“Going Home”, Acrylic – Oil, Pamela S. Pease (2021)

Down through the ages, people have always known firsthand that life is not a straight line — I suspect our distant ancestors were never sure if they would make it to sundown, or whether a hungry cave-bear, all fang and claws, was waiting in ambush just around the next boulder!

Fast forward to modernity and the world of concrete-and-steel. While cave-bears have gone the way of Neanderthals, the uncertainty of what waits around the next corner is still firmly imprinted. The cave-bear has become an online hacker, and Monkeypox is on the rise. Like most urbanites, I had often pondered the many serpentine bends, and hairpin turns filling my lived life, or else much to my dismay, finding myself enmeshed in situations not of my making. Smug within my cosy plan, naïve and beguilingly optimistic, I threw myself headlong into the business of life, never anticipating such dramatic setbacks — sometimes painfully instructive, often prolonged, always unexpected — thinking it must be my own private neuroticism… until my ‘boomer’ cohorts reported similar experiences.

Strangely enough, this did not seem to be the case with my elders. They had rolled up their sleeves, surviving the unspeakable horrors of two world wars, the Spanish Flu, and the Great Depression, then blithely settled down in the same house, same spouse, and same job, admirable in so many ways… marking time contentedly until the proverbial ‘gold-watch’ retirement.

Come the 21st century, unmarked detours, if not complete turnarounds, lie scattered aplenty along the zigzag path of life’s journey. Once regarded as a problem with no agreed name, ‘rupture’ — in scrappy everyday talk — has now been inflated to the scientific, if long-winded ‘discontinuity’, in what must surely be an instance of vicarious slapstick. While lacking the emotional verve of ‘rupture’, which clearly sounds out its harsh meaning, nonetheless ‘discontinuity’ in the end, captures that sense of deflection from an earlier state of being. Discontinuities occur in an uncanny way, often by chains of associations in which the individual is largely powerless.

In his 1919 study, ‘The “Uncanny”’, Freud confined his discussion to those strange coincidences, somewhat ‘mysterious’, which he attributed to a regressive, unconscious etiology. The present essay however widens the idea of the uncanny to describe a swerve from one’s idealized life trajectory — particularly the actual experience when the individual recognizes that a discontinuity has occurred. This awareness may seem unsettling, even alarming, simply for the reason that the diversion may unfold circumstantially, step by step, undetected by normal, daily perception. All change, as a first response, is felt to be loss. Furthermore, one is unsure where it is going. What was viewed simply as an everyday event at the time is later recognized in hindsight as a momentous change.

“I was too busy living my life day by day,” as one fazed colleague described it, “that I failed to notice the big picture had changed around me. It came as a shock… even more so, because I had changed as well, without realizing it!”

Ruptures may be as diverse as the offer of a new career, a divorce, a life-threatening illness, dropping a soul-crushing job for a madcap, reef-diving journey, the aftermath of a savage hurricane, or perhaps, a simple chance meeting that becomes a life-changing affair of the heart, et cetera. Sometimes it becomes possible to chart the causes, connecting the dots, the intersection of random vectors… though usually later in retrospect when the dust has finally settled.

Not all ruptures play out in center-stage: they can occur largely unnoticed or else dismissed as minor transient changes. The individual may unwittingly take some action of sorts along the way… yet nonetheless the end result often remains a case of unintended consequences, pleasant or otherwise. As with Pandora’s box, the wider subject of discontinuities invites perennial questions of Free Will.

***

It’s then only a short skip and a jump to nineteenth century Denmark and the philosophical writings of Soren Kierkegaard. In particular, Kierkegaard’s concept of ‘dread’, the existential dilemma that stifled his lengthy engagement to Regine Olsen. That’s when the doubts began! Paraphrasing Kierkegaard, ‘how can I make an informed choice in the context of unintended consequences? I want it desperately, yet I fear for where it may lead… and so, I am left paralyzed in a state of dread’.

He described this paradox as the “dizziness of freedom”, where ‘freedom of choice’ was a core value for him, as it remains for most people today. Kierkegaard’s deep Christian faith alone couldn’t save him, but for his inspired writings by which he gained some level of equanimity, whether divine grace or hardwon insight.

