A few years ago, a dear friend of mine lost his wife. They had a long and tumultuous marriage. There were extended periods when my friend’s wife was in such a fury, and with some reason, that she would barely speak to him. She developed what was judged to be a terminal form of cancer. She lost her enormous energy, lived in agony, and slumped into a deep and impenetrable funk. When she was going through chemotherapy my friend dutifully and lovingly spoon-fed and bathed her. An individual of considerable persuasive power, he exhorted her not to give up. Thanks to an experimental treatment, the cancer went into remission for a time but a couple of years later it raged back. In the end, she contracted pneumonia and after a death-rattling few days, slipped into a coma-like state. My friend was bedside and had to give the order not to resuscitate.
Dealing with an emergency of my own, I could not attend the funeral in California. I called my pal of forty years and asked him how he felt. He sighed, hesitated a moment, and then he uttered the powerful and arresting truth, “She knew me . . . and she loved me.” Not, “She knew me and still loved me.” No, just, “She knew me and loved me.”
How to give, find, and accept love? What do Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky have to teach us on this triad of existential questions?
To be sure, there are different flavors of feelings that we call “love”—erotic, friendship, and familial. The Greeks distinguished between eros (erotic love), agape (selfless, sacrificial), and philos (friendship, brotherly love). With Kierkegaard, love, or rather the command to love, is central to what it means to be a Christian. Doubtless, the treatises on what Jesus meant by love could fill a floor of the Mall of America! And what about the people rushing about the Mall of America? What do they, what do we, think about love? Are the plethora of romantic comedies that we ingest any indication? Or Tinder and the matchmaking websites, many of which seem based on the premise that the search for a person to share your life with is akin to shopping for a car? We might as well have something like new car sticker sheets—Mr. or Ms. Lonelyheart is attractive, intelligent, friendly, enjoys skiing, wants to have children. You have some test drive dates and then . . . who knows? And what’s wrong with that? I’m not sure. Maybe nothing.
How to give, find, and accept love? What do Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky have to teach us on this triad of existential questions?
The existentialists were far from dewy-eyed about love. Some of these frequently sneering, wry characters outright deny the possibility that we can get outside of ourselves enough to love someone else. Not to include him among the Sartre and Camus cadre, but it was Luther’s view that human beings are by nature “curved in” on themselves and as such we find it immensely difficult to break out of the lock of our own self-love. For Luther, this inwardly directed, selfish self-love was at the dark heart of our innate sinfulness. Today, we don’t think in terms of an inward curve; instead we talk about a pandemic of narcissism, symptomized by the likes of selfies and self-promoting messages on Facebook.
To return to the existentialists, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, written and produced during the Nazi occupation, a mysterious valet escorts three characters—Garcin, Inèz, and Estelle—into a room sparsely furnished in Second Empire style. Soon enough, they realize that they have died and gone to hell. They are dumbfounded by the lack of pincers and whips, but there is a less-than-obvious rack they are to be stretched on. During their lives on earth, each of them had culled their sense of themselves from the reactions of others. There is no mirror in their living room/cell. And just as they related to others when they had breath in their lungs, each of them treats their fellow denizens of hell as objects, as mirrors to see themselves in. Because they are all after the same self-affirmation, they can’t look to their hellmates to secure their sense of identity. As the play closes, the murderer Garcin gets the idea and exclaims, “Hell is other people” because life is an endless struggle to establish yourself as a subject among others trying to do the same.
I have a tad of knowledge about the dynamic Sartre dramatized. In the mid-1980s, I used to drive a limo from Camden to Portland, Maine. Much like Newport, Rhode Island, Camden is a yachting town, popular with the fabulously wealthy. My job was to shuffle millionaires forty-five miles to the airport so they could catch their flights back to Palm Beach or wherever. One late night in the middle of the Maine woods, my Croesus of a client casually blurted out, “I am in the mood for a Mexican dinner and a margarita; can you find a place? Don’t worry, I’ll pay for your time.” Because I had another ride waiting in Portland, I could not satisfy his whim. Used to using staff to get whatever he wanted, he pouted the rest of the way and then gave me a lousy tip. Being an airport limo driver was enough to turn me into Che Guevara. Most of my customers related to me as though I were an object, maybe a rudder on their sixty-foot sloop, or at least they treated me that way until I somehow managed to sneak in the fact that I had just received my doctorate from the University of Chicago. Then the tenor of the interactions usually, though not always, shifted. Then I was no longer a thing, or to use the existentialist Ralph Ellison’s prescient words, I was no longer an “invisible man.”
