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    Master Kierkegaard: Fall / Winter / Spring 1847–1848: A Novella
    Master Kierkegaard: Fall / Winter / Spring 1847–1848: A Novella
    Master Kierkegaard: Fall / Winter / Spring 1847–1848: A Novella
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    Master Kierkegaard: Fall / Winter / Spring 1847–1848: A Novella

    By Ellen Brown

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    About this ebook

    In this second volume of Master Kierkegaard, the fictional German maidservant Magda continues to record her relationship with Scripture, literature, and her elusive yet compelling master. Three journals set in the fall, winter, and "peoples" spring of 1847 and 1848 reflect the precariousness of Magda's position in the household and the rapidly changing social landscape, at the same time as Kierkegaard began, revised, or completed several of his most existential and prophetic works.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCascade Books
    Release dateJun 1, 2012
    ISBN9781621893639
    Master Kierkegaard: Fall / Winter / Spring 1847–1848: A Novella
    Author

    Ellen Brown

    Ellen Brown is a 30-year veteran foodie. She is the author of more than 30 cookbooks, including several Complete Idiot's guides. She is the founding food editor of USA Today. Her writing has been featured in major publications including The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Bon Appetit, Art Culinaire, and The San Francisco Chronicle, and she has a weekly column in the Providence Journal. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

    Read more from Ellen Brown

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      Master Kierkegaard - Ellen Brown

      Journal Three

      (September 6–October 30, 1847)

      September 6, 1847

      Fall is so sweet and inevitably sad. What to do with the sadness? It is not here yet. It is enough that each day have its own misery.¹ Taste the sweetness; do not seek trouble. The sky is clear. Looking into it—a universe of bright blue—my mind relaxes. My worries wander off to be with the clouds.

      My master does not rest. He has resumed work on his book about a religious maniac, a Mr. Adler. A very interesting question, if I understand it correctly. What is the difference between surrender to the word of God and insanity? To the world there is no difference.

      Psalms have become my mainstay since my two weeks of joy subsided. Reading them aloud I feel their incantatory power. They protect me—from what? Also a good question.

      No more dancing with the devil.² Fall is too slippery a season for that. Could the good-natured Eichendorff be the tonic I need? Which shall it be, From the Life of a Good-for-Nothing or Intimation and Actuality? Our joyous thoughts never age, and youth is eternal.

      ³

      September 7

      Just like a university student, I have laid out an ambitious program of reading and reflection, as if I were not a maidservant⁴ and a rigorous fall cleaning were not the task at hand. Not to mention the fall melancholy—I begin to feel its tug downward like another kind of periodic cleansing, perhaps equally necessary to life, a shedding of accumulated nesting material, the stuff of bodily formation, the cocoon. I know about bile, of course, along with phlegm and blood, but what is the medium of sadness? Did the ancients have a name for it? I will ask my master.

      Hear God my cry and attend to my prayer!

      Here below on the earth I call to you, when my heart is anxious; you will lead me onto a high rock.

      For you are my assurance, a strong tower before my enemies.

      I will reside in your tabernacle forever and have confidence under your wings. Sela.

      For you, God, hear my vow; you give me my inheritance, what is due those who fear your name.

      ⁵

      Eichendorff’s aristocratic upbringing on a secluded estate, in the bosom of a faithful and devoted family—a heady business, Prussia before Napoleon, before I was born. How one person can change everything, and how one poet, with all the strength and rootedness his name implies, can dedicate himself to setting things right.⁶ His mother’s Catholicism seems to have granted him a child-like confidence that it could be done. His protagonist is a romanticized self-portrait.

      ⁷

      Among them stood Count Friedrich in quiet, contemplative joy. He was larger than the others and distinguished himself by a simple, free, almost ancient knightly bearing. He himself spoke little, but delighted much more quietly in the exuberance of his lively companions; common opinion might easily have taken him for foolish.

      ⁸

      A funny coincidence—perhaps like a religious maniac I make too much of it, but I stopped my reading of Eichendorff in the middle of the second chapter, where I came across the name Adler. Count Friedrich sees the intriguing Rosa approach on horseback from a great distance. He swings himself onto his horse and, as he rides swiftly down the mountain to meet her, "his glimpses and thoughts [fly] out like an eagle⁹ from a high place."

      Perhaps this height is what Mr. Adler and Mr. Eichendorff hold in common. My master, son of a well-to-do hosier, and I have not so much to be nostalgic about.

      September 8

      I once thought of Faust II as too rich for my blood—that proved true—but Psalms are far richer, and at the same time more nourishing. Something sweet, yet nourishing—that is conversation with the Holy. But how to write about it?

      My soul attends to God, who helps me . . .

      Put your hope in him at all times, dear people, pour your heart out before him; God is our assurance. Sela . . .

      Rely not on injustice and outrage; do not depend on such things which are as nothing; if wealth comes to you, do not hang your heart upon it . . .

