The Memory of Happiness

Kierkegaard asks us to consider the unhappiest man. He places us at an open grave, where the body is missing: “Did he find not rest, not even in the grave; does he perhaps wander restlessly about in the world? Has he forsaken his dwelling-place, his home, leaving only his address behind!” (p. 217). Not only is the dwelling-place of his death an appearance of absence, but so too is the unhappiest man an embodiment of that absence: “He is always absent, never present to himself” (p. 220). He carries with him an absence framed by the failure to be in the present. Beyond the present, Kierkegaard’s unhappiest man finds himself living in a region that smoulders the present, tears it asunder, and renders it a liminal place, in which he merely visits.

Kierkegaard turns us toward the past. Toward the great expanse of a landscape already lived, yet already expired. The landscape opens up, and the consciousness of being in the present fades. Here, in the region of the already dead, is a reality that resounds with greater force than the present. The undead retain a dynamism that the living lack. It is a place divested of hope, but grounded in the structure of submission to certainty: the certainty of disappointment.

We are made aware of certain patterns that occur in the early hours, where the curtains are open and the lights remain on. Figures move in the darkness. Sounds emerge in the silence. It is an alien world that windows and doors afford, a world reconstituted by remains of former years. Impossible to distinguish what actually exists in the present and what has been seized from the past and thrown into the present. Once more, Kierkegaard: “Is this a real being, or is it an image, a living person who lives, or a corpse who lives? It is Niobe. She lost all at a single blow; she lost that which gave her life” (p. 225).