"...intricately beautiful semi-nonsense..."

The Feast of Love (Charles Baxter)
- Highlight Loc. 1202-6 | Added on Friday, April 29, 2011, 11:46 PM

Lonely, eccentric, and crazed, the man Kierkegaard worried continuously about the mode in which one might think, or could think, about two unknowns: God and love. These were for the hapless Kierkegaard the most compelling topics. They bound him in tantalizing straps. Of the two vast subjects about which one can never be certain and should therefore perhaps keep silent, God and love, Kierkegaard, a bachelor, claimed especial expertise. Kierkegaard's homage to both was multifarious verbiage. He wrote intricately beautiful semi-nonsense and thus became a hero of the intellectual type.

Kierkegaard maintained that everyone intuits what love is, and yet it cannot be spoken of directly. Or distinctly. It falls into the category of the unknown, where plain speech is inadequate to the obscurity of the subject. Similarly, everyone experiences God, but the experience of God is so unlike the rest of our experiences that there, too, plain speech is defeated. According to Kierkegaard, nearly everyone intuits the subtlety of God, but almost no one knows how to speak of Him. This is where our troubles begin.
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The Feast of Love (Charles Baxter)
- Highlight Loc. 1425-30 | Added on Saturday, April 30, 2011, 06:54 AM

What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you—if you happen to be me—with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you. The workings of nature are mysterious, but they do account for a certain amount of despair among single persons, the irrelevance you sometimes feel.
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The Feast of Love (Charles Baxter)
- Highlight Loc. 2970-73 | Added on Sunday, May 01, 2011, 08:45 AM

THERE’S A STORY of Kierkegaard's that I especially like. A philosopher builds an enormous palace, but to everyone's surprise he himself does not live in the palace but establishes his residence in a dog kennel next to it. The philosopher is invariably offended when it is pointed out to him that he lives in this ludicrous manner. But how else could I have built the palace, the philosopher asks, if I had not also lived in the dog kennel?