THE MELANCHOLY METHOD MAN

Lest this turn into a mutual admiration society — a hall of mirrors, if you will — I should write about something besides a friend.

So how about a great Dane? Not Marmaduke. But Soren Kierkegaard (right).

I think all Danes are great, by the way, not just the great ones. I love Denmark's situation in the world, its geography, its aesthetic. It's the stepping stone between prissy Europe and earthy Scandinavia. I always think of Danes as being a little bit European and a little bit Viking, like the Osmonds are a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll. Shakespeare, without benefit of the Donny and Marie example, spotted this characteristic all on his own and — perfectly — made Hamlet Danish. The Dane is a very precise mixture of doubt and resolve, of paganism and Christianity, of melancholy and ecstasy. Hence all his problems.

My favorite Dane, by far, is the Baroness Blixen. Not just because she wrote the most elegant opening line in the English language — "I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills" — but because she understood the food-sex connection in literature. Maybe she even invented that connection, as we know it, in "Babbette's Feast." She herself lived on champagne and grapes and eventually died of malnutrition.

I have a lot of superficial thoughts on Kierkegaard before I get down to the deep ones:

1. The lasting achievement from my career as a philosophy major is that I can spell Kierkegaard without looking it up. I can also spell Nietzsche, although I can't use it correctly in a sentence.

By contrast, I bet you $6 that Driftwood, the Last Feminista, had to look up "Kierkegaard" when he mentioned him in the comments section of my last entry. He looked it up, then carefully pecked it out with one finger on his keyboard. (The Last Feminista is way smarter and better looking and more athletic and kinder than I am, so the only way I have to keep him in his place is continual reference to his spelling disability.)

2. Kierkegaard — with his frail looks and his unrequited love — reminds me of Washington Irving's Ichabod Crane. I wonder whether Norman Rockwell had the same impression when he painted Crane (left).

3. Kierkegaard wrote killer love letters. Here's a sample: " ... it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all girls in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards, and at the next moment you are so near to me, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it's good to be here."

Wow. He didn't mess around. Is it even possible to write a love letter like that these days? Would your loved one even get it, or would she just glance at it and say something like "Hmmm. Obsess much? Let's watch 'American Idol.'"

4. He loved a woman and gave her up. It's one of the most famous breakups — sacrifices — in Western thought. Everyone who talks about Kierkegaard's philosophy mentions Regina at some point. I named my dog after her. Once, long after she was out of his life, he asked her husband for permission to talk with her briefly. The husband said no. No.

5. Kierkegaard was critical of the church. He felt it robbed religion of its soul. It reduced something magical and grand to a set of petty rules and empty forms and ugly, uninformed judgments, just like the Christian right has done today.

6. In my study of philosophers, Kierkegaard was the first one who struck me as a real person. He impressed a lot of people that way, I imagine, which maybe has something to do with his being regarded as the first existentialist. You can picture him walking down the street, deciding where to go.

7. He came up with the "Leap of Faith," which strikes me as the most elegant understanding of religious feeling ever articulated. It's beautiful because it's a death knell for and celebration of God all at once. The idea is that faith is meaningless without doubt. If you don't doubt your religious convictions, you are incapable of ever truly believing them. Doubt makes the miracle, like exception makes the rule. It should keep atheists and believers alike happy. But it doesn't.

(Note to self: Invent a cocktail called "Leap of Faith" — one part doubt, two parts conviction. Serve at room temperature with a Hegelian twist.)

Gosh, look at the time. I forgot to spring my clocks forward. And I haven't even gotten to my deep thoughts on Kierkegaard. Words, words everywhere, and not a thought to think.

Oh well. You didn't get to see my profound wisdom on the great Dane, but you did get to see how — with smoke and mirrors — I bullshitted my way through a philosophy degree.