Word: kierkegaard
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Percy is aware that this forbidding subject requires a light touch. In fact, most readers know the author as the genteel Louisianian who wrote such mournfully charming novels as The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins. But there is also Percy the Dixie Kierkegaard who wrote The Message in the Bottle. That 1975 collection of essays attempted to relieve the ache of self-estrangement by arguing that humankind was the glory of the universe because it was the only known species that used language (as distinguished from the intelligent communication of chimps and dolphins...
Partly his staying power comes from an almost religious dedication to craft. Christian symbols and ethics hover around much of his work; it was no accident that in Atlantic Brief Lives, a biographical compendium, he chose to write about Søren Kierkegaard. The existentialist, Updike noted, works "with flirtatious ambiguities, elaborate deceits and impersonations, fascinating oscillations of emphasis, all sorts of erotic 'display...
...dramatic unity and humanizes its subject. Such notions are wishful thinking and Philistine romanticism, says the author. His own view is that the meanings of Mozart's life and music are completely separate, that Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus in fact hid behind his nonverbal art. The author paraphrases Kierkegaard on Don Giovanni: "Don Juan is not someone who creates himself by thought, but someone who can only reveal himself musically, since the erotic principle by which he lives evades his consciousness or its conscious verbal expression...
...rummages in closets for these revelations. Kierkegaard's fancy about being a police spy is a dark, shiny little item: a melancholic's impulse toward sneaking omnipotence, the intellectual furtively collaborating with state power, committing sins of betrayal in police stations in the middle of the night. It is not far from another intellectual's fantasy: Norman Mailer once proposed that Eugene McCarthy, the dreamboat of the late '60s moderate left, might have made an ideal director of the FBI. McCarthy agreed. But of course, McCarthy had a sardonic genius for doubling back upon his public...
...entertain ourselves with visions of an alternative life. The daydreams are an amusement, a release from the monotony of what we are, from the life sentence of the mirror. The imagination's pageant of an alternative self is a kind of vacation from one's fate. Kierkegaard did not really mean he should have been a police spy, or Nixon that he should have been a sportswriter. The whole mechanism of daydreams of the antiself usually depends upon the fantasy remaining fantasy. Hell is answered prayers. God help us if we had actually married that girl when...