Like his friend Sartre, Camus had many romances but was not exactly a romantic on the topic of love. In his twenties, Camus published The Stranger. The bestseller made Camus an instant literary insider. Set in Algeria, the protagonist Meursault lives so close to his senses that he is almost reptilian in character. Like the writer who created him, Meursault savors the sun, the sea, swimming, and also romping in bed with a former officemate named Marie. One morning after sleeping together, Marie is clad in Meursault’s pajamas. They are horsing around; Marie is giggling. Meursault recalls, “When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so. She looked sad.”
In part one of the book, Meursault is not given to introspection. It is as though he believes we are just a beach for feelings to wash over us. Some feelings last longer than others, but they come and go and don’t point to anything beyond themselves. One plausible interpretation is that Camus is intimating that the ideal of love is a Western bourgeois myth. If we were honest, we would admit that it is impossible to package and project our emotions into the future, as if to say I will feel about you in five, ten, or twenty years as I do now. Float that deflationary view of love and the frogs will start to croak about “what about commitment,” but Meursault would shrug and ask what is commitment beyond promising to feign feelings after they have disappeared? Or perhaps, promising to act lovingly after the thrill is long gone.
In his personal life, Camus was a passionate romantic, but an unfaithful partner. His first marriage ended in divorce. Camus always complained that he believed marriage to be unnatural, but he tied the knot again in 1940, this time with the French pianist Francine Faure, who gave birth to twins. Camus had many dalliances, the most famous with the Spanish-born actress Maria Casares. Francine was so troubled by his infidelities that she attempted suicide. Camus’s oblique confession of guilt is inscribed in The Fall, a mea culpa that ironically earned Camus the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, just three years before he was killed in a car crash.
Like his first literary success, The Fall is simply a portrait, or in this case a partial self-portrait, written in the form of an extended monologue. Though he bore another name earlier in life, the main character goes by the moniker Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Formally a fancy Parisian lawyer, Jean-Baptiste carries a business card that reads “Judge Penitent.” As the novel unfolds, it becomes evident that this title is a caption on Baptiste’s lascivious and egoistic behavior. One night, after enjoying a few hours between the sheets, Jean-Baptiste is walking home. He crosses a bridge and sees a titillating woman dressed in black. A second later she leaps from the bridge. Though he can hear her screams downstream, he does nothing, not even as much as reporting it to the police. Later in the text, Baptiste recalls that before the incident at the bridge, that is, the fall that is also his baptism, he might have boasted, “few creatures were more natural than I. I was altogether in harmony with life, fitting into it from top to bottom. . . . Life, its creatures and its gifts, offered themselves to me, and I accepted such marks of homage with a kindly pride. To tell the truth, just from being so fully and simply a man, I looked upon myself as something of a superman.”1 Back then, Baptiste defended the defenseless in court and helped the poor. After his awakening he realizes that even when he was engaged in ostensibly charitable works, he was always expressing his will to power, his will to be admired. As Luther might have put it, he was curved in on himself; it was always “I, I, I.”
At one level, The Fall is a reflection on the problem of guilt in a world in which there is no longer any possibility of forgiveness. Baptiste plies his lawyerly trade with criminals in a seedy sector of Amsterdam. The Judge Penitent confesses that he only confesses his sins in order to escape judgment and perhaps to induce you, his listener, to reveal your own transgressions so he can turn the tables and pass judgment on you.
The Nietzschean gospel of Jean-Baptiste is that we are so driven by the need to be in power and to escape the judgment of others that we can’t blast out of the circle of self-love. There are two characters sketched out in The Fall who might qualify as being capable of love, but to listen to Camus’s creation, one in a billion people are up to it. Forget the Christian overtones—if love is caring about someone else as you care about yourself, how many of us can rise to the task? When fortune smiles on my friends, I effuse, “I’m so happy for you,” but few and far between are the times when I can actually share in someone else’s joy.
Again, Baptiste doesn’t exactly conclude that love is impossible, but he comes close, saying, “Of course, true love is exceptional—two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity and boredom.”
