Scribbled on a flyleaf:

The flyleaf may be found in my Kierkegaard book, which I can’t stand reading and return to periodically because…

Curiosity, I suppose. I keep sniffing, as Henry does where a dead squirrel lay. Kierkegaard influenced folks who influenced me; infused the conversation during my college years. That I’ve never “gotten” him galls. I’d aimed at being the sort who could quote Kierkegaard confidently. I punish my brain on his writing as once I worked my body on machines. I make sense of a sentence here and there, but my mind bounces off his gnarly syntax as a misdirected bird off pane glass.

Younger, I comforted myself I could compass others’ thoughts if I set my mind to it. I know now that’s not true. Calculus, geometry, physics, and economics flummoxed me in school; most so-called philosophy riled me as a waste of breath. My mind gets lost in abstractions. I grow bored, irked, anxious. If William James, Bonhoeffer, Sartre, Auden, Borges, DeLillo, Hesse, Kafka, David Lodge (David Lodge!), Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Rilke, Salinger, Updike swore by Kierkegaard, why could I only swear at him! My vanity kept pleading for entry to a club that wouldn’t have me.

The more I think, the stupider I get; the more I know, the less. Puppy Henry wonders I subject myself to such torment. Why not read “for pleasure”? Am I a masochist?

Younger I strove for the appearance of erudition. Not now. These days I aim to be amiable, not daunting. I dislike show-offs – why would I want to be one?

My obsession is understanding my story. We can do that only by comparing. How do I differ from, how resemble persons I’ve known and those I’ve met in their words? How am I the product of my moment (as we all are)? What am I to make of my zigzag topple through time? I’m my own lab rat, no idol or exemplar.  My Kierkegaard incompetence – and intransigence – interest me. Please explain!

Kierkegaard was a guy who thought – not for a living or glory, not for any advantage, but because he couldn’t help it. Like his exact contemporary, puppy Henry’s namesake (Thoreau), Kierkegaard thought himself to conclusions sometimes insulting to his neighbors. His writings, which barely sold in his lifetime, were wrestling matches with the actuality he experienced. In this we’re kin.

Never concluding, he kept pressing the elastic envelope of his attention. There was always more to find out and report. Every “yes” dragged a “but” like a tin can tied to its tail. He repeated himself, but never exactly. He contradicted himself, publishing under pseudonyms. His thinking was not systematic or conventionally defensible. Go, Søren! – I root from the sidelines.

And he couldn’t quit messing with God. God was real to him but impossible to pin down. You couldn’t reason your way to Him. Kierkegaard coined the phrase “leap of faith.” And he was always straining to square his behavior with this invisible inscrutable Divine.

So, yeh, I want to get to know him. No matter his prose prickles, I keep trying. Are my questions on the flyleaf, prompted by reading him, absurd? Probably but so? They snag and tug me – to discoveries. No pain, no gain.