Kierkegaard’s experiences of discontinuities — moreso the dread of them — speak to the very foundations of the Self. In writing about the endless “possibility of possibility”, he is consumed with anxiety. The everyday act of deciding invokes the Latin root, ‘decidere’, which means ‘to cut apart’. Thereby lies the inherent warning — every decision is a fork in the road, incurring a loss as well as a risk whichever path. It may be ‘Either… Or’ but relentlessly, cannot be both… a maddening plight, or so it appears. If nothing is decided, of course, then everything remains possible, with little risk. We want to have it all and live freely, only to find that once we actually reach out, decisions curtail us, tying us down responsibly at every turn.

So, it became for hapless Kierkegaard. Certainties abound in the syllogisms of Aristotelian logic, breaking existence down into neat black-and-white pieces… but offer little comfort when faced with the fluid vagaries of life. Any life direction Kierkegaard may choose — such as his desire for a happy union with Regine — involves a risk, with unwanted possibilities lurking in the wings, ready to open up a discontinuity, or worse still, a full-blown rupture. As if that was not enough, having at last made a choice, one way or another, he is left with a Faustian bargain of his own making: bedeviled by the choice not taken, and its loss. The spectra of ‘what if’ becomes a millstone around his neck, forever the mysterious and unanswerable question.

“Life can only be understood by looking backwards”, proclaimed Kierkegaard with chilly detachment, when of course, the outcomes of all decisions become blatantly obvious — then inserts the steely barb that mocks his innocent aphorism, “but must be lived forwards”. Forwards or backwards, the moment in time changes everything… but which one is that certain spellbinding moment loaded with greatness? How to tell it apart from the other plebeian, empty moments of life? Here lies the rub at the epicenter of existence: short of magical thinking, we cannot look back, eraser at the ready, and undo a decision! Like it or not, we are all perforce, existentialists. Living with an ineffable mystery yet struggling with the drive to break it down into ordinary words — the curse of having to choose, beginning each day with whether to get out of bed… or not! With the 19th century, came the onset of ‘specialization’ in understanding the world… yet more slicing and dicing.

No wonder Kierkegaard considered the human condition, above all, to be “absurd”. Absurdism is the common thread running through his magisterial work, ‘Either/Or’ (1843), in which he makes the wily case for a paradox, beyond the illusion of opposing choices and forked sentences. Is the problem Life itself, he asks rhetorically, or is it the way we think about it? Part of the problem, Kierkegaard argued, was the conventional concept of time: we live in an organic world but think in terms of linear time, relentlessly marching forward into a worrying future that doesn’t yet exist and may never do so? This would of course, be an absurd thing: an artifice, in which the tool (clock, iPad, or iPhone) has now become the master! Mocked by our own creation, capped off by the ogre of artificial intelligence, complete with ‘chatbots’?

Instead, “if time is regarded as an infinite succession of vanishing moments”, then each moment becomes a unique entity in itself, suffused with potential. Making his point, Kierkegaard founded a short-lived periodical called ‘The Moment’. The idea of a future consequence, good or bad, becomes meaningless, since we can only exist in that present moment. Moreover, we make and re-make the future constantly, organically, with every such moment that passes. We take some fresh action or consider a new thought, so that the realm of future ‘possibilities’ becomes infinite. Life is no longer a straight line, rather more like widening ripples in a pond. Yet we do not think about our thinking in these terms, such is our learnt response to a linear, either/or mindset… as it was with Kierkegaard before his epiphany about the nature of time. As an aside, Kierkegaard’s epiphany was followed up, if belatedly, by no less an authority than Martin Heidegger with his door-stopping tome, “Being and Time” (1927).

Kierkegaard’s expansive state of being, however, goes largely unrecognized by most people — repressed to make existence livable, as Freud would have it, in his “Civilization, and its Discontents” (1930) — free-thinking of this Dionysian sort, says Freud, would surely mean the downfall of a regulated society, a lapse backwards into barbarism. The conflict with Freud — still ongoing — would come later however, carried onwards by others. Meanwhile, Kierkegaard struggled mightily with his own audacious ideas, not lest the revolving door of Either/Or. Considering the uncertainties of decision-making, risk and loss, led him backwards to the maker of such external decisions, the inner Self. If thoughtful choice is the the quintessence of the Self, then these existential uncertainties hit at the very foundations of identity. It is then only a short trembling path to the pit of primal self-doubt, ‘Who am I’? An odd question to ask, but it matters.

