Denmark: Finding Kierkegaard in Copenhagen

When I was in my twenties I thought I might be, or become, an American Kierkegaard. (Check out the archival photo of me and my buddies on Gettysburg College's commencement day 1971.) I read all of the Danish philosopher’s works that had been translated into English and, on the way to earning a Ph.D. in Religion and Culture, I once wrote an illustrated, thesis-length essay about Kierkegaard’s own Master’s thesis, in a Kierkegaardian style.

I admired the way Soren Kierkegaard (SK) combined religious thought and creative writing, and how he used pseudonyms to explore certain types of lifestyles and to distinguish particular intellectual points of view. Always, his audience was “that solitary individual.” Everything SK wrote was designed to turn people inward, to challenge them to think for themselves, and to help them become nothing less than the individuals they determined to be.

So I was delighted, when Jan and I got to Copenhagen, to learn that its municipal museum has put up an exhibition devoted to Kierkegaard: “Works of Life, Works of Love,” after the title of one of Kierkegaard’s collections of “edifying discourses.” The central piece in this exhibition is the diamond ring that SK had given his fiancée, Regine Olsen. After he terminated their engagement, and the ring was returned, Kierkegaard had the five diamonds fashioned into a cross, which he wore himself, "even unto death."

Soren Kierkegaard decided that he could not—or should not—marry. In part he feared that he would die before he turned 34 (as his mother and five of his siblings did). In part he felt that he was so homely, and melancholic, as to not deserve another’s love. But in larger part, SK determined that the intellectual project he envisioned would require so much effort, and such singularity of focus, that he could not make room in his life for anything, or anyone, else. Kierkegaard’s “authorship” thus became the cross for which, and on which, this remarkable individual suffered and died (at age 42, not 32)—for love, of a very particular (though, perhaps, a very peculiar) sort.

As I stood beside Kierkegaard’s writing desk, and looked at some of his cups and saucers (none of which matched, according to his preference for the individual in contradistinction to any collection or system), I appreciated again what Kierkegaard lived, worked, and died for. But visiting this museum exhibition with Jan made me keenly aware that in the conduct of my own life I made quite a different choice, or series of choices, than Kierkegaard did in his.

Had I been (or become) an American Kierkegaard, I would no doubt have produced, by now, a much larger output of creative and intellectual work than I can presently show for myself: one full-length play with music, 60 or 70 songs and other musical compositions, a hundred or so recorded saxophone performances, a handful rather than an armload of academic monographs (most unpublished), and one hefty dissertation (with limited audience appeal).

Had I devoted myself to an “authorship,” as SK did, what would I have today, in addition that body of work? No life’s partner. No children. No friends. Probably no saxophones. No former students. No money. No thanks.

The “existential” choices I made led to a different path—a shared path—not the path Kierkegaard walked alone. Nevertheless, the way I chose to live has demanded its own “purity of heart” and has yielded its own harvest of wisdom, fulfillment and “joyous suffering”—although, I admit, not too much solitariness and very little genius. My chosen path has led to ample and sometimes abundant love, occasional sacrifices, but no celebrity—and certainly no cross, either to bear or to wear!

Each day Jan and I were in Copenhagen I walked the city’s streets, as Kierkegaard himself did for two or three hours on most days of his life. It was touching to be walking alone in thought, seeing some of what my former intellectual hero must have seen, in much the same way as he must have seen it. But after a week of walking and reflecting in Copenhagen, I confess that the work of love, in my life, took me down a road somewhat more traveled. And that has made all the difference.

Who needed another “American Kierkegaard” anyway? Henry Thoreau had already played that role, and rather well indeed!

P.S. If you would like to read a little more about Kierkegaard, you could do worse than to start with a short essay by the late British writer and television commentator, Malcom Muggeridge (1903-1990): 
http://www.plough.com/en/articles/2010/january/the-oddest-prophet-søren-kierkegaard

England: Our English Spring

Jan and I had a wonderful time in England during the first weeks of April. I (Jim) first came to England in 1969 to attend the University of Bristol for a year. I know, only too well, just how inhospitable the “English spring” can be. Yet on this latest trip the sun shone on us every day.

I arrived from Chicago a day before Jan, and her mom Jo, arrived from Durham. The plan was for me to get a good night’s sleep in order to meet their flight at 7:00 AM, pick up a rental car, and drive us all down to Portsmouth, where Jan was to be one of the plenary speakers for the Lactation Consultants of Great Britain’s annual conference.

