Dying Inside

Unfortunately we do not have the imaginary letters which he dictates constantly to himself but never sends. Dear Mr. Kierkegaard: I agree entirely with your celebrated dictum equating “the absurd” with “the fact that with God all things are possible,” and declaring, “The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.” In my own experiences with the absurd. . . . Dear Mr. Shakespeare: How aptly you put it when you say, “Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove.” Your sonnet, however, begs the question: If love is not love, what then is it, that feeling of closeness which can be so absurdly and unexpectedly destroyed by a trifle? If you could suggest some alternate existential mode of relating to others that. . . . Since they are transient, the product of vagrant impulses, and often incomprehensible, we have no satisfactory access to such communications, which Selig sometimes produces at a rate of hundreds per hour. Dear Mr. Justice Holmes: In Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen, 244 U.S. 205, 221 [1917], you ruled, “I recognize without hesitation that judges do and must legislate, but they can do so only interstitially; they are confined from molar to molecular motions.” This splendid metaphor is not entirely clear to me, I must confess, and. . . .

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Dear Mr. Selig:

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, “Create silence.”

Yours very sincerely,

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

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