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Kierkegaard’s “fear and trembling” path of discovery raises many awkward questions about the true nature of the Self.

The intuitive image we carry over from childhood is that of an autonomous, unitary Self that struggles mightily with hard knocks yet remains largely resilient at its core — solid and singular as Mount Rushmore, the still point of the turning world? This is the default assumption, rightly enough, when people are hard pressed on such an asinine question. Tell me about yourself, or your Self? In search of an inner Being, thinking of ourselves in the third person, can we really be objective about our own subjectivity? Caught in a hall of mirrors, the Self reflects its own image back to itself in a maze of existential vanishing points.

It comes as no surprise that our most precious possession, our own first-person Self, has been poorly understood for so long. Hidden from view, Selfhood has only developed as a legitimate field of investigation in recent times. Longitudinal studies over the last several decades, however, have led researchers to conceive of a plurality of ‘selves’ each of which we ‘inhabit’ for a time. This is the point at which life’s discontinuities come into play. Every successive discontinuity shapes and sculpts us — our private Self — as we adjust to its particular demands. Fluid and developmental, each nascent Self merges with that of its predecessor. While they are different selves, they overlie one another in ways that continue to resonate in present time. ‘Breakthroughs’ we call them, intuitively, recognizing we have moved from one state of being to another. Not quite different, yet we are never quite the same either.

More improbably, could there be several contiguous lives, splintered identities, each purpose-built for different situations, an all-in-one package? But hark, psychologists have seen the light and wisely backed away from the cultish Multiple Personality Disorder — quickly purloined by Hollywood scriptwriters, or murderers seeking an alibi, or both of the aforementioned — now replaced by the safely arcane Dissociative Identity Disturbance. In one deft stroke of the pen, the symptomatic presentation (multiple personalities) is replaced by its underlying psychopathology (dissociation). A retreat away from the lofty phenomenon (different Selves, cohabitating!) into reductionist etiology. On the other hand, such diagnostic wordplay provides an example of the challenges (and politics!) in understanding the shape-shifting mystery of Selfhood…in whatever form it takes!

Kierkegaard’s panicky sense of dread, arising from his morbid ruminations on ‘possibilities’ underscores how the Self becomes hopelessly enmeshed in external circumstances: in his case, the impending marriage with his beloved Regine — a devout Christian — both of them intertwined in a gossipy community. Kierkegaard had by this time attracted several fierce critics who, bloated with their own righteousness, slandered him as unchristian. Any philosopher at that time walked a wafer-thin line, amid furious debates, with the fearful charge of nihilism — and another heretic for a burning at the stake — always at the ready. A regrettable instance of the mobbish blend of arrogance with ignorance, driven in Kierkegaard’s case, by his fragile physiognomy and introverted manner — cutting a figure that invited hectoring. He was not, as a rule, a courageous person, but was known to use his walking cane if provoked.

Kierkegaard’s notoriety grew regardless through his clear-eyed writings, but no less from mischievous innuendo. Straightlaced neighbors whispered, turning their backs…in what would be termed ‘cancel culture’ at a much later age. Beyond the sanctuary of home, street urchins mocked his straggly, stooped figure, as he ventured on his daily meditative walks, hesitating to cross a street. It comes as no surprise that Kierkegaard is also the author of “Stages on Life’s Way”, published in 1845 — a veiled sequel (or justification?) to the tactless ending of his engagement in 1841, involving an anonymous young man breaking up with his beloved.  

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It was clear to her family and friends that Regine’s open-hearted, yet earnestly robust spirituality was a foil for Kierkegaard’s heavy, pondering character. The larger meaning of things meant little to her and, content within the arms of the church, she wasted no time dwelling on matters where doctrine provided unwavering answers. The widening gap between them simmered beneath the surface, fraught with unspoken words, gradually becoming a yawning chasm. In truth, their temperaments were such that they might as well have come from different worlds — Kierkegaard’s haunting anxiety of their marriage falling apart, in which ‘anything was possible’, created its own reality. His behavior towards Regine became increasingly erratic, being at once too vulnerable and too touchy.

