it flew a little farther

A knight rides through a wood and sees an unusual bird. He gives chase. The bird stays just ahead of him, lifting and settling a little farther on each time he closes in, until the light fails and he has lost his companions, lost the path, and lost the bird itself in the dark.

the aesthetic stage

Kierkegaard thought a life moves through three stages. In the first, the aesthetic stage, a person lives for sensation, for beauty and novelty and the experience not yet had. They cultivate taste. They become, in their own eyes, a connoisseur of life.

This is most of us, most of the time. It is the painter who needs the next canvas to be unlike any before it. The traveler with the longer list of countries. The listener with the more obscure shelf of records. We assemble a self out of what we have taken in, and we keep reaching for something larger to cover an emptiness that only grows.

That is the curse the aesthete carries. Kierkegaard's claim is that this stage leads, with a kind of certainty, to despair: the more you have, the more you want; the more you experience, the less anything moves you. In the end you are tired of everything. There is a subtler turn inside this. The aesthete can come to see that they are an aesthete, can read a paragraph like this and recognize themselves, and feel that the recognition is the way out. It isn't. It just becomes a finer grade of the same taste, and leaves you no nearer to getting out.

the ethical stage

Once a person has tasted the emptiness of the aesthetic life, they tend to move into the ethical stage, where they start living for something, for responsibility, for a commitment. They marry. They choose a kind of work. They accept that a life is finite rather than endlessly revisable, and stop watching their possibilities in order to actually live one of them.

This is real progress, and I don't want to wave it away. Most of the unhappiness in the world, and most of my own, comes from refusing this step, from keeping every door open long past the point where the openness feeds anything. To choose is to grieve all the lives you won't have. The aesthete avoids the grief by never choosing. The ethical person grieves and chooses anyway, and becomes someone in the choosing.

But the ethical stage has a trap of its own, and it is one almost nobody warns you about: the chasing hasn't stopped. Go back to the knight. He believes the bird is trying to get away from him. The truth is that he is the one who cannot put down the chase, and this time the bird is called meaning. A person thinks they have finally left the shallow pursuit behind, when all they have really done is change what they are pursuing. This is why people who at last find their calling so often arrive exhausted, and cannot understand why the exhaustion stays.

the leap

Kierkegaard's third move is the one everyone quotes and few sit with: the leap of faith. To really find yourself, the move goes, there has to be a moment when you admit you cannot catch the bird, when you are lost, holding nothing, standing alone in open country. And then, out of that complete solitude, you leap toward a self that needs no outside thing to prove it.

Here the old story and Kierkegaard begin to separate, and I would rather say so than paper over it. Strictly speaking his leap is not toward the self at all but toward God. For him the self alone can never escape despair, because despair is a sickness of the self, and only a relation to something genuinely outside it, the eternal, can give the self rest. Most of us now live in a world where God is no longer a live option, and yet the predicament he described, the loneliness and the emptiness and the loss of meaning, feels no less common in our century than in his. So I read the leap through the wilderness instead, and borrow the shape of his answer without the ground he stood it on.

There is one more piece of him worth keeping. Kierkegaard believed that truth is subjective. He did not mean the lazy modern thing, that whatever you feel is true, which would have appalled him. He meant that for a finite, mortal person, the deepest questions, how to face death, how to hold meaning, can never be settled by an objective proposition. They can only be settled by being lived. Whether something is true for you depends on whether you will stake your whole existence on it. This is the real reason the losing cannot be skipped. You cannot read ahead to the leap and perform it on schedule. Each stage has to be lived until it gives way on its own.

the wilderness

Stay with the knight a moment, because the parable does. It is fully dark now. He has been riding a long time. The bird is simply gone. He reins in; the horse's breath smokes in the cold; the wood looks the same in every direction, and there is no fire, no voice, nothing that knows his name. He rode out as someone: a knight, a man on an errand, one of a company that left at dawn. None of that is doing anything for him now. There is the cold, and the dark, and his own breathing, and him.

By rights, a person who has lost every reference point should fall apart. So why does the parable say he finds himself?

I think the reason is this. A self is not an object waiting to be found. It is something that only surfaces once everything has been stripped away. While you have an aim, you are the one chasing the bird. While you have companions, you are a knight in the column. While you have a road behind you, you are someone who came from somewhere. Each of those describes you from the outside, fixes you as some particular role. When all of them fail at once, what is left has no adjective to attach to. Either a self surfaces there, or the wanting of one goes quiet. I don't know which, and the parable doesn't say. It promises only that the stripping had to happen.

And you cannot arrange it. You can't reach the wilderness by reading about it, or will yourself into it by deciding to feel lost. The bird has to actually go. The path has to actually dissolve.

simplicity

One thing before I stop, so none of this gets mistaken for the cheap version, the one about going back to your roots and not getting so caught up in the world. The Little Prince tells us every grown-up was once a child. Each of us had a small planet and a single rose, and then left it to wander among kings and businessmen and lamplighters, learned their rules, took on their faces, lost ourselves among them. It is tempting to read that as a story about how you should have stayed. But the prince had to leave the planet, and the knight had to chase the bird. The losing isn't an accident in these stories. It is the story. Complexity was never the mistake.

And then watch the bird that hands you. If you close this and resolve to go get properly lost, to seek out the authentic wilderness, you have only found a new bird and started the same chase. There is no method here, nothing to set out and do. You cannot aim at the wilderness without turning it back into the restless thing it was meant to end. And if this essay starts to feel like it is handing you one, that is the bird, and you should be suspicious of me.

So I don't think it could be mistaken for returning to simplicity. That reading carries a verdict buried inside it: that the complication was the wrong turn, that you should have stayed where you started and known better. But the knight had to chase the bird. You had to chase the thing you are chasing. The loss is not a detour around the road; it is the road.