Kerrigan in Copenhagen by Thomas E. Kennedy

fell under her spell. He asks himself whether he is too hard on her, too easy with himself. But she did do what she did do—what else to call that but falseness and treachery? She had seemed made for him, and he for her; according to Kierkegaard, that was the moment when a couple should have the courage to break it off. But Kerrigan was in her thrall.
    Somewhere in Kierkegaard’s writings, he said, “Whether you marryor not you will regret it.” Kerrigan both regrets it and not. Licia was such a beautiful illusion. For a time. And his beautiful baby girl, taken from him so young. She surely hardly remembers him now, or if she does at all it is as a vague fragment of a dream she dreams wherever she might be now.
    He thinks about Kierkegaard and his beloved Regine Olsen—with whom he broke off the engagement, then spent the remainder of his short life contemplating and writing about it.
    Subtitled
A Fragment of Life, Either/Or
is a gathering of aphorisms, essays, a sermon, and, lodged within it all, a novel in the form of a diary,
The Seducer’s Diary
—all written under different pseudonyms.
    The concept of “either/or” was Kierkegaard’s response to the Hegelian concept of mediation—the negotiation of contradictory ideas—“thesis” and “antithesis”—into “synthesis,” which is meant to include and reconcile them both. Either/or was Kierkegaard’s refutation of this “both/and” approach to thought. But this aspect of it has no interest to Kerrigan. He picks and chooses from the book in accord with Kierkegaard’s own prescription in that book, “The Rotation Method,” whereby one picks a part of a book or a play or a poem and makes of it perhaps quite another experience than the author thought he was preparing for the reader.
    The Seducer’s Diary
, the novel within the book, captures Kerrigan, for in it the first-person narrator, Johannes, walks the banks of this lake Kerrigan now walks, more than 150 years later, beneath the six windows of Kerrigan’s apartment, dreaming of the object of his desire, Cordelia.
    On the banks of these lakes where Kerrigan now pauses to watch a swan glide along the stippled glittering water, Hans Christian Andersen also stood weeping real salt tears over his mistreatment by the world while Kierkegaard’s fictional Johannes the Seducer stalked his beautiful young Cordelia in the pages of the fictional diary set like a substantial dark gem in a book of philosophy and meditation. Kerrigan himself now strolls this path by the water regretting and not his marriage of four years—the length of a college education—preceded by four years as lovers, another college education. But what did he learn from it? Theequivalent of a B.S. in being the victim of treachery. That while he was lecturing her about the creation of illusion in literature, she was busy creating an illusion for him with her bright, light smiling eyes.
Is this melodramatic?
he asks himself.
Is this bitterness? Am I growing to like the taste of my wounds as I lick them?
    To Kerrigan’s mind, the fictional Johannes is as real, more real perhaps, than the figures of history who walked here. More real to him in any event. For though he knows that Andersen and Kierkegaard were men of flesh and blood, equally wounded in love as Kerrigan, the very intimate record available of them is still mostly indirect, while in Johannes we have a mind and a soul laid open for study in detail throughout the course of an extreme action. Even if Johannes is the cynical one in that action, Licia the cynical one in Kerrigan’s life.
    Then he thinks of Goethe’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, which sorrows were self-inflicted, and he tries to see himself in young Werther. Had Goethe not died in 1832 but lived another dozen years, he might have seen in Kierkegaard’s Johannes the Seducer some ironic reflection of the Young