Kierkegaard and the Nuns

I had a lot of apples that weren’t of the best quality, so I decided to make a crumble. However, I wanted a crumble that was less crumbly and more pie-like. This recipe was perfect! Preheat oven to 435F. Using my fingertips, I mixed ¾ cup flour and 1/3-cup oats with ½ cup sugar and 125 g butter cut in pieces. In a separate bowl, I mixed 5 peeled and sliced apples with 1 teaspoon cinnamon and 2 teaspoons sugar. I put the apple slices in a pie form and topped it with the flour/oats/sugar mixture. I let it bake in the oven for about 22 minutes.

One day a man sees a sign in a store window. The sign reads: “Got clean laundry? We press it for you!” Happily the man runs home, collects all his clean shirts and heads back to the store. But when he hands over the bundle, he’s being told that the store does not press anything at all, in fact this is a store that sells signs, and that particular sign is for sale.

This is a story, or an aphorism really, that was written by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). It is meant to shine light on the disappointment we feel when we assume something is a certain way, and then discover it is not. (Although to me, the story is also a warning about the false promises often showcased in display windows.)

Kierkegaard is a philosopher for the fearless. He preaches the gospel of the individual and the power that rests within the individual (as opposed to the cowardly crowd). It is daunting, Kierkegaard argued, to live our lives as individuals. It is easier to adapt to the crowd than to form our own individual heart. We therefore tend to buy ready-made truths that sound and look good at first, but do we ever bother to look deeper into them? And if we did, would we like what we saw?

“Most people lead far too sheltered lives, and for that reason they get to know (the divine) so little. They have permanent positions, they never put in their utmost effort,” Kierkegaard wrote in his diary.

The other day, a friend and I visited a convent in Connecticut. The convent is located in a mansion, which in turn is ensconced in absolute peace and quiet by the water. It is a magnificent place, surrounded by green lawns. It is also a place where you hear things. You may not hear the sort of things you want to hear, but perhaps the sort of things you need to hear. One of the things Mother Superior, a beautiful petite Indian woman, said was:

“It’s not so important to be always the winner. Sometimes it’s good to be the loser.”

Kierkegaard held up a warning finger against the loud talk of the crowd, urging us instead to glean something from the individual who quietly communes with himself. In his diary he wrote:

“One can very well eat lettuce before its heart has been formed; still, the delicate crispness of the heart and its lovely frizz are something altogether different from the leaves. It is the same in the world of the spirit. Being too busy has this result: that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality who actually has formed his heart, will never be popular, not because he is difficult, but because it demands quiet and prolonged working with oneself and intimate knowledge of oneself as well as a certain isolation.”

When I came back home from the convent, I thought about Kierkegaard and all the glitter promised by the signs in all the window displays, and how easily it is to fall for it, be it a Louis Vuitton handbag or Converse sneakers. And I thought again about what Mother Superior had said about being a loser, and I wondered if I would even notice such as truth if it were to hang in a shop window.