As much as Camus, Sartre, and others moan about human beings, everyday people frequently lay down their lives for others, often strangers. Of course, cynics have a way of dismissing such acts of self-sacrifice. For the doubters, altruism is impossible; everything we do is motivated by self-interest. The doctor who leaves a comfy practice in Maine to serve the victims of the war in South Sudan has a selfish motive—maybe fear of guilt, maybe a desire to be a hero and become famous. Most of our actions come on the springs of a mélange of motives. You can always construct an explanation that seems to unmask the selfish aims behind supreme acts of love and self-sacrifice. Perhaps the most attractive aspect of the claim that there are no unselfish actions is that they conveniently free us from feeling duty bound to take a few steps along the same path. Oh, I would like to help you but I’m afraid that if I did, I would only be trying to assuage my own sense of guilt. Therefore, sorry, you are on your own.
But does true love really exist? You can’t see it. On that basis, faithful members of the empiricist congregation might find themselves in company with Jean-Baptiste. And yet, as cited above, Kierkegaard has a cautionary word for those whose vision of life does not extend beyond their line of vision: “If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love.”
From Kierkegaard’s vantage point, the hardheaded, probability-calculating individual who talks himself out of love has talked himself out of that which is most precious in life. Kierkegaard admonishes: “To defraud oneself of love is the most terrible, is an eternal loss, for which there is no compensation either in time or eternity.”
Sadly, on the face of it, Kierkegaard did just that—he defrauded himself of love. In one of the most poignant philosophical love stories of all time, the twenty-seven-year-old magister broke off his thirteen-month engagement with Regine Olsen, a horrendous scandal among the Copenhagen elite. Everyone, his own brother included, thought Søren was acting like a cruel cad. Regine’s father, a lawyer, made a desperate personal appeal to him to reconsider, pleading that his distraught daughter was nearly suicidal. But Kierkegaard was unrelenting, despite the fact that in his journals he wrote long, complicated entries affirming that Regine was the wife of his eternal soul, that she was the only one for him.
From Kierkegaard’s vantage point, the hardheaded, probability-calculating individual who talks himself out of love has talked himself out of that which is most precious in life.
What prompted him to make the break? He went back and forth, and round and round. In his daily notes to himself, Kierkegaard explained that he did not want to bring Regine into the profound depression that seemed to afflict all the men in his family; at other points, he intimated that it was his calling to be a religious author. Soon after he returned her ring, and hoping to help her break the tie that bound them together, Kierkegaard traveled to Berlin, where he wrote letters to his friend Emil Boesen, who was instructed to calmly circulate the fiction that Kierkegaard was sowing his wild oats. Nothing could have been further from the truth. With preternatural verve, he was attending lectures, writing his sprawling Either/Or, a raft of religious discourses, and beginning work on the classic Fear and Trembling.
A couple of years after the breakup, Regine recovered and married. Mortal that the literary immortal was, Kierkegaard was furious at the news. Still, he always retained his love for his former fiancée, sending her vellum copies of all his books. He even approached her husband, Fritz Schlegel, asking him if it might be possible that he reenter into a friendship with the now Fru Schlegel. The husband refused.
Of course, a therapist would have told Kierkegaard to move on. But Kierkegaard believed that once you declare someone to be your eternal love, you need to keep that love alive, to “keep the wound open.” This, of course, rings highly neurotic to our ears, but perhaps that is because we misunderstand love.
By the end of his short life, Kierkegaard was estranged from his only surviving brother and most of his friends. So why should we turn to the man who became a veritable recluse for wisdom on love? Perhaps because the reason Kierkegaard was alien to everyone is that he loved his friends and fellow Danes enough to tell them what they would have preferred not to hear.
On the surface, this vignette will seem remote from the issue of love, but not so. One afternoon, when I was a graduate student, I floated into Professor Rieff’s office, proudly announcing that an essay of mine had just been accepted for publication in a top-flight journal. “Well done,” said Professor Rieff, and then he began chiding me, saying that I smelled like ambition and that if I wanted to be a writer I should go and be a writer rather than trying to secure a faculty position. Rieff lectured that most professors were too narcissistic to be the authority figures they needed to be. Rather than confront a student about his or her manners or intellectual progress, he told me, most academicians would prefer to keep things quiet so as to be left in peace to write their next forgettable article. Who needs the conflict?
