1.
I have taken a month off from posting on the NAP without really meaning to. For Christmas, Frances gave me a picture painted by a woman who stayed at Holden Village not long after I had stayed there for a month in January 2014. The picture shows two peaks in the North Cascades that can be seen from the village, drawn from the same perspective but at different times of the day and in different conditions, similar to Monet’s haystack paintings. The peaks have a different character in each frame but it’s easy to recognize them; particularly, to recognize the position from which one can see them, the part that is not in the painting but is like a kind of teleportation back into standing and looking at the mountains: I remember walking up between the peaks that January, passing between them on a trail that led to the frozen lake on the other side.
Some things carry place-memories like the idea-feelings I talked about in an earlier post from Dostoevsky: memories that get called up, elicit feelings of their own accord and memories tied to these feelings that remind us how valuations come to take their meaning from experience like the madeleine cookies in little Marcel’s memory from Proust. Place-memories seem to bear to the fruit of idea-feelings particularly strongly. For me, just the memory of looking at the peaks, even in a picture, brings up many things: there was a mine-reclamation project and the river ran copper-colored near the village from tungsten tailings; the river passes behind the chapel quietly over rocks; there’s an old gym, muffins and coffee, a sign marking the wilderness, simple bedrooms, a cold shower, tailings covered with snow.
2.
There’s an article from a recent conference on Søren Kierkegaard that a professor I had at PLU, Sergia Hay, shared with me. In the article, the author writes about readerly revelations, decisive reading encounters: “this kind of deep reading, which helps to shape a human consciousness and develop a self, is as psychologically jarring as it is inwardly grounding.” This is, I think, a kind of place-memory, a textual place rather than a geographical one. My Holden memories have traces of both: it was where I first read Kierkegaard. This was right after my first semester of college and this experience was my impetus for studying philosophy. I started Sickness Unto Death as part of the class I was taking and can still almost remember the opening from memory,
A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self.
Admittedly, I didn’t remember that exactly but quoted it. I was pretty close. I remember feeling annoyed at the obtrusiveness of this beginning and subsequently feeling a weird intellectual shock of understanding after a class where we spent an hour diagramming the paragraph to parse out the meaning; I remember reading Works of Love back in my room at night: in it, SK talks about love from Paul’s letters, the strongest piece of Christian theology as far as I can tell; I remember we read a part of one of the Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air discourses (SK wrote several) and afterward walking off by myself, listening for silence and trying to be quiet in nature. I don’t think I’d ever done that before. I’m going to be embarking on some Kierkegaard reading in the weeks to come and I figured this would be a good starting point for the blog because it’s my starting point. Not often do we find a place where something meaningful in our lives definitively started—and even if it didn’t then, in January five years ago, even if I began some of the books before, read philosophy before—what of it?
3.
I am left wondering, at the end of this post, where the beginning of my reading of Kierkegaard leaves me. Dostoevsky writes in his Diary that “nothing ever comes to an end, and so nothing can ever be too late; every event continues and takes on new forms, even though it may have finished its initial stage of development” (472). This seems apt. A lifelong task has an odd chronology. Where did it begin? What created the environment for its flourishing? The initial development, the starting point of something that nourishes its own idea-feeling, feels significant, feels grounding—and perhaps points toward future development.
Works:
Fyodor Dostoevsky. A Writer’s Diary, Volume 1. Translated by Kenneth Lantz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994.
Søren Kierkegaard. The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Søren Kierkegaard. The Sickness Unto Death. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Søren Kierkegaard. Works of Love. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Notes of an Amateur Philosopher 