On Kierkegaard and Boredom

Today I've been tripping through my latest essay of Kierkegaard, "Either/Or: A Fragment of Life." To say that I love it would be to understate the fact. I am in love with this reading. And its not so much just the reading, but also the time spent reading, the freedom to read, the whole work of it all.

And it is work.

It is work to find time in your day to sit and read. And not just read, digest. To eat a piece of work, and upon finishing the given section, to taste your fingers. To ruminate on it. That is work; work often neglected.

Every so often I find this work ironic as well. Take today's snippet, for instance. I cannot in one sitting digest this piece of work, and so I trip through it. That is, I take small but frequent trips through it, taking it one section at a time. Today's reading was the very first few pages with the topic being: Boredom. Here Kierkegaard provides (as tongue-in-cheek) a proof that boredom is the root of all evil. The proof could be summarized this way: Boredom led God to Adam, Adam to Eve, Adam and Eve to Children, Children to population, population to Babel, and Babel to widespread population, widespread population to widespread boredom. Circle completed and begun again.

Obviously said with true conviction and a wink.

But it was the last part of this piece where irony pierced me to the chair. Kierkegaard writes,

"There are men who have an extraordinary talent for transforming everything into a matter of business, whose whole life is business, who fall in love, marry, listen to a joke, and admire a picture with the same industrious zeal with which they labor during business hours. The Latin proverb, otium est pulvinar diaboli (Idleness is the devil's pillow), is true enough, but the devil gets no time to lay his head on this pillow when one is not bored."

And I laughed because I had only an hour before said to myself, "It is time to work at some Kierkegaard." I was not taking time out for Kierkegaard, I was infusing him into my work schedule.

Oh to be bored and therefore read Kierkegaard out of boredom! But would I still digest it if bored? I hope so. But why take the chance?

And why give evil the chance to sleep?

Ah, back to work.

See you in church,
VT...