Everything "went to plan,” as the Brits say. Our flat in Gosport (a short ferry ride from Portsmouth) had to be changed to accommodate Jan’s walking difficulty. But—“no worries”—our hosts moved us to their other, six-bedroom, property. Here all the rooms we needed were on the ground floor (what they call the First Floor), and lots of others rooms we didn’t need were perched above, on the upper two floors of this converted dairy.

Jan could not believe that EVERYTHING went wrong with her technology in the UK. Minutes before she was to speak, her PowerPoint refused to load due to a corrupt file, and we had to go with an earlier version, on my computer. The same problem persisted on the second day, when I took Jo out for a tour of Portsmouth. The iPad (which we rely on for GPS), and sometimes our mobile phone, also failed to thrive! But—“no worries”—I saw most of Jan’s presentations at the LCGB conference, and they were very well received. In the end she had the largest turnout of all the speakers, and audiences (the full group was 140) seemed to be very engaged.

As Jan attended and presented lactation workshops, Jo and I investigated both the remarkable naval history of Portsmouth and the birthplace of Charles Dickens, where role-players brought his era to life. Jan’s conference was held at the John Pounds Centre. John Pounds, we learned, was a cobbler turned philanthropist, who sought to lift up the poor Portsmouth neighborhood into which he was born by establishing “ragged schools” for working class children. Dickens would have been proud!

In our travels around Portsmouth and Gosport, Jo and I toured the Besty Rose, King Henry VIII’s flagship (recently raised after 400 years on the sea bottom), Nelson’s flagship Victory (which carried its deceased captain/hero home from Trafalgar, pickled in a cask of brandy), a nineteenth-century iron warship (the HMS Warrior), and a twentieth-century submarine.

After Portsmouth the three of us moved west to Southampton. We toured nearby Manor Farm, which several years ago hosted a BBC team that documented the life of the British farmers who saved Britons from starvation or malnutrition during World War II by doubling the output of British agriculture.

This highly engaging program, Wartime Farm, has proved to be one of the BBC’s most surprisingly popular shows in recent years. In it, an historian and two archaeologists show what farm families did to return idle acreage to production and to improvise, economize, and revolutionize their way to victory on the home front. Jan and Jo and I thoroughly enjoyed watching every episode of this series, and we sent the DVDs home to our farmer son, Dave.

After emergency visits to the Apple and Vodafone stores at a fancy new shopping center in Southampton, we made our way to the Isle of Wight. I was especially touched to be here at age 64. Do you recall the lyrics of the Beatles’ tribute to what used to be the British retirement age? The song expresses the hope that one might afford to retire in this British version of paradise. We all came to appreciate the basis for this fond hope as Jan, Jo and I wandered the pastures, villages, and woodlands of this charming and historic island.

How delightful to find sunny, pleasant accommodation on a working farm! We took pleasure in the daily habits and forays of the sheep and lambs, pigs and llamas, ducks, geese, chickens and horses. I took a walk up a steep hill to survey the surrounding countryside from an obelisk marker placed in 1744. All of us enjoyed the thatch-roof houses in “our” village of Godshill, where we enjoyed a proper English “cream tea” our last afternoon there.

On Good Friday we drove back to London, where we saw The Book of Mormon. This award-winning show got mixed, but generally “thumbs-down,” reviews from us. The language was offensively salty, and the writers mocked both Mormon and Ugandan beliefs, even though, in the end, all the characters ended up better than they began. Jo loved the young male dancers. (“I’ve never seen more than one or two boys in a show before who could really dance. But every one of these boys was GREAT!”) I appreciated the production and score details, and was interested, as a student of religion and culture, in the plot and theme. Jan wished we had gone to Lion King!

Jo flew safely back home to Durham on Saturday, while Jan and I moved on to Copenhagen where this year’s European Lactation Consultants (ELACTA) conference will be held in a few days. We look forward to seeing two HUG friends there: Barb Glare from Australia, and Min-Sung from Korea. And we also look forward to seeing family and friends back in England, when we return there in June and July.

New Zealand: Living in a Postcard!

