Fear and Trembling Revisited

This thing happens when I read Kierkegaard. I realize that there is something lurking in the corner that I haven't addressed. There are things that need to change about myself, and they are the things that I am most scared to change. Then, I pretend that I didn't realize that, and everything is fine. This is followed by a period where I wrestle with myself (?) before deciding to do the riskiest thing: imagine that my life could be different.

These things are quite hard to write about because they are usually somewhat abstract, but sometimes they end in concrete changes. The last time I was in Denmark, and I was forced to read A LOT of Kierkegaard in a class, I broke up with my boyfriend, abandoned my theological perspectives, added a new major, and insisted that I would be happy. Strangely, it all worked out rather well.

So, here I am, in Copenhagen, reading Fear and Trembling. Again.*

At first I thought that it was something about Kierkegaard that made me want to change everything. Maybe he has some magical power that makes one dissatisfied with everything and ready to make a leap, but as I got to page 5 tonight, I realized something.

Maybe it isn't that Kierkegaard convinces me to change everything. Instead, it might be that once I have decided to pick up that book, somehow I have already committed to taking the risk. I listened to a friend of mine explain that self-help books do help her. She read this one book and ended up really applying these principles and reshaping her life. I don't want to compare Kierkegaard to self-help (though I wouldn't be the first to do so), but I imagine that it is the same for her. When she bought that book at the store, she had already decided to open herself up to the world. I think that I just need a concrete action every now and again to push me over the edge.

It's not that I want to change my life direction this time, but I am open to the possibility. Post-graduation is a vulnerable time for someone who has defined themselves academically, and applying to graduate school can feel a bit like one's whole identity is being evaluated (in a defensive move, I wrote this sentence in the third person--can't quite own that one yet). Not to mention, I moved half-way across the world.

So, I have felt myself close off, pull in, and hide from myself and others. I already knew that on one level, but I also read it on page 5 of Fear and Trembling. I imagine I will be reading that same sentence for the next 142 pages. Then maybe I will actually be ready to open myself up to the possibility of radical change.

You know, you could lose everything taking a risk like that.

*Please do not assume that I will take all of the above actions again. I just wanted to convey the importance of reading Kierkegaard to the direction of my whole life. Really, it is a bit more abstract this time around.

Pictures

Pictures are memory devices. That is why they are so comforting. I just loaded God-knows-how-many pictures of my trip to the Czech Republic onto my facebook page. It was strangely therapeutic, especially in the melancholy mood I was/am in.

Sometimes I am melancholy because I cannot place myself in the context I am in. What am I doing here? Is this where is should be? Why did I decide this would be meaningful? These questions are so much more obvious when I have left the familiar for a foreign country with high taxes and no open container laws, but these questions are always lurking around the edges of my thoughts, just beyond articulation in my antsy mind.

Pictures, however, remind me that indeed my story has progressed as I remember. I was just in Prague. My memory is reliable, and thus the story that I have told about myself is reliable. I can load these pictures onto my own little identity representation device with little captions to explain why I went where I did, and to show, sometimes all too overtly, why these images make me who I am. It is almost as if I am trying to convince everyone (myself) that I am that person who loves philosophy and is curious, smart, creative, and thoughtful. (Maybe this blog is another attempt...)

Either way, I articulate a story about myself: I am a world traveler. I lead students through academic tours of foreign countries because art, history, identity and politics matter to me. They matter because they are so important, and furthermore, I have beautiful pictures to prove how important they are!

All of this is to say, sometimes we need some confirmation of our own self-story. It is not that I doubt that I was in Prague, but somehow these pictures tell my own story of purpose and organizing telos (the goals and ends I direct myself toward as I live) back to me. Pictures are one of the little tools that I use to remember the right things and in the right ways. Perhaps it is a bit solipsistic to tell myself my own story with the photos I have taken and captioned, but I think it is all I have to start with.*


* I know too well, based on a 75 page honors thesis, that really, I have others. Facebook facilitates the ability of others to confirm my story, to call it into question, or to merely act as a "look of the other" kind of check. There is this other element though of the weight of the responsibility of my own story that can become a bit detached from the confirmation of others because perhaps I can always find someone to confirm whatever story that I create.

Memory and Identity, Forgetting and Oppression

The theme of the tour I am leading to the Czech Republic is memory and identity. It corresponds to the name of the academic program that I work in at DIS: European Culture and History. The basic idea is that, through a class and this trip, the students are supposed to tie history as the collective memory of a nation, to current culture, politics, lifestyle, national identity.

The concept seems a bit vague at first, but the idea is that our identity, or how we think of who we are, is tied to the stories that we tell about ourselves, especially our past. So, when you ask me who I am, I will likely think through the various situations in my life that have led me to live in Copenhagen, love philosophy, and lead a group of possibly asinine students to Prague.

Now, expand this same concept to a nation, and you can see how the history, or collective memory of a nation, can tell a lot about how that nation collectively imagines itself to be. For instance, the United States rests on a solid narrative around the Revolutionary War, the war for independence, the breaking away from an oppressor. This story shapes how we see ourselves today, as independent, strong, and individualistic people who value liberty, who fight for what is right, etc.

Who we are is strongly tied to what we remember about ourselves, but there is also the possibility for pathology, because we can be so wrong about ourselves. We can fool ourselves and undermine ourselves, and because our memories are so spotty, so unreliable, our identity is often built on something that is anything but sturdy.

So, if nationalism is built on a possibly flawed memory, nationalism is an identity plagued by the possibility of pathology. I have tried a half dozen times to distill the history of the Czech Republic into a blog-sized explanation of the frailty of nationalism, but I simply am not able. Because the Czech Republic is built on the illusion of ethnic unity, its pathology shows its face in ethnic tension and identity crisis. The reality is that the interests of nationalism have only divided this nation. The quest for a unified Czech identity has led to the attempted extermination of not only Jews, but Germans and Czechs at different times and in different places, and an identity could only be forged by forgetting some of these events while highlighting others . Even the Czechs, who were oppressed by German empires and nations for years, turned to expulsion and genocide as forms of ethnic cleansing when they held the power in this region, the long proclaimed as the heart of Europe. In the Czech obsession with rejecting German-ness, it has embraced one empire after another, from the Soviets to Corporate Capitalism.

But the stories that we tell ourselves, that Czechs might tell themselves, are the justification of our actions, or, maybe more often, the denial of them. So, we can pretend to be nations of a unified people, while forgetting that we killed those who we could not unify, that we expelled those who disagreed, and the storytellers edit their identity as they forget the past.

This was not a coherent or well-written post, and believe me, I have edited it a lot, but I am practicing explaining these ideas because I am still working out what I think, and not to publish or include in any thesis, but just so I can reconcile what I see. I want to be able to tell a story about Europe and my time here that doesn't forget, and I want to tell a story about myself that doesn't forget either, if it is possible.