It is worth noting that the abstract metaphysics of the ‘possibility of possibility’, while fostering a deep source of dread for Kierkegaard, also provided a convenient pretext for Kierkegaard’s very real personal fears, his messy inner life. However much he fretted for Regine, yet even so, he doubted whether he was capable of closeness with another person, whosoever. A mooted discomfort with bodily contact probably didn’t help matters, hinting at long buried issues of which Kierkegaard preferred never to speak. He flinched from the very thing his heart most earnestly desired — back and forth, round and round we go. If his failed engagement with Regine was the visible husk, then here lies the kernel perhaps, of that inner conflict which kept him stuck all these years. It is not unreasonable to suppose that this final rupture, however distressing, allowed him to move onwards, providing the stimulus, if not the fodder, for his later inspirations. As he scathingly put it, in his oft quoted riposte: “rather well-hanged than ill-wed”.

Never a cuddly figure, the ascetic Kierkegaard would devote himself entirely to a life of the mind. From childhood, he had always thought of himself, if anything, as a writer… and now his time had come. Solitary in his own echo chamber, he threw himself unsparingly into his work, disciplined as a metronome — which, nonetheless, included his ritual promenade. Copenhagen at that time, was little more than a sprawling provincial town, its medieval ramparts still intact, with the Industrial Revolution decades away. In one way or another, most residents depended upon the salted-herring fishery, which supplied the cloistered monasteries and churches of Catholic Europe.

Taking his regular stroll one morning along the Nyhavn canal with its fishermen’s brightly colored houses and merchant ships docking from all over the world, Kierkegaard’s steadfast routine was disturbed. Shunned to the point of mute acceptance, he had long ago become that peculiar shadowy figure, the nameless watcher who remains unseen, faces turned away askance as he approached. Something strange happened however, on this particular day.

In the course of his walk, a passerby paused, tipped his hat, bidding him a bright ‘Good day’. The long hours of midnight writing, Kierkegaard feared, were playing cruel, delusional tricks on his overworn brain. He closed a fist, digging his long nails deep into the pulpy flesh, a curious habit he had acquired as a neuresthenic schoolboy. Pain is so often the measure of reality, and so it was on this fated day. He stared back at the Other in disbelief, aghast, mumbling a response. A normal, everyday courtesy, forgettable by most people, yet unfathomable for Kierkegaard. Over in seconds thankfully…but that was not the end of things. In the following days, townsfolk greeted Kierkegaard by name, disarmingly as a familiar face.

Startled at first, then astonished, he had interrupted their greetings to apologize for the lookalike confusion with someone else. Told there was no misunderstanding, his astonishment grew all the more. Still, he continued his walks. On the following day, he caught himself returning fleeting smiles with complete strangers, even striking up casual conversations, as if spellbound in a wondrous dream. Back in his study, he dismissed the exchanges as nothing but meaningless banter on the everyday problems of living. Weather, food prices, ‘aches and pains’, all became grist to the mill. Inexplicably, despite all his ruminations, he began looking forward more and more to these chance encounters. All at once, the idea flashed through his mind that their neighborly human decency was present all along, only suppressed by the censure against him. His protective aura of detachment — some called it ‘remoteness’ — fell away gradually, lessening each day with the medley of goodwill greetings.

Not only his street demeanor, but also his actual appearance, took on subtle changes, warming with the weather. As Spring blossomed and shadows shortened, so too he stood taller, less stooped, with eyes no longer downcast — eagerly greeting his newfound neighbors directly now, a radiant expression on his face.  A whole sensory world of brighter colors and bolder shapes opened up before him, further lifting his mood. He began taking an idle interest in ship’s rigging as he passed the docks, discerning a brigantine from a barkentine. Returning herring-boats intrigued Kierkegaard’s restless mind, with their retinue of seagulls squawking and swooping for morsels, as the weary crews hosed down the decks before berthing. The image sprang to mind — a repulsive one — of his fellow humans scrambling over each other for money or ambition, when life was so short. His features immediately took on the familiar misanthropic mask…then unaccountably, broadened into a beaming, tender smile.

