Unopened Letters and Gutted Books: Kierkegaard’s Call to Direct Experience

In his critique of the theologians of the day, S?ren Kierkegaard compares them to a young man who receives a letter from his beloved but instead of immediately opening it, says:

“This I must read and study, but first I must familiarize myself with the original language; I must be thoroughly grounded in philology, I must read the Fathers and the Reformers, I must go through the church history, must study the history of dogma…”

If a man delays opening a letter from his beloved, it suggests he doesn’t truly want to open it. A man in love doesn’t worry about understanding the letter; he just opens and reads it. If his concern about not understanding it prevents him from reading it, he is not truly in love.

A person in love may not understand everything in the letter, but he doesn’t mind because he understands with his heart, not his mind. The heart grasps; the mind dissects. The mind is not in love — that’s why it delays the experience. The heart is in love — that’s why it hastens it.

According to Kierkegaard, meaning is revealed to a lover through direct encounter. For a lover, meaning always emerges from direct experience. The lover hastens the relationship. The one who is not in love delays the relationship. He is not interested in direct experience. He doesn’t yet know that the Logos reveals itself only to a loving heart.

When my wife and I read the quiz questions our son received at school for Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, we both cringed. The questions focused on anything except what Ray Bradbury wrote the book to convey. “What type of drug did the mechanical hound inject into Montag’s leg?” “How did Montag reach the ‘book people’ — by train, bus, or on foot?”

We gasped. What does it matter? We looked for questions about the meaning of the text but found none. They were all focused on technical details that had little or nothing to do with the text’s deeper significance. If the school’s goal was to assess the students’ knowledge of the book, they entirely missed the point. Knowing all these details does not constitute understanding the text, but I suppose, it wasn’t required.

Even if the students didn’t look up all these details on their phones (which they likely did), it didn’t help them “get the book.” Fahrenheit 451 is about encountering books —embodied in people. This is the profound solution to the dystopian hell. Based on the quiz questions, the students have not encountered Fahrenheit 451.

When you encounter a book, you ask different questions — you want to delve deeper into the experience to amplify it more and more. Ironically, in Fahrenheit 451, books are physically destroyed; in our modern world, they are spiritually gutted. In Fahrenheit 451, books are unavailable; in our world today, they are sterilized, sanitized, disinfected, and defanged.

They have been cursed by people who are not in love. Such people may know everything about the books, but they have not encountered them. That’s why they keep delaying the only thing that can make us happy — an encounter with Meaning.