Page 36 - WTP Vol. IX #6

Keren wasn’t someone I’d known very well. She was my wife’s friend, we met mostly at meals, and rarely had one-on-one conversations. But I’d always felt a familiarity with her, a kind of closeness, as if we were siblings or long-lost cousins. I’d always enjoyed her perspective at the lunch table, or drinking tea on the balcony and talking about the vicissitudes of her life as an art student, her adventures dating, a recent movie or book. One day my wife told me that Keren had texted her saying she’d been diagnosed—at the age of thirty-three—with ovarian cancer. I felt as if I were sick myself. My stomach turned, I felt like nau- seous, and a sense of panic spread over me that I’d never really before felt so acutely. It was as if she’d told me Keren had already died.
My wife, who’s a general practitioner, immediately called her back, going into the next room to speak to her in private. She’d actually been the one to insist Keren get a blood test after she’d mentioned casually, at a
meal we’d recently hosted, that she’d seen a bit of spot- ting between periods. I waited for my wife to return
and when she did asked what Keren had said. It seemed Keren had been sent straight to surgery, that they’d di- agnosed it early and “only” took out one infected ovary. She was beginning the first of three or four rounds of chemotherapy next week. The hope, she said, was to keep the rest of her reproductive system intact in case she ever wanted to try having children.
There was little I could do so I sent Keren a text mes- sage saying that I was thinking about her—and asking her to tell us in case there was anything she needed. She thanked me and said she was moving in with her parents for a while—adding that we should come visit soon. I wrote that we would and added a smiley face. But inside all I felt was dread.
~
Our visit did not come as soon as it should have. I’d just started writing an article on Donald Barthelme’s “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel,” and was reading the book with which it dealt, Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony With Continual Reference to Socrates. It actu- ally turned out to be Kierkegaard’s doctoral thesis, a complicated text written by a young man still find-
ing his voice, which didn’t make it easy to read. But academics don’t have the privilege of not being experts in their field, of knowing enough to just bridge the gap. And when you’re dealing with a writer like Barthelme,
who invokes an entire intellectual lineage, you have to have at least read what he’s read. And so you end up reading one of Kierkegaard’s least known books.
Spending so much time alone with Kierkegaard, it seemed, had its own cost. The concept of irony, it turned out, was not as simple as it might seem, at least not when discussed by Kierkegaard. To make thing more complicated, what he wanted to say about irony, he instead encapsulated in a discussion of Socrates. The fact that Socrates never wrote anything down—that he never expressed in words what went on inside—was what most interested Kierkegaard about Socrates. He was, for Kierkegaard, a historical person about whom we knew nothing beyond that it seems he existed. And this, for Kierkegaard, was the embodiment of irony: knowing only that we exist.
And so, day after day, I mulled over this conundrum in conversations with those around me—my wife, my friends, my colleagues. All we know, I said, is that
we exist. But somehow that didn’t really express the frustration that went along with the feeling that our outward existence didn’t quite reflect what was hap- pening internally. Our insides and outsides, I kept say- ing, are completely out of whack—they have nothing do to with each other beyond being on opposite sides of our self. This is the true irony of it all!
I noticed that talking this way didn’t make much sense to anyone else, but was making them impa- tient. Still, there was nothing I could do to stop. I had an article to write, I had to understand the sub-
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Unfair
david stromBerg