Had good-hearted Regine, he wondered, taken an invisible hand in matters, using her powerful family connections…was he now one of her charitable ‘good works’? Her hushed, caressing tones still lingered in his mind, “Sometimes, small acts of kindness make all the difference”. At first mildly annoyed at the thought, it nonetheless pleased him immensely to think so. Something long congested opened within him, flooding his soul with its warm, gossamer light: the balm of human connection. Kierkegaard’s growing renown for braininess belied the fact that at heart, he loved people, just as he in turn wished to be loved. A niggling discomfort only remained, for the lost happiness that could have been.

***

It would not be unreasonable to expect that such a devastating rupture with Regine, albeit self-inflicted, might be followed by a descent into wretchedness, perhaps even the chaotic relief of madness. In fact, the rupture turned out to be a catalyzing event! Much to his surprise, but also to the shared betterment of all humanity, Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” drove him forwards. He flourished, prodigiously! As a Dane, he liked the novel idea of Viking blood coursing through his veins — the great seafarers of the stormy North Atlantic — adding to his newfound audacity! His works received wide praise for their boldness and innovation, critiquing in part, the hyper-rationalism of Aristotle.

The careful reader, however, is left with a vague undercurrent of sadness, if not sickly foreboding, that only grows with a closer scrutiny of Kierkegaard’s later works. Death was already casting its grim shadow. In a burst of genius, he wrote feverishly, compulsively, with expressions that at times border on transcendence — yet curiously, the writer lingers airily on the sideline, workmanlike. There remains a lurking inevitability to his works…sooner than expected, he was dead.

Now a reluctant celebrity, Kierkegaard died in 1855, likely from tuberculosis, collapsing in the street, among friends. His church funeral was attended by all the priggish notables of Copenhagen, haggling for pews, as well as the ordinary people crowding together in the cloisters. These sturdy, rawboned fishermen, persnickety shopkeepers, and swarthy dockworkers knew little, if anything, of Kierkegaard’s achievements, but philosophy be damned, they would honor the passing of greatness from one who walked amongst them. A fitting paradox for one who at the best of times, defined himself as an odd, misshapen outsider. For her part, Regine married her tutor in 1847, happily, and died in 1904, having long forgiven her once erstwhile suitor.

***

Kierkegaard’s deep concern with individuality, struggling with the paradox of ‘Either/Or’, finds its twenty-first century affinity in the works of Charles Taylor (“Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment”, Harvard University Press, 2024). In particular, Taylor is concerned with the contemporary, malign sense of anomie, the pervasive loss of belonging as a modernist state of being, stemming he proposes, from post-Enlightenment values. To be always going nowhere in a hurry — following a podcast algorithm, busy posting selfies on the Internet, or prepping to be an influencer — yet never making it. Taylor fears that The Web with all its social networks is redefining the meaning of personal identity.

The resulting emphasis on individualism, scientism and hyper-rationality comes at a cost: such values “atomize” the Self, according to Taylor, isolating it from those sources of self-affirmation provided by earlier “communities of meaning”. Putting aside Rousseau’s tropes of ‘the noble savage’, Taylor is nonetheless pointing to a misplaced way of being. He means to be provocative! I think of the well-tailored ‘outcasts’ of ‘The Lonely Crowd’, David Riesman’s 1950 sociological classic, or William H. Whyte’s 1956 ‘The Organization Man’, a mechanistic, cardboard figure — early additions to this genre of truthtellers that begins with Kierkegaard.

The evidence is not hard to find in the present age of daily massacres (261 mass shootings, including 23 mass school shootings in the USA, so far this year up to July 4th): an appalling new statistic of psychosocial alienation. On the other hand, past societies were imbued with the ‘enchanted’ joy and beauty in the Self of the Other, drawing people together to celebrate a common humanity, or what Taylor calls the “interspace”, connecting one another.

Witness the luscious paintings of Bruegel the Elder (1525 – 1569), doyen of the Dutch Renaissance, with their peasant scenes of fiddle music, tankards of ale, raucous laughter, and exuberant goodwill. What better to bring on a smile than one of his semi-comedic works, ‘The Peasant Dance’ of 1568 with everyone, children as well, gyrating, stomping, and high-stepping shamelessly around their thatched, wattle-and-daub village houses. The whole notion of Self is inextricably tied to the clan as a whole — the 2002 movie, “Rabbit-Proof Fence”, set in 1931, provides a more recent, if heartrending example in which Australian Aboriginal children are plucked from their community by government decree so as to assimilate them into white society.