Rieff practiced what he preached, telling me in no uncertain terms that, despite my impending scholarly publication, I wasn’t progressing as much as he would have liked. He ended our meeting with a hand on my shoulder and a stern look in the eye, saying, “Gordon, if you really care about your students, you will tell them the messy truths, even if it makes them angry.”
That is how I like to think the critic Kierkegaard regarded his relationship to Danish society. By expounding on his understanding of the New Testament, Kierkegaard reminds his increasingly secularized fellow Danes that they—and we—have been commanded by God to love. He hints that the notion of love as a duty is so alien to our natural way of thinking that it is unlikely that any human being could have ever come up with such a bizarre idea. It had to be God.
Works of Love is rife with observations that challenge our assumptions about love. For instance, Kierkegaard articulates the austere idea that preferential love, loving someone for the qualities they possess—a curvaceous figure, a razor-sharp intellect, wit, or whatever—or because they are blood related is at bottom an expression of self-love. You love them either as an extension of yourself or because they fulfill some deep-seated desires. Preferential love comes easy to anyone with even a dab of humanity. Murderous mobsters love their children and their pals. There is nothing special about being able to love and make sacrifices for people you identify with, like your children. Beyond pushing us to reevaluate some of the forms of love that come so naturally, much of Works of Love is devoted to, well, the works of love. According to Kierkegaard, one of these works is nothing other than the strange duty to presuppose love in others; that is, in opposition to Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche, Kierkegaard believes that we are duty bound to presuppose an essential ability to love in everyone, not only in people we feel simpatico toward but also in those whom we cut across the street to avoid.
I have an inkling of what this work might be like. It was the first faculty meeting of the year, one that nearly everyone attends. I glanced up at a colleague with whom I have had some heated battles. Hate might be too strong a term; then again, maybe not. We have been fellow teachers for twenty years, but like high school kids, we don’t say hello to each other when we cross paths. That day, when I saw my academic archenemy, I was suddenly wrapped in a waft of warmth and good will. Almost automatically, I smiled and my hand flashed up in a friendly wave. Shocked, my less than friend jerked his hand up in a return half-wave but then pulled his paw back and looked the other way. For a few ticks, the animus and dissimilarity between us vanished. It hit me that we were just two struggling and bumbling human beings.
According to Kierkegaard, one of these works is nothing other than the strange duty to presuppose love in others; that is, in opposition to Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche, Kierkegaard believes that we are duty bound to presuppose an essential ability to love in everyone, not only in people we feel simpatico toward but also in those whom we cut across the street to avoid.
On Kierkegaard’s reading, the injunction to love one another has everything to do with the fact that in God’s eyes we are all equal. Kierkegaard writes:
Dissimilarity is temporality’s method of confusing that marks every human being differently, but the neighbor is eternity’s mark—on every human being. Take many sheets of paper, write something different on each one; then no one will be like another. But then again take each single sheet; do not let yourself be confused by the diverse inscriptions, hold it up to the light, and you will see a common watermark on all of them. In the same way the neighbor is the common watermark.2
As earlier noted, one sign of the fallenness of this world is our addiction to our differences. I have known students to land fellowships and get accepted to elite programs and soon enough they are eager to find out how many others were shut out at the door. The more that are rejected the better they feel about themselves. Kierkegaard maintained that we are so attached to comparisons and our differences that we take them into the cemetery, with the big shots getting large monuments and maybe even a small chain-link fence to keep the hoi polloi out of their eternal resting place. Kierkegaard professed that when it comes to the spiritual life and to love we see best when our eyes are tightly shut and we are blind to the differences between ourselves and our neighbor. Closing our lids illuminates the watermark of the only true equality, equality before God.
Kierkegaard would wryly smile that my experience at the faculty meeting was a passing mood, something that “happened to me.” It was not a love grounded in a sense of duty. I suspect the reductionists would say the same, that I was experiencing some sort of neurochemical rainbow. The surge of fellow feeling was, in fact, so out of the ordinary that for a moment I wondered if something might be wrong, that maybe the sudden and strange feeling was an insight granted just before my lights were going out, a peek given to punish me with the thought—“this is the kind of person you could have been!” In the end, maybe it is best to think of such heart-opening moments as affective internal landmarks that we can remember and strive to climb back to.
