Weltschmerz

''From a child I was under the sway of a prodigious melancholy …' Ah, what can we understand of the melancholy of Kierkegaard – of melancholy and its attendant suffering of which he says 'I was never free even for a day'? What of the 'premature aging' of the Danish philosopher that, he said, was caused by his melancholy? What of his isolation to which, he says, melancholy condemned him – 'for me there was no comfort or help to be looked for in others'?

Then, too, there was his necessary capacity to hide his melancholy; the depth of his melancholy found its correlate in what he says is the dexterity he possessed of hiding it 'under an apparent gaiety and joie de vivre'. His only joy lay in the fact that no one knew how unhappy he felt.

He would communicate nothing! He would fool them all, and not only because he wanted to spare them his wretchedness. He wanted to be 'absolutely alone with his pain', he wrote; he wanted, he said, to be 'relegated to myself and to a relationship with God'. This was why he could revel in the 'unlimited freedom of being able to deceive'.

And what about us, W. and I? Neither of us is alone with his pain, W. says. I am the cause of his pain, for one thing. And if I suffer – if I whimper, sometimes, about my manifold troubles – it only adds to his suffering, aping it, mocking it, as if W.'s Weltschmerz were on the same level as my administrative worries, which are really only the same as worries about keeping my job.

Pain, what do I know of pain? Of the pain I cause W., for example. Of the pain I cause others and for which W. has constantly to apologise. He dreams of being alone with his pain, W. says. Alone with it, relegated to himself and – perhaps – to a relationship with God. A relationship with God, and by dint of his Weltschmerz, the depth of his Weltschmertz. But then, too, he is frightened of being alone, W. says. Frightened of losing me, because he might be relegated only to his own idiocy, his Weltschmerz disappearing like morning dew.