Schopenhauer describes the following as immortal romances-Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, La Nouvelle Heloise, and Wilhelm Meister.
I wonder if you are acquainted with La Nouvelle Heloise and Wilhelm Meister.I think La Nauvelle Heloise was authored by Rousseau and Wilhelm Meister by Goethe. I think ,to a degree, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard’s lives were similar. Both had affluent fathers so they did not need to work and could devote a lot of time to writing. While Kierkegaard might appear overly religious at the first glance,he was not an optimist, or at least ,not a shallow one.
Many people use the same terms to describe quite different things. Kierkegaard used a lot of phrases which the State Church of his country must have used a lot too,but Kierkegaard was its bitter enemy( his elder brother was a pastor) and comes across as an honest thinker.
The problem is, I feel hemmed in from all sides.All I could do ,in all honesty, is to leave copious notes (anonymously) and hide them somewhere just like some of the gulag victims appear to have done. I can very easily relate to what Solzhenitsyn has to say.
Most people assume the gulags could only be found now in the dustbin of history. But the truth is, I am living in one, every single day.
Today, in the afternoon, I was doing something in the office that was distasteful to me and yet had to be done and I thought about Kierkegaard’s ideas,some of them, and it helped me feel better.
Words and ideas could be more intoxicating than any substance.