“You are not a thing,” Jim had said the first day of Existentialism, by way of definition of our subject matter. And I wasn’t. I had to start setting boundaries for my obsessions. On top of the grief of losing a family member, I also had to cope with my unrealistic expectation that in the midst of funeral preparations at home I would continue to keep up with all of my schoolwork. In Kierkegaardian fashion, philosophy was personal for me, and as another existentialist thinker, Simone de Beauvoir, put it, “In truth there is no divorce between philosophy and life.” In my grief I dove in further, yet I knew I couldn’t live like this forever.
Returning to school after we buried my grandfather, I was physically and emotionally spent. I needed to compartmentalize, or at the very least spend a bit more time at the local watering hole relaxing with friends. As I struggled through midterms and made plans to work at the summer camp where I had worked every summer since finishing high school, my mother finally became the voice of reason.
She asked me if I’d ever thought about taking a break.
I had not. I took her advice and turned down the camp job—notorious for seventy-hour work weeks and low pay—in favor of a gig as a summer Resident Advisor that included free rent in the small lake town where I went to school. I started to look forward to afternoons lying on the beach, and then, because summer has always meant reading for me, I set about planning a book club. A favorite history professor would later say to me that anyone who organizes a summer book club on the scale that I did was basically “doomed” to go to graduate school. Having warmed to the idea since my advisor first suggested that graduate education might be in my future, I took that as a compliment.
Together with a couple of equally bookish friends, I emailed favorite professors and asked what books each of them would suggest to students as “must reads” before graduating. We wanted to know their “best ever” book recommendations. And so the Best Ever Book Club was born.
We chose one book from each professor, created a syllabus (yes, a syllabus), and then invited the professors to join us the week that we discussed their books. We read Madame Bovary, The Brothers Karamazov, selections from Wendell Berry, and Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation, among other things. The Merton text was suggested by my Logic professor, Jack. He had also suggested Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, but I had been unable to convince my friends to include it on the syllabus. They were wise to talk me down off that ledge—it is nearly 400 pages long, for one thing—but they could not hold me back permanently. The book lodged itself in my mind, a “must-read” before our graduation the following May.
Jack invited us over to his home to discuss Merton, and I met his wife Melissa for the first time. As we sat around sipping coffee she started talking about Works of Love, and the Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. When Jack was in graduate school they spent a summer there while he did research for his dissertation, and she participated in a Works of Love reading group with him. She echoed my friends’ sense that it would have been a bit much to include it on our summer reading list, but I was too distracted by her mention of this Kierkegaard Library to hear much else. I laughed as she told stories about being one of the only women in residence that summer, philosophy still being a male-dominated field, and how she would hang a warning sign on the door of the shared bathroom whenever she took a shower, just to be on the safe side. I tried to imagine spending a summer in a place where everyone around me shared my slowly growing love of Kierkegaard.
As summer wore on I began to think that my history professor was right—perhaps I was doomed to go to graduate school. And perhaps I would study Kierkegaard. My understanding of what that meant was still limited, however, and first I had another year of school, not to mention applications to fill out, rejection letters to cope with, and finally an acceptance to rejoice over.
Most importantly, first I had to actually read this book, Works of Love. Fall semester of my senior year flew by with required courses for my major and drama with my roommates, and I took a full load in my final semester so that I could complete a second major in religion. Weekends, as always, were spent doing school work at my favorite coffee shop, JP’s. Best of all, I convinced both department heads that a directed study on Works of Love should count for both of my majors. And so my Friday afternoons with Jack began.
Jack is a tall, thoughtful, blond man, awkward in that endearing way that philosophy professors inevitably are. Born and raised in the Dutch Reformed tradition (the same one my parents had raised me in), he converted to Catholicism in college. He was the only person I knew who liked Kierkegaard more than I did. Way more. His office was lined with books I had never read but hoped I would, eventually—beautiful Princeton editions of Kierkegaard’s works, translated by Howard and Edna Hong, secondary scholarship on Kierkegaard’s works, other non-Kierkegaardian books about religion and philosophy. There was also a collection of philosopher finger puppets Melissa bought for him. On the fourth floor of Lubbers Hall, home of all my favorite professors, Jack’s office window overlooked 10th Street, and in the spring, beautiful flowering trees and rocking chairs on the front porch of the campus ministries house across the street.
It was a picture of a future I was I afraid to hope for, a future as a scholar and a professor. I was twenty-two, and I finally knew at least one thing that I wanted for myself. I still wasn’t sure how to get there, though. I was looking for someone to show me the way; I didn’t yet know that I’d have to make it up on my own.
It had taken all my nerve to ask Jack to supervise this directed study, shy as I was, though I figured all along that he would be happy to help a student read a text he told me was one of his favorites. When the semester began, I read about fifty pages a week, because Jack thought it best to read slowly and carefully, instead of at the usual breakneck pace of many of my courses, which resulted in students remembering nothing they read—or giving up on trying to read at all. Jack knew college students well, perhaps because he was young enough to remember being one himself in the not-so-distant past. He told me that if I got stuck, I should read aloud, and so I closed my bedroom door and paced around, delving deeper into the text, getting lost, and finding my way out again. From time to time Jack would also have me read articles by contemporary Kierkegaard scholars, and each week I wrote an informal one- or two-page paper to get our discussion going.
Those discussions were the highlight of my week. Yet I also dreaded them, at times. I was still learning to articulate my ideas, and the text was dense. Besides that, I hated the thought of appearing stupid in front of a professor I respected. Those old perfectionist habits died hard. Most of the time I simply did not know what I thought yet, and compared to my normal classes, now the discussion was all on me. There was no lecture component here. It was Jack, me, and our Danish friend Søren.
There were a lot of long pauses during those discussions. Often I began by reading my short paper aloud, grateful to at least have some ideas to start things off, always more confident with my pen than with my voice. At other times I stared out the window at those rocking chairs across the street, and past them to the dorm I lived in my first year of college. “Well . . .” I said, and paused again. “I guess . . . maybe . . . it seems like . . .” and perhaps then the words started to trickle out. I started to say what I really thought, which was that Kierkegaard was right about all of this Christian love stuff. But that I worried he was also wrong, sometimes.
Kierkegaard’s understanding of love begins with a central assumption taken from Matthew 22:39: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He goes so far as to assert that if loving one’s neighbor is not a duty (e.g. you shall love, whether you like it or not), the concept of neighbor does not exist. He writes in his journals, “And it is this Christian love that finds out and knows that the neighbor exists and, what amounts to the same, that everyone is that, because if it were not a duty to love, then the concept of ‘neighbor’ would not exist either.”9 In other words, what besides duty could make sense of a person’s efforts to love that neighbor whom she has no particular preference for, not to mention loving the neighbor who she flat out doesn’t like? And, on top of that, without duty, loving