Master Kierkegaard: The Complete Journals. Ellen Brown

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Master Kierkegaard: The Complete Journals - Ellen Brown


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the Andes, but not for long, once we Europeans have laid hands on them.

      June 23

      If only there were some discernible plotline to my life. I tried comic, then tragic. But now it seems one long denouement. People live by the stories they tell. I am all out of stories. My master told me another story today which seemed to be his and yet widely applicable—perhaps mythic. Maybe it was a dream. At any rate, a young man was walking at night in the woods near a large town and heard an alarm. Someone needed rescuing, but it was not clear whether the person in trouble was in the woods where the young man was walking or in the slightly distant city. Soon people were combing the woods with torches looking for a body—it was already too late to help. Then an old woman appeared. She knew where the body of the young woman who had called for help could be found. The young man looked down at his feet and there she lay, but she was not dead. She was only sleeping. He lifted her up and they walked out of the woods together in the opposite direction of the searching crowd. The old woman had disappeared. I think my master wonders what sort of future there is for him without his bride. I feel like the old woman who knows where to look for lost loves—who disappears the instant they are found.

      June 24

      A string of cloudy days slows me down so much that Mrs. H. wonders aloud what I am good for and sets me to polishing silver as a rebuke for my lack of cheerfulness. That is her primary virtue, despite her worries, which are personal as well as professional. An eccentric master keeps everyone guessing, and her grown children do preoccupy her at times, despite their absence. Everything is delivered with a smile and a laughing voice (only an occasional sigh), however, which helps to keep darker thoughts at bay.

      Emil I hardly think to write about, he is such a fixture here. His loyalty is remarkable. I wonder if in recommending me to the household he thought I might serve his friend in a way that few servants are equipped to do. I do not know yet in what my service really consists, but it does seem that my place is secure, that my master, Mrs. H., Emil, and I form a unit, a family, if you will. My master, who will not marry, is not close with his brother, and yet comes from a large family, so his happiness depends on having family which he lacks. How is it that our happiness can depend on the very thing we lack? Can we be destined for unhappiness?

      Matt 17:22–23. “And they became quite melancholy.” Jesus will be handed over to those who will kill him. (The disciples do not hear what Jesus says about resurrection because to them it has no meaning. It is gibberish.) The importance of hands: blessing, breaking, baptizing, betraying. The controversy over handwashing—keeping one’s hands clean as hypocrisy. What is important is not the state of one’s hands but what one does with them. Where would Jesus have come down on the “faith versus works” controversy? My master is at work on a book that may answer this question, or not, as he is more in love with questions than answers.

      June 25

      This emphasis on purity, a telltale sign of Paul’s former career as a law-enforcing Pharisee, is completely internalized in his Christian ministry. Which is more oppressive, I wonder? And yet his intentions are good. Clearly the Philippians are especially dear to him. If he could lay down a royal carpet to heaven for them, he would do so. But then Christ has already done that. So perhaps Paul’s problem is one of redundancy. All ministers, by virtue of their very ordination, are redundant, and redundancy is always oppressive. My master fights against this oppression, and though he wounds the oppressor, he does not give offense in the proper sense of setting up a stumbling block for sincere Christians.

      June 26


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