After five weeks here it’s become easy to feel at home in New Zealand. Everywhere we go we encounter beautiful landscapes, friendly people, clean and usually picturesque towns and cities, well-preserved historic homes and public buildings of the style we love most (Victorian and Edwardian), excellent local food and produce, and an un-crowded, un-hurried pace of life. Jan says she feels like she is always IN a postcard!

Jan attended the New Zealand Lactation Consultants annual conference in Auckland and offered an all-day HUG Your Baby workshop that was exceptionally well received. She also met with Plunket nurses and educators in Dunedin, Wellington and Auckland, and spoke at a nursing school in Nelson, where I had the pleasure of going on a country “tramp” with David Mitchell, an experienced nurse educator who has done some excellent research on working with fathers.

Our “needs priorities” in terms of accommodation have gotten clearer to us as we travel. We need a “cooker and frig,” as we mostly cook for ourselves. Because we seldom rent a car, a decent grocery store must be walking distance from our place. We need a good Internet connection, something easier said than accomplished in many of the places we have stayed before we got to New Zealand. We’ve also found that we need two separate rooms, so that one of us doesn’t wake up the other when arising in the middle of the night to work or read. We like to have a bathroom with a tub, as Jan likes to soak. It’s a real plus when the place we stay has a gym for me.

We prefer to stay put for at least a week at a time, place our clothes into drawers and closets, and pack away our suitcases. For people who have devoted so much time, through the years, to homemaking, it takes surprisingly little to satisfy our sense of "home" on this trip. We spend a full day, at least five days a week, keeping up with HUG Your Baby projects and correspondence, as well as managing our travel plans and expenses. Jim always goes out for walks and exercise, but some days Jan never goes out at all because there is so much HUG business to manage. She can lose track of time, immersed in the work she loves.

We enjoyed visiting Friends Meetings in New Zealand. For a week we stayed in the Wellington Friends Centre’s fellowship hall, with a piano and full kitchen. We didn’t (much) mind putting away our beds (from their place on the floor) when gatherings were planned. We also attended Meeting in Nelson and in Auckland. In Nelson we were delighted to meet Joe and Beth Volk, who used to live in Durham when Joe had his office, as a field worker for the AFSC, in the Meeting House. Small world! Beth and Joe are traveling like us—but their retirement travels are planned to last TWO years! You can follow their blog. We were not able to make it to the Friends Settlement at Whanganui. But visiting that former Friends School will give us something to do when we come back again, one day. Hopefully by then the Friends Meeting in Christchurch will have risen from the rubble of the 2011 earthquake and the muck of this week’s flood.

As we travel I've been reading quite a bit. Most of my choices are travel-related. In New Zealand I read both of Eleanor Catton’s novels. She is awesome! The Rehearsal is a contemporary study of girls in high school, saxophone music and theater arts, and betrayals of trust. The Luminaries recently won the Man Booker Prize and is a big and beautifully constructed novel set in the days of the New Zealand gold rush. It's written in a glorious nineteenth-century style. As we leave, he’s finishing up James Belich’s fascinating, scholarly study, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century.

Jim has also enjoyed researching and writing the music for the HUG lullabies we are writing together. Tony Bowman is producing and recording them in North Carolina. We’ve learned as much as we could about Maori childbirth practices to include in our NZ lullaby. New Zealand has some great museums and collections to draw upon. We especially enjoyed Te Papa in Wellington, and the War Memorial Museum and city Art Gallery in Auckland.

Today we reach a natural “half time” break in our travels. Our next stop on the HUG Your Baby “international teaching tour” is the UK in April. Today, on Jonathan’s birthday, we fly from Auckland to San Francisco. It is about as cheap to go from NZ to UK via North America as via Dubai. So we will see sister Nancy and her family in California. (It will be a LONG day! Because of the mysteries of the International Date Line, we arrive in SFO BEFORE we leave AUK!)

We had to miss Nancy and KB’s wedding at the end of last year because of our travels, and now we can celebrate properly with them! After California Jan will fly to Durham to pick up her mom and bring her London, while Jim will spend a week with Dave in Chicago before flying to Heathrow.

This blog will resume in Europe. HUG Your Baby presentations are planned for April and May at conferences in Portsmouth, England; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Bologna, Italy. We will see Nancy and Kathryn, and Dave Smith and Susan Strozier, in England, before returning to Durham July 28, 2014.

 

New Zealand: A Braver New World?

