Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. Born May 5, 1813. Died November 11, 1855. Just a short while, then I have won. Then the whole struggle entirely disappears. Then I can rest in halls of roses and talk with my Jesus without ceasing.
A nod to Kierkegaard and Walker Percy: existentialist tomfoolery, political satire, literary homage, word mongering, a year-round summer reading club, Dylanesque music bits, apocalyptic marianism, poetry, fiction, meta-porn, a prisoner work-release program.
Søren Kierkegaard
Walker Percy
Bob Dylan
Literature & History
Letters from an American
Beau of the Fifth Column
This American Life
The Writer’s Almanac
San Diego Reader
The Stranger
The Inlander
Adoremus
Charlotte was Both
The Onion
From Empty Hands
Ellen Finnigan
America
Commonweal
First Things
National Review
The New Republic
All Manner of Thing
Gerasene Writers Conference
Scrutinies
DarwinCatholic
Catholic and Enjoying It
Bad Catholic
Universalis
Is My Phylactery Showing?
Quotidian Quintilian
En pocas palabras
William Wilson, Guitarist Extraordinaire
Signposts in a Strange Land
Ben Hatke
Daniel Mitsui
Dappled Things
The Fine Delight
Gene Luen Yang
Wiseblood Books
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The enigma of death, in the guise of both inevitability and possibility, resonates in the corpus. When death is viewed from the third-person standpoint, it appears inevitable. When it is regarded from the first-person viewpoint, it becomes a constant possibility: at any moment I may die. The point that Kierkegaard tries to make is that death, when construed as a possibility, allows for an existential urgency, indeed, lends life a meaning that would otherwise be unavailable.
The human being, a synthesis of opposites, bears an immanent relation to eternity and has the task of making existential movements from possibility to actuality. The individual begins with and is attracted by immediacy, which is fundamentally relative in its attachment to the temporal and finite. The failure of this esthetic level to satisfy the human being can lead to irony, which breaks the first attachment to finitude and forms the first “movement of infinity” by arriving at absolute freedom, negatively rather than positively. On the ethical level, the individual makes a “leap” to positive absolute freedom and accepts the duty of always following ethical norms, but believes this can be done entirely through one’s own efforts. The failure of this project can lead to the movement of resignation and the “leap” to Religiousness A, the highest immanent and human-centered level, where eternity is recognized as possible for the individual.