      One thing has God spoken; I heard it several ways: only God is powerful,

      and you, Lord, are gracious, and you repay each according to what he has earned.

      ¹⁰

      Attending to God, listening with hope but without expectation. Not grasping after certainty but resting in certainty. This is only possible when one’s view has already shifted, based on the perception of the vanity of all worldly pretensions to self-sufficiency.

      But human beings are indeed nothing; important people are also wanting: they weigh less than nothing, however many of them there are.

      ¹¹

      That there are two folds to the one commandment¹² is one way of putting the paradox of justice and mercy. In one exhalation of love, God pursues his enemies and encourages his people. But pouring out our hearts to him, this is the main thing. Anger, sadness, jealousy, envy, joy—even indifference. To say before God that I care more for the dog than I do Emil, that the house depresses me, that I am angry at my master for being so distant (what right have I?), that I am jealous of the days he spends on his stupid carriage rides and envious of his learning, which sets him apart from me (but not his wealth—that is a burden), that the joy I feel is boundless, when I feel it, and rests solely in him, and that I am not the least ashamed of it, though Mrs. H. and her kind—yes, this petty comparison I allow myself, though I know it is a sin, the sin of pride—would not approve of anything so unselfconscious as boundless joy in the Lord and those who love him back.

      The everyday battle with the enemy, or enemies, however, is not to be mocked. The band of robbers that wounds Count Friedrich he remembers only as a grievous dream.¹³ What a blessing! Such wounds, when taken as reality, are not so easily overcome.

      September 9

      I dreamt last night that I loaned a large reference work, a grammar of some sort, out of my father’s library to my lover. When he returned it to me, the spine was broken.

      Mrs. H. has given me a tongue-lashing. I am not to approach my master with my own questions. ‘Speak when you are spoken to’ was the rule in my day. Do not solicit his attention or take up his time. Merely do as you are told, and all will be well.

      The question about melancholy—I thought he would welcome it, as I am certain he has reflected if not brooded upon it. But this is impertinence in the view of the housekeeper, whose domestic economy demands order among the servants by keeping them, like the household furnishings, in their respective places, tidy and ready for use. She does her job well. I cannot seriously fault her. But she interrupted us, and while he was quite willing, I received no answer.

      A psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah.

      God, you are my God; I keep watch for you in the early hours. My soul thirsts for you; my whole person longs for you . . .

      When I lie in bed, I think of you; when I awake, I talk about you.

      For you are my helper . . .

      But they seek my soul, to overtake me . . .

      But the king delights in God. The one who swears by him will be praised; for the lying mouths shall be stoppered.

      ¹⁴

      Such a wide open vent Psalms create for any present or residual anger, that it evaporates into the all-accomplishing wrath of God, while desire is left wholly intact, strangely enough.

      Dear Eichendorff, who makes a plaything of desire with his free-form novel—who even has his fun with Goethe, it would seem, by creating a renowned poet, Faber,¹⁵ who is in actuality a completely coarse individual. Friedrich (Eichendorff) takes issue with Faber’s (Goethe’s) position that the poet has always something of sleight of hand, tight-rope dancing and so forth in play.¹⁶ The earnest Friedrich requires that poetry be edifying, that the poet believe what he writes, for there is nothing great, other than what comes from a simple heart.¹⁷ The controversy puts me in mind of little boys in the sand, disagreeing over the best way to construct their castles; and yet if these boys were to form clubs and admit girls, I would choose Eichendorff’s, or rather hope to be chosen.

      September 10

      Friedrich is so gracious, even to his philosophical-poetic opponent, whose superiority he acknowledges when he notices his room illuminated late into the night:

      Faber’s diligence moved the Count, and he appeared to him in this moment as a higher being. It is surely great, he said, to hover with such godlike thoughts over the wide, still circuit of the earth. Wake, think, and press on to compose, happy soul, though the rest of humanity sleep! God is with you in your loneliness, and he alone knows what a poet truly intends, when not a single person concerns himself with you.

      ¹⁸

      There is a teaching in this regarding how to relate with one’s enemies, much gentler than Psalms, which could instill a highly fearful self-righteousness when not grounded upon trust in God—God only, and no one, nothing else. Psalm 64 on the various forms of attack, such as poison words aimed like arrows, covertly shot at the pious (those who trust in God and God only. This is threatening to those who seek to form human alliances for protection and self-advancement—the lone person is an outlier, a rogue element): suddenly they shoot at him without any hesitation.

      ¹⁹

      But God takes care of them all, good and bad, in the end. The righteous must guard against self-righteousness, though—a trap of the enemy.

      About the humors, Emil explained to me that the four-part system comes from the ancient Roman physician Galen, but that the theory goes back at least as far as Hippocrates, and that a three-part version based on Plato’s tri-partite soul described the liver as the seat of bile and the baser instincts, the heart as the seat of blood and the spirited aspect of our being (we would say emotion), and the brain as the seat of

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