Thursday, November 11, 2010

Everybody just turn around

Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard died on this day in 1855. He wrote:


"Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward."

   And what was the story? How had it all come to this? Surely he’d hoped for…for what? He’d wanted to be a ballplayer, but then what? Truth be told, nothing much. He’d been a drifter, adrift, sometimes on the sea of possibility, other times in the swamp of necessity, to borrow a line from someone. Kierkegaard? Kierkegaard, elsewhere, had summed him up nicely, as the man never present to himself, always either hoping or remembering, but not even present in his hoping or remembering. That man may remember, in consequence, a past he didn’t really experience, and as a hoping individual he always had a more gratifying disappointment.  --  Chapter 21, The Misforgotten. 

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