One of the cavils that I have with Kierkegaard’s otherwise rich, illuminating interpretation of love is that he may have given a cold shoulder to the feeling aspect of love. Kierkegaard describes love as a duty, a passion, a need, but tenderness is certainly not foremost in his analysis. Any account of love that excludes tenderness is lacking. Kant, the Socrates of the Enlightenment, contended that when Jesus commanded love, he could not have meant much more than being respectful and helpful to others because, pace Kant, love considered as a feeling can’t be commanded. After all, you cannot will an emotion. To Kant’s point, I may put on my boots and gloves and help my irascible neighbor shovel her snow, but I can’t will myself to feel warmly toward the icy woman who scolds kids when they scamper across her yard. And yet, both the existentialists and the American pragmatists opined that we can do more than we might think to nudge our emotions in directions we would like them to go.
If a primary aim in life is to develop into a caring and connected human being (admittedly a big if), rather than, say, thinking of oneself as a tourist collecting as many pleasant and fulfilling experiences as possible, then surely a capacity for loving feelings must play a role. Of course, that softening of the heart does not guarantee our humanity. After all, Hitler teared up over his pooch. Maybe Genghis Khan did the same over his horses. Still, an otherwise upright person who could walk by a little girl greeting her soldier dad coming home from war without heat coming to the cheeks is missing something. The person stopped in their tracks by the sight of a hunched, old woman, bags in hands, waiting in a thick snowfall to be picked up from a shopping trip might be in a better spiritual place than those of us marching with our heads down, consumed with the pressing problem of how we can get some work in after dinner and still catch the next episode of Game of Thrones.
Any account of love that excludes tenderness is lacking.
Most members of the Socrates guild, most who identify themselves as philosophers, begin inquiries with a search for a definition. But as previously noted, the perturbations of the inner world are difficult to speak readily about or distinguish from one another without the use of metaphors. The idea of tenderness usually calls to mind a softening of the inner self. The ancient Greeks, who understood psychological matters in terms of the elements, believed that too much Spartan tough-guy training literally desiccated the soul, rendering it hard and insensitive. For them, tenderness would have involved a moistening of the psyche and an opening up to the impingement of the outer world. When we say that an injury is tender, we mean that it is hypersensitive to the touch. In moments of tenderness, it is as though the ego and all its machinations momentarily melt away so that our feelings are heightened and we are moved by the impulse to reach out with a comforting hand.
For raw-edged instance a few years ago, my wife, Susan, and I were involved in a frightful car crash in the frozen tundra of the Minnesota countryside. After the collision, and looking down into her fluttering eyes, I held my emotions in check as the EMTs strapped her to a board for a helicopter ride to the trauma center in Minneapolis. But then I glanced at my twentysomething son, who had raced to the scene. I glimpsed his cheeks working with love and fear for his mom, as he tried to keep his inner universe intact. The sight of him undid me. In a tsunami of affection, all my stoicism and calm reason began to fly with the geese winging overhead.
When we say that an injury is tender, we mean that it is hypersensitive to the touch. In moments of tenderness, it is as though the ego and all its machinations momentarily melt away so that our feelings are heightened and we are moved by the impulse to reach out with a comforting hand.
The most famous philosophical meditation on love is Plato’s Symposium. Few women populate the Platonic dialogues, but here Socrates attests that he absorbed his lessons on love from the priestess Diotima, who taught him that love is a cupid-like desire for the beautiful. All of us are steeped with an intuition that possessing the beautiful will ensure happiness. According to Diotima, we begin spellbound by the beauty of the physical form, then, if and when we mature, we are attracted first to the loveliness of the virtuous soul, and then to the beauty of laws that nurture souls.
My Diotima, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, brilliantly articulates the unexpected problem of accepting love. In The Idiot, an astounding portrait of Jesus, Dostoyevsky hints at the brow-raising position that facing the ultimate truth does not demand mental health but a pathological state of mind. More bluntly stated, you have to be crazy to handle the truth.
Dostoyevsky easily fulfilled his own requirement. He was highly neurotic, and given all that he endured, it is no wonder. He was born in Moscow in 1821. An engineer, Dostoyevsky served in the army. Afterward, he became involved with a group of idealists whose aim was to topple the Czar and democratize the Russian government. In 1849, the Czarist police arrested Dostoyevsky and other members of the group. After languishing in prison for months, Dostoyevsky and some of his comrades were taken by wagon, dressed in white cloth, tied to a stake, and asked to kiss the cross in preparation for execution. Just before they were to be shot, amid drum rolls, the execution was called off. His sentence was commuted to four years in prison in Siberia, followed by four years of military service.
