Good writing is rewriting.
— Truman Capote
I remember hearing Truman Capote say that on The Tonight Show decades ago. Over the years since, I’ve often experienced that the same thing also applies to reading: all reading is rereading. That’s true at least for anything really worth reading in the first place.
All my life, beginning all the way back to my childhood before I even knew how to read myself, I have realized that anything worth reading deserves — and richly repays — rereading. As I may have mentioned before in one or more of my previous blog posts (I may well reread a bunch of them to find out for sure), back when I was only about four years old my mother thought that I was ready to learn how to read, given how incessantly I asked her to read and reread things to me. The Earth for Sam, which was originally published way back in 1930, and Space Cat, which first came out when I was six and began to be taught how to read and which was one of the first books I read myself, were my two favorites.
Wanting to do the right thing, my mother made the mistake of asking teachers of the Jefferson County Colorado school system—that being the county in which we lived—if she should teach me how to read, which she would have been able and happy to do. She was informed that it would be best for me to wait, and to learn how to read along with other children my age once I entered public schools and made it past kindergarten and into the first grade, where that would occur. So till then my mother, who took the teacher’s supposedly expert but utterly wrong-headed advice to heart, had to keep doing all my reading and rereading aloud for me.
At any rate, once I got to my mid-teens one of the authors I started reading and rereading on my own was Søren Kierkegaard. Once I became a college classroom teacher myself, I often used texts by him in various classes at various academic levels, from introductory lower-division undergraduate philosophy classes to seminars for graduate students and advanced undergraduates.
Despite my having read and reread most of Kierkegaard’s works, one thing of his I never read until just recently, and at least parts of which I have already reread more than once, was his academic dissertation, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates. Among the already more than once reread passages of that text is the one that follows, a passage in which Kierkegaard is addressing the “Socratic outlook” on irony. My initial reading of the passage is what helped give me the idea for the blog post you are currently reading. (The passage occurs on p. 60 in the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong English translation of the text, first published by Princeton University Press in 1989.)
If we now inquire further and ask to what more universal view this Socratic outlook may be traced, in what totality it rests, then it obviously is in the meaning ascribed to [what Plato calls] recollection; but recollection is in fact the retrograde development […]. [. . .] It is Socratic to disparage all actuality and to direct man to a recollection that continually retreats further and further back toward a past that itself retreats as far back in time as that noble family’s origin that no one could remember. [. . .]
In the next section of this post, I will share some of what that passage suggested to me when I first read it.
Kierkegaard’s grave, Copenhagen (picture from Wikimedia Commons)
* * *
Profound progression is ever-recurrent regression into the groundless ground. Such regressive progression/progressive regression is never aggressive, at least not in the ordinary sense of “attacking”: it is, rather, always serene, and spreads the seeds of peace wherever it goes. However, in the original and originating sense to which the word aggression itself always goes back, progressing step by step in its retreat, through French to Latin and eventually to a presumed Proto-Indo-European root, in joins up with both progression and regression, as I’ll now try to explain.
The presumed Proto-Indo-European root of all three words — progression, regression, and aggression — is *ghredh-, assigned the meaning “to walk, go.” To progress is to walk or go forth or forward. To regress is to walk or go back. To aggress is to walk or go against, as one sometimes needs to go “against the current,” as we say, to do what one is called to do as one progressively regresses/regressively progresses.
Progression is walking the path forward into the terrain of what will be. Regression is walking the path back into the terrain of what has been. The walking itself traverses, step by step, the terrain of what truly is, regardless of what the current opinions about what is may be.
* * *
To come to a full understanding of the preceding section of this post, you may need to resist temptations to just go with the flow. Instead, you may need to go back to reread that section, and perhaps even the first section of this post, carefully and attentively again and again.
I will leave it to you to decide if I am speaking ironically in the preceding paragraph.
Note to readers: This will be my last post before I take my usual summer break. My next post will go up on Monday, September 12, 2022.