New Zealand’s South Island, where we’ve been for three weeks now, is a fabulous place to visit. It’s probably an even better place to live and raise a family. New Zealand is one of the best countries in the world for mothers and babies. The nurses and volunteers of the Royal Plunket Society have seen to that for more than a century!

The landscape is strikingly beautiful here. Parts of the South Island—such as the enormous Fiordland National Park in the southwest—are vast and mysterious. Hollywood has discovered that NZ makes great sets for fantasy films. We got a little taste of this awe-inspiring beauty on a boat trip through Milford Sound (technically a fiord).

For several days we stayed in Te Anau, a lakeside community. We moved on to Queenstown, a larger community on another, impossibly blue lake. It's a ski town (now in the off-season), not unlike Aspen or Breckenridge—only the mountains, the trees, the birds are not what a North American expects to see. Queenstown is an antipodean version of an Alpine paradise.

The New Zealand landscape is wide-open. More sheep than people live on the South Island. It’s peaceful to meet their ovine gaze and watch them graze, or to see them dotting distant hillsides like dabs of paint. Some herds have had their haircuts; others are waiting for the summer shearers to find them.

Not only is New Zealand’s landscape appealing; its society is too. New Zealand was fortunate to be relatively recently settled (both by Polynesians and then by Europeans). European settlers who came here were determined to avoid human exploitation (of slaves, as in North America, or of convicts, as in Australia). It's not an accident that New Zealand women were the first to vote.

As recently as a couple of decades ago New Zealand was widely regarded as a classless society. Now editorials, talk shows, and blogs bemoan the widening gap between rich and poor in New Zealand, its growing child poverty, the declining quality of its public schools, and a host of other social issues that mirror problems the US has in spades.

Nevertheless, New Zealand seems (to Jan and me) to be much better off than America currently is. It’s hard to find a piece of trash, or a homeless person, anywhere. Rivers and oceans are absolutely pristine. Healthcare is virtually free. Local food is proudly grown, sold and purchased. Roads and infrastructure are well maintained, with thoughtful provisions for cyclists and the disabled. Public toilets, beaches, trails ("tracks"), and picnic areas are plentiful and spotless.

People are friendly and happy in New Zealand. Where folk feel safe and cared for, open spaces make open hearts. Everybody wears bike helmets here—and a smile. The society is proudly multicultural. Maori place names and cultural practices are valued and embraced, even though people of indigenous backgrounds are reported to still fall behind their counterparts of European descent on most measures of well-being.

We are told, however, that ostentatious materialism continues to draw more derision than admiration in New Zealand. Kiwis appreciate hard work, but not greed—or gain at the expense of others. Back in the gold rush days fortunes were made by newcomers, and that was okay because it took plenty of hard, dirty work and self-sacrifice to grub out a “bounder” [i.e., a homeward-bound ticket]. I read all about the South Island’s gold rush days (and a great deal more) in a fabulous novel, The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, the youngest writer ever to win the Man Booker Prize.

In Dunedin, where we lived for a week, we could not believe how well preserved its many Victorian and Edwardian buildings are. Jan and I are suckers for the architecture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Dunedin is truly magnificent in this regard—Savannah’s equal, if not its better. Not only the city center but also the residential suburbs feature block after block of gems. We’ve never seen so much leaded glass in one city. (Dunedin boasts that it’s the fourth largest city in the world in terms of area!) There’s even a castle out on the Otago Peninsula, on the way to the albatross and penguin sanctuaries.

Dunedin also offers, for free, its magnificent Botanic Gardens (150 years old!) and a newly renovated, beautifully presented “Settlers Museum.” Like San Francisco, Dunedin is a hilly city. (It used to have cable cars, and still has the world’s steepest street.) It was a challenge for Jan to manage on her TravelScoot, but she soldiered onward, and upward, and (scariest of all!) downward.

The weather suits our clothes and skins here in the New Zealand summer. It can be rainy and windy, or sunny and bright—all in one day! Layers are needed. But it’s neither too hot, nor too cold—now or hardly ever. New Zealand is just right. That’s how it was planned, and that’s how it seems to be!

Relaxing on Waitangi Day, I watch Lake Wakatipu sparkle below, craggy peaks scratch the sky in the middle distance, and a faint half moon pierce the blue sky overhead. A thought I've had before comes to mind: If Al Gore had won that election in 2000, would American be as far behind New Zealand as we are today?