After he was released from custody, Dostoyevsky’s beloved brother Mikhail died, and he took on the financial responsibilities of his sibling’s sizeable family. Dostoyevsky made his daily bread as an author, but because of his pressing financial responsibilities, he was always forced to sell the rights to future works at low rates just to make ends meet. He was severely epileptic, and just when the publishers were pounding at his door, he would often suffer a seizure that erased the memory of the plot he was constructing. As his second wife and secretary, Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevsky, remembers, a few days before an installment was due and the creditors were about to start carting off the furniture, Dostoyevsky would pace the floors of his apartment dictating the likes of what might be the greatest novel ever written, The Brothers Karamazov.
Given his horrific prison experiences, captured in The House of the Dead, the themes that occupied Dostoyevsky’s real and imagined life were insults, humiliation, and moral self-degradation. In 1864, Dostoyevsky penned one of the nastiest satires in history, Notes from Underground. On reading the text, one Russian critic wrote a review, reasonably titled “A Cruel Talent.” This novella is in part a rebuttal to Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? In his novel, the optimist reformer Chernyshevsky contends that with the right sociopolitical arrangements, human beings would cease eviscerating one another and live together in peace and harmony.
Dostoyevsky’s novel is like the two books by Camus we have addressed, a parody in the form of a portrait. At one level, it is an argument that no amount of political, economic, or social engineering will deliver us from ourselves. On Dostoyevsky’s reckoning, human beings are spiders, ungrateful bipeds who would prefer expressing their will to power even at the cost of their own happiness. You could read Notes from Underground as supporting the psychological thesis captured in the story of Genesis: If we were in Eden, we would follow Adam’s lead and turn paradise upside down into an eventual Auschwitz.
Dostoyevsky’s chief character is a former clerk who, through a meager inheritance, has just enough money to retire early. Socrates commanded, “Know thyself.” Dostoyevsky and others in the existential tradition were taken up with the question of whether or not we can know ourselves without faith in God. The book is written from the narrator’s standpoint of someone looking back across forty years. The Underground Man wants to see if he can be totally honest with himself. This project entails retrieving the memory of a choice that seems to have determined the course of his life.
Like tenderness, awkwardness is a theme that philosophers have placed in a forgotten file cabinet. Still, if you want to prepare someone for life, it would be good to remind them that life is replete with awkward situations: responding to friends who are deep in grief, bumping into people you have to pretend you are friends with when you have nothing to say to one another. Dostoyevsky is the Rembrandt and Mozart of those lip-twitching scenes. In part two of the novella, the Underground Man recollects forcing an invite to a send-off party for a rich army captain and former schoolmate named Zverkov. Much like Dostoyevsky himself, the Underground Man is umbrageous, always given to causing scenes. Though it is evident that no one wants him there, he manages to get himself included in the party. In a Freudian slip, one of the other celebrants tells him that the soiree is an hour earlier than it is. By the time the party arrives at the restaurant, the Underground Man is in a high dudgeon. After irritating the group with his snide and condescending remarks, everyone takes to ignoring him. He gets the hint, but out of stubbornness and spite the Underground Man refuses to excuse himself. Instead, he retreats to a nearby table, where he drinks himself into a besotted state and an emotional lather. Finally, when the party is about to disperse and the guests are offering tributes, our friend insists on making a toast in which he insults Zverkov, the guest of honor. A tissue of contradictions, the Underground Man tries to make amends. Zverkov interrupts and contemptuously replies that the Underground Man is a bug, too far beneath him to be taken seriously. “Insulted me?” says Zverkov. “You? In-sul-ted me? My dear sir, I want you to know that never, under any circumstances, could you possibly insult me!”