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It can be argued perhaps that a discontinuity such as that suffered by Kierkegaard during his Regine “stages”, represents an epiphenomenon of sorts — a recurring pattern of symptoms driven by Taylor’s plight of modern estrangement? The Self, alienated from its community roots, has become fragmented to the point that discontinuities are regarded as normal. At the same time, each discontinuity is also a paradox in that it reconfigures the disconnected Self, attempting in its own way, a deeper, more meaningful connection, to recover that lost sense of ‘wholeness’. Needless to say, Kierkegaard had performed a praiseworthy service by exposing this fundamental dilemma of the reasoning mind, disconnected from the social reality of community...even if his personal ordeal makes for heavy, if not painful reading.

Besides, viewing discontinuities as progressive ‘fragments’ of an ever-emerging, dynamic Self is not necessarily a bad thing, considered as a continuous process of renewal. The latest rendition of the self gradually becomes stale, then moribund, ready to be cast aside — much like the moulting of a crab as it wriggles out of its old, hardened carapace into a fresh life, though not without a struggle. A breathtaking undoing, transforming all that came before, or merely a new installment? Regardless, whoever you were in young adulthood, keening for adventure, is usually not who you are in late middle age, consolidating your legacy.

Furthermore, Taylor’s thesis is not such a novel one, since the social construction of the Self by way of modeling, reinforcement, and introjection — along with genetics — has a long history of acceptance in clinical psychology. While Taylor rightly emphasizes the value of community in those developmental processes leading to selfhood, modern corporations and cityscapes have inexorably become purveyors of the very values which he abhors. Where to start when the tactile, dancing communities of Bruegel’s time have morphed into the blogosphere, complete with digital town squares? Chopping things up, and connecting oddball pieces back together, can make sense of anything, or so it seems in the wacky, self-absorbed world of TikTok memes, all screaming petulantly, “Look at me!”. What is so wrought under the euphonious name of ‘online knowledge management’ may be difficult, if not impossible to undo.

***

All well and good, yawns the stalwart reader, but what does this mean practically for the everyday individual facing a rupture? In keeping with Taylorian ideals, it behoves individuals to seek out and cultivate supportive communities: those actual people, places, ideas, as well as posts and podcasts which, oddly enough, may help navigate the first felt inklings of a rupture. Which is to say, a rupture is not always the bogeyman it appears to be, but rather may turn out in the long run to be a ripe opportunity for self-renewal.

Kierkegaard’s trailblazing major works, for which he is rightly touted as ‘the father of existentialism’, were forged in the furnace of initial despair transformed into creativity, following his heartrending rupture with Regine. This was a time in which he was struggling to make sense of the tortuous experience, and he was ashamed to admit, his own caddish, self-defeating behavior. His philosophical writing became a therapy of sorts, a working out of how to fully exist as a person connected to a greater humanity.

For everyday people, equally for philosophers and psychologists, a rupture may hopefully turn out be a rite of passage to a fresh beginning; however, it can just as likely teeter on a knife-edge between discovery and chaos. There’s no denying the pain of separateness that unavoidably comes with a false start: stuck in a rut, up a blind-alley. Yes, every discontinuity has its own parabolic arc, which needs to be nurtured and facilitated as far as possible. The real-life trajectory, however, will nonetheless run its due course as fate would have it. The individual is largely along for the ride, the ups and the downs, come what may.

Lest the picture be painted with too heavy a brushstroke, it is equally true that most people when stretched pull a brave face, spurred onwards to greater things — as with Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” — showing a resiliency they never imagined.

At worst, we learn from any mistake…which thereby is no mistake at all. Either way, we are never back ‘stuck’ where we were, for that moment in time has long passed.

Impermanence has an upside after all.

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Paul B. Donovan is a humanist writer and forensic psychologist. He is the author most recently, of "Epicurus Love: A Novel of Mythos and Desire in Ancient Greece" (2023, The Euphorion Press). *** Pamela S. Pease has painted and exhibited her art in Santa Fe and Maine, as well as internationally in France and Australia. Inspired by the shapes of Nature and the geometry of objects, she embraces an artistic style that is both impressionistic and abstract. She is the author and illustrator of a children’s picture book, "EL JOFFE: Poodle de Santa Fe".

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