived hitherto, and he returns to Switzerland one last time at precisely the age of forty.

And what he comes back for is the mystery of the novella.  There is another girl named Julia who hovers like some succoring angel in and out of our condemned man’s life, and there are the machinations of R. who is everywhere and only really in Switzerland.  Nabokov’s prose, whose only fault is an overreliance on foreign words and parentheses, has rarely bloomed in such lilac shades as in this sad tale of revenge and love: one Person’s journey to a beautiful country of beautiful memories where nothing ever becomes transparent to anyone except R. and the reader.  And when all has been accomplished according to plan, there is night, “which is always a giant but [which] was especially terrible,” and not only because it is a “common grave of sleep.”