Far past midnight, the partiers rush off to a brothel. A virtuoso of self-humiliation, our antihero borrows money from a disdainful acquaintance and hires a sled to take him to the house of ill-repute, where he is intent on slapping Zverkov’s face. By the time he arrives, however, the revelers have left and he is unable to slake his burning thirst for revenge. Still, a line of prostitutes wait in front of him, so he makes an arrangement with a girl named Liza. A couple of hours after having sex, he begins to work at his real thrill, toying with the young girl’s mind. The Underground Man recalls:
My mind was in a daze. It was as though something were hanging over me, provoking, agitating, and disturbing me. . . . A dismal thought was conceived in my brain and spread throughout my whole body like a nasty sensation, such as one feels upon entering a damp, moldy underground cellar.3
A conversation begins. At first Liza responds mordantly to his expressions of interest and his tragic, half-made-up tale about the recent death and burial of another prostitute from a business down the street. Gradually, he gains Liza’s trust with stories of the familial life she is depriving herself of. Surprised at his own feeling, the game continues. In a long-inspired speech, he calls Liza’s father and mother to mind. In touching detail, the Underground Man describes the joys of motherhood that she will be missing out on, a baby breastfeeding, “the chubby, rosy little baby sprawls and snuggles; his little hands and feet are plump; his little nails are clean and tiny . . . his little eyes look as if he already understood everything. As he suckles, he tugs at your breast playfully.”4 Impassioned, the Underground Man prattles on. The Muse is with him; he gives the speech of his life.
Silence follows as he waits for Liza’s response. One of the fears that the Underground Man harbors about himself is that he is a pretentious pate whose life is fashioned from novels. After listening to him, Liza stumbles a bit, then somewhat sarcastically blurts out that his tirade sounds like a book. Decades down the line, he recalls, “Her remark wounded me dreadfully. That’s not what I expected. . . . ‘Just you wait,’ I thought.” Revenge will be his.
The ideas are whips, but the writing is ethereal. As the sun begins to rise, the Underground Man prepares to leave. Impulsively, he scribbles his address down and invites Liza to visit him at his home, an invitation which he immediately knows is a mistake.
Four days later he is disgruntled and disheveled, embattled in a loud and ugly fray with his irksome housekeeper. There is a knock at the door. It’s Liza. Our man is in a fury and wrapped in a dirty yellow bathrobe. No longer looking like a savior, he is frothing with ire at Liza for catching him in this compromised state. By sitting with her for five minutes without uttering a word, he makes the situation as tortuously uncomfortable as possible for her. Eventually, he boils over into a confession to Liza that he was just using her to vent his anger and slake his thirst for revenge. He hisses, “I’d been humiliated, and I wanted to humiliate someone else.”5
Shaking, he continues: “The fact that I’d appeared to you then as such a hero, and that now you’d suddenly see me in this torn dressing gown, dilapidated and revolting. . . . By now surely even you’ve guessed that I’ll never forgive you for having come upon me in this dressing gown.”
Amazingly, Liza is not repulsed by the tirade. As he weeps and rants, she recognizes him for the unhappy and angry man that he is. More than that, she knows that even though the Underground Man believes he was just playing with her, there were earnest feelings as well. She responds to his attack by putting her arms around his neck and crying with him. Sobbing, the Underground Man buries his head in the sofa. Then comes one of the most deliciously sinister passages in literature:
But the trouble was that my hysterics had to end sometime. And so . . . lying there on the sofa and pressing my face firmly into that nasty leather cushion of mine, I began to sense gradually, distantly, involuntarily, but irresistibly, that it would be awkward for me to raise my head and look Liza straight in the eye. What was I ashamed of? I don’t know, but I was ashamed . . . precisely because I felt too ashamed to look at her, that another feeling was suddenly kindled and burst into flame in my heart—the feeling of domination and possession. My eyes gleamed with passion; I pressed her hands tightly. How I hated her and felt drawn to her simultaneously!6
The combination of attraction and repulsion echoes Kierkegaard’s recipe for anxiety. The Underground Man cryptically cries out, “I want to be good but they won’t let me.” Part of him hungers for Liza’s love, but he can’t accept it because that would mean feeling as though he were on a lower plane. He bolts out of the room and leaves Liza sitting alone. Discomfiting minutes tick by with poor Liza sitting there in a daze. Finally, he taps on the screen indicating that she should leave. With a very sad countenance, she gathers up her things and says goodbye. A study in moral self-degradation, the Underground Man grabs her hand and places a five-ruble note in her palm.
Liza flies out the door into the snow-slanting late afternoon, gone forever. As usual, the Underground Man has third thoughts, calls to Liza, and dashes out after her, but she is gone, and so is his singular chance at real love. Back at his apartment, he espies the crumpled-up five-ruble note. This was the memory, the memory that haunted the Underground Man for forty years, and yet, even after that expanse of time, he fails to grasp that it was his pride that defrauded him of being able to accept love.
