Soren Kierkegaard

drawn figure than the Young Man ever was, far more intense and notice-
ably deeper.
The diary does not describe a linear development but soon comes to
move in circles. And all of a sudden it rotates so rapidly around its own,
unknown center that it begins to burrow beneath the whole of empirical
reality, disappearing soundlessly into emptiness and meaninglessness. It
makes for unbearable reading. Quidam’s torments are almost enough to
take away the reader’s life, nothing less, but it is precisely in this that the
work’s redemptive gesture consists! It is the book’s sophisticated intention
that we—the readers—are to witness the monomaniacal writer’s mental
breakdown and thus see through his self-absorption as a demonic state that
points directly toward death and dissolution. In brief, it is the diary’s inten-
tion that the reader diagnose Quidam’s conflict and dissociate himself from
it. And indeed on numerous occasions Frater Taciturnus has been “tempted
to abandon him [Quidam] and lose all patience.” Not unreasonably he as-
sumes that the reader has also been inclined to do something similar. In fact,
he actually believes that of the book’s “few readers, two-thirds of them will
give up halfway through, which can also be expressed by saying that they
will stop reading and throw the book away out of boredom.”
In saying this, however, Frater Taciturnus does not want us to go so far
as to reject the conflict itself. For at its most profound, the conflict is con-
nected to the religious sphere, which is not “something for stupid people
and unshaven striplings” but is “the most difficult thing of all.” Frater Taci-
turnus would like to back this assertion up, and this is why he (like Con-
stantin Constantius inRepetition) appends to Quidam’s diary an “Epistle to
the Reader” consisting of six lengthy paragraphs. In this epistle he does not
simply repeat the transfiguring gesture with which Constantin Constantius
revealed himself as the creator of the Young Man. He also reveals with
scenographic expertise the manner in which he, Frater Taciturnus, has ex-
perimented with Quidam and Quaedam in accordance with quite specific
psychological parameters: “I have placed together two heterogeneous indi-
viduals, one male and one female. Him I have kept within the power of
the spirit and have related him to the religious. Her I have kept within
aesthetic categories. There can certainly be a good deal of misunderstanding
as soon as I posit a point of unity, namely this, that they are united in loving
each other....IfIremove the passion, the whole thing becomes an ironic
situation characterized by Greek cheerfulness. If I posit passion, then the
situation is essentially tragic....What is tragic is that the two lovers do not
understand each other. What is comic is that the two, who do not under-
stand each other, love each other.”