Page 37 of Follows with Intent

“It could be. I mean, if I want to get into a good doctoral program, this could do it. I’d love to have a solid publication when I apply. And maybe a letter of rec from one of these professors.”

“What’s the paper about?”

“Kierkegaard,” Nico said with a lopsided smile. “It’s so boring; you don’t want to know.”

“Didn’t we go over this?” Jadon said, and his tone was still gentle, but there was steel there too—a reminder that Jadon was, along with whatever else he was becoming for Nico, still a detective. “I asked you a question. That means I want to know.”

“Okay. Um, so, let’s see.” Nico worked to sort out the threads of the argument in his head; he’d been living inside the paper for so long that it had become a jumble. “So, my research is about Kierkegaard’s role in developing an aesthetics of Christian existentialism.”

“Aesthetics like, what? Why things are beautiful?”

“Mmm, kind of. Why is part of it. But it’s broader than that. What it means for something to be beautiful. What beauty means in the larger framework of Christian existentialism.”

“Truth is subjectivity.”

Nico gave him a startled look.

“Okay, that’s a little insulting,” Jadon said, eyebrows curved to take the heat out of the words.

Laughing, Nico shook his head. “No, I—oh my God, I’m sorry.”

“Well, it was only this morning, Nico. I’m not a genius, but I can remember that far back. Keep going.”

“Right. Well, the question of aesthetics and subjectivity is a huge one, way beyond Kierkegaard, and that’s partly what I’m interested in. But for this paper, I’m interested in a different side of his work. Kierkegaard is…um, complicated? I mean, that’s a way of saying his writings are convoluted, and sometimes they seem contradictory, and in general—”

“It feels like pounding your head against a brick wall?”

“Pretty much. But one of the questions that comes up is the way Kierkegaard uses the language of the aesthetic to talk about love, which again, isn’t exactly unique—I mean, most of the Western tradition has some conflation of love and beauty—but the way Kierkegaard does it is fascinating.”

Jadon’s smile was like something Nico had drawn as a child, his best, most determined efforts to capture the essence of a smile, and somehow getting it right even though all he’d managed were the lines of it.

“Sorry. You’re—”

“If you tell me I’m bored,” Jadon said, “we’re going to have a fight. What does Kierkegaard say about love?”

“The problem with the aesthetic—with beauty, for Kierkegaard—is that it’s sensual, it’s unstable, it’s often selfish, and it’s right now, a pleasure that distracts us from what matters, which is the eternal. And if we’re caught up in the aesthetic, and aesthetic love, which a lot of people take to mean sexual love, or love with a sexual component, then we’re not going to make that leap of faith that takes us from reason to beyond reason.”

“Because we already have something we want, something here.”

“Exactly!” Nico sat up a little straighter. “So, Kierkegaard says there’s ethical love. Because loving our neighbor is a commandment in the scripture, so he can’t say love in general is a problem. Ethical love is a duty. It’s an obligation to care for people, and it transforms love from something based on feelings, which are sensual and changing, to a commitment. It’s also something we choose, which means that even though it’s an obligation, it also emphasizes our moral freedom. True love is freely given and freely chosen.”

“But no sex?” Jadon said dubiously.

“I heard that.”

“It’s a philosophical question.”

“Sorry, Kierkegaard didn’t cover being called daddy.”

“Hey!”

Nico shrugged and spread his hands.

“Hey,” Jadon said again, and this time he laughed. “So, that’s it? Ethical love? A moral commitment to care for the person you choose to love? That seems kind of…I don’t know. Cold.”

“Kierkegaard isn’t a straightforward writer. He talks about romance and the reality of human relationships that begin in the aesthetic mode. But he believed that ethical love was higher, and he tried to live that way. Struggled with it. He was engaged, and he broke off that engagement, which was a big deal for him.” Nico was silent for a moment. “Anyway, I’m writing about the absurd and the leap of faith, kind of this mixture of ideas, playing around with how Kierkegaard’s ideas on non-rationality might actually resolve some of the contradictions in his ideas of aesthetic love.”

“That sounds so interesting.”

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