To return to the tale that began this chapter, for all their marital strife, in the end, my bereft widower friend was able to accept being loved as the imperfect human being he knew himself to be when the doors were closed and the shades drawn. Despite the pain he caused her, his wife loved him, not some idealized version of him.
Perhaps as a way of defending ourselves against our own doubts and inner voices, many of us hanker for admiration. We yearn to be desired, valued. We want to be loved as the people we aspire and perhaps imagine ourselves to be, not the flesh-and-blood fallible creatures that we are. Being loved for the sometimes kind and at other times tantrum-throwing child that we might be feels too much like pity, like forgiveness. Liza is, of course, a Christ-like figure, and one of the messages in this brutal book seems to be that pride impedes our ability to accept Christ’s love and forgiveness. Both Nietzsche and Freud counted Dostoyevsky among the greatest psychologists in history. According to Dostoyevsky, if there is one thing that will drive a person to distraction, it is being forgiven. I know this to be true from both ends of the experience.
We want to be loved as the people we aspire and perhaps imagine ourselves to be, not the flesh-and-blood fallible creatures that we are. Being loved for the sometimes kind and at other times tantrum-throwing child that we might be feels too much like pity, like forgiveness.
When I was a boy, my father would come home from his club late, having had two too many martinis, and go on a rampage. Maybe I was six at the time. Up until then I had slumbered through my father’s rants. One night I woke up to a new and terrifying reality of the house being torn apart. Back then, my dad was my buddy and hero. In between rounds of their battle, my mother came upstairs, wiped my tears away, and tried to comfort me, saying, “All daddies get drunk sometime.” My mother didn’t drink, and she wasn’t one to back down from a fight. At a lull in the strife, I crept downstairs and up to my father. It was dark. I had never seen him look so disheveled. He put his hand on my head and said, “Get back to bed.” I didn’t move but softly said, “It’s okay, all daddies get drunk sometime.” In my own little boy way, I was saying, “I know you and love you.” He pushed me across the room and I beat it back upstairs with a disappointment long in dissipating.
But I have shuffled in my father’s shoes as well. A few years back, I started a loud and embarrassing squabble with my wife at my son’s wedding reception. Up until that moment it had been a glorious day. Really, the perfect wedding. But beer, coupled with my overheated brain, brought a piece of me to the surface that had been submerged for decades. Before I knew it, I was red-faced and angrily screaming, enough that my other son had to pull me aside. The next day, I could not look myself in the mirror. At breakfast, one of my boys put his hand on my shoulder and out of nowhere quietly said, “Don’t worry about last night, pops.” I was silent for a moment, then hissed, “There is nothing I need to worry about, thank you.” “All right,” he said, withdrawing his palm from this Underground Man’s shoulder and walking away.
My sons saw a side of me that I imagined had long ago vanished. I initially resented being seen soul naked. Nevertheless, I am many things but no Underground Man. A few minutes later, I came to my senses, threaded my arm around him, and, kid-like, rested my head on his shoulder—tearfully whispering, “I am so damn sorry.”
Kierkegaard taught that Jesus’s love commandment, namely, love thy neighbor as thyself, first and foremost requires proper self-love. This nonnarcissist caring relationship to the self is remote from the vanity and self-obsession that we tend to equate with self-love.
Over the course of my life, I have suffered through seemingly endless orgies of self-hatred. During those horrid spells, I would usually manage to go through the right motions, give due thanks and warm hugs to people who stood steadfastly by me. Nevertheless, I did not really appreciate or appropriate their love. In fact, as though they had been duped, I would often wonder, What is it with these people? Why would they want anything to do with me? For lack of proper self-love, the frothing fury in the furnace of my depression had me convinced that at heart and at bottom, I was a nasty Underground Man, and if the people around me only realized that, they would not be around me for very long.
Pardon the repeats and what rings of a sermon, but it is paradoxical: we need the love of others to love ourselves, but in order to be nurtured by the love of others, we need to love ourselves sufficiently to accept that love. Though it would take us far beyond the parameters of this chapter, herein lies part of the poison of racism and oppression. They profoundly damage a person’s ability to love themselves.
Earlier in this chapter, I mined Kierkegaard’s insight that the duty and work of love is to presuppose love—not just the love in others, but perhaps above all, the love in ourselves. Had he done that work, Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man might have been able to let Liza hold and comfort him. He might have ceased being the Underground Man.