Master Kierkegaard: The Complete Journals. Ellen Brown

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Master Kierkegaard: The Complete Journals - Ellen Brown


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of my master’s family.8 Most servants are of a better sort than religious authorities, I find, though there is rot in every profession.

      The clouds this afternoon look like the flow of a glacier in spring, white opening into blue. The birds sing so sweetly in the trees. I never learned the names of birds and trees in my youth. This puts me before (or behind?) Adam, who could not rest easy until he had named everything, including Eve, I suppose. Now it clouds over; the contrast is lost.

      June 7

      My strength comes back through honest effort, washing woodwork and windowpanes. One must be well to read Faust and not succumb to its seductions. The language, the variety of verse forms, the subject matter, any of these things alone is enough to make one swoon.

      June 8

      And yet I feel for Herodias, hardly mistress of her fate, teaching her daughter the worst of feminine wiles as a matter of survival—for how was Herodias to have provided for herself and her daughter with their husband and father dead if Herod had obeyed the Baptist’s injunction against a purely figurative incest and repudiated her? Who would dare to have her and her child after that? All victims of a cosmic plotline in which the Baptist, who had given new life to so many, had by one device or another to die, in order to make way for Jesus. It is a wonder more people do not doubt the goodness of God on the basis of Scripture alone. Had the Bible been the work of one man, he would be considered a misanthrope.

      Under the mattress with you; it is not safe to write so freely in such a heretical mood. If Mrs. H. were to find this and have someone translate it for her, I could be out on the street before my master or Emil would have a chance to intervene. Fortunately, I keep my own chamber and she is too proud to snoop.

      June 9

      Rain all day today. Helping in the kitchen. No skill, just the ability to take direction. A father cannot teach a girl how to cook, but he can habituate her to discipleship. Conversation in the kitchen is lively—a welcome relief from my relative isolation, though hardly edifying. Mostly gossip not worth relating. I enjoy watching the dog make itself comfortable by the stove—what a handsome and good-natured animal. Sometimes I think the true child of God is more like an animal than a human being in simply accepting the good that is at hand. My fingernails are still black from digging in the garden yesterday!

      Matt 14:13–21. “And he had the people arrange themselves on the grass”—five thousand men, not counting the women and children, so five thousand families, really—an entire town, but not arranged as people arrange themselves, according to rank and wealth and language and livelihood, but in an order not known to us, of angels or animals, an invisible pattern, seemingly random, in which no one wonders where one belongs. The dog belongs beside the stove because that is where it is warm, that is all. He can feel the warmth—he does not have to see it. He does not have to ask after his food like the theologian who wants to know, why five loaves and two fishes precisely? He just eats and drinks and is satisfied. And yet it can be dangerous for a human being to be so simple-minded as to huddle with whatever warmth is offered. Not every man who offers what is needed in the moment is a son of God. How trite I have become in my disillusionment—how stupid!

      June 10

      My master told me a parable this morning—the story of three sons who loved their father so much that they gave up their lives for him, each in a different way. That was not what their father wanted for them, but they could not help it, he had so devoted himself to them. One gave up his life by trying to do everything right and going mad, another by running away and catching a fatal disease, the third by acquiring a name for himself that was not his own. But the saddest thing of all was that while they were living, the brothers could not abide one another, so intent was their focus on the father. And all died childless.

      My master’s parable haunts me. He is too much like Peter, I fear, trying too hard to be the disciple who never disappoints, spurning established religion just as Jesus did, honoring the Father beyond all reason. More rain today.

      June 11


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