Sighs that sound like music

A Danish writer who died in 1855, and who never saw the inside of a meeting, opens one of his books with a question that belongs in one. “What is a poet? An unhappy man who conceals profound anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so fashioned that when sighs and groans pass over them they sound like beautiful music.”11Either/Or (1843), the “Diapsalmata”, in Lee M. Hollander’s Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard (University of Texas, 1923), the one English Kierkegaard in the public domain: Project Gutenberg #60333. Hollander’s wording is a century old; the Hongs and Hannay translate the passage differently. Then he says what happens next. People flock about the poet and say: do sing again. Which means, he says, would that new sufferings tormented your soul; your cries would only terrify us, but your music is delightful.

Anyone who has sat in the rooms long enough has heard the poet share. He is good at it. He has the vocabulary, the pauses, the line that gets the nod around the table. The room thanks him. And he drives home with the thing he came in with, because what he gave the room was music, and the music was made precisely so that nobody would hear the sigh underneath it.

The Book’s word for him

The Book does not say poet. It says actor:

More than most people, the alcoholic leads a double life. He is very much the actor. To the outer world he presents his stage character. This is the one he likes his fellows to see. He wants to enjoy a certain reputation, but knows in his heart he doesn’t deserve it.

BB p.73 ¶1

That paragraph sits in the middle of the Fifth Step for a reason. The step is the one place the program will not accept a performance. “We think we have done well enough in admitting these things to ourselves. There is doubt about that. In actual practice, we usually find a solitary self-appraisal insufficient.” BB p.72 ¶2 A good share is a solitary self-appraisal with an audience. It is still solitary.

And the Book is blunt about the cost, in the first paragraph of the chapter everyone can recite: the people who do not recover are those who “cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.” BB p.58 ¶1 The poet is not a liar. He is a man who has found a way to tell the truth so well that it stops costing him anything.

What takes the place of the music

One person, and plain words. Not the room. The Book has us pick the person with care and then stop choosing our phrasing: “We pocket our pride and go to it, illuminating every twist of character, every dark cranny of the past.” BB p.75 ¶2 The sentence after that is the one the poet has never had: “Once we have taken this step, withholding nothing, we are delighted. We can look the world in the eye. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease.” BB p.75 ¶2

Kierkegaard ends his paragraph on the poet with a line that reads like a man leaving a meeting to make a phone call. He would rather, he says, be a swineherd on Amager and be understood by the swine than a poet and misunderstood by men.22Same page. The swineherd line closes the aphorism; the critic, who “resembles a poet as one pea another” except that he has no anguish and no music, comes just before it. Amager is the flat island south of Copenhagen where the city kept its vegetable gardens. It is not a glamorous place to be understood. It is only a real one.

So the question for the end of a day is not whether you shared well. It is whether there was one person today who got the sigh instead of the music.