Two Books In My Personal Canon

One never knows, when picking up a book and reading it, what impact it will have over the course of a lifetime--especially a life lived, as mine has been, among books. I have long acknowledged the importance of Robert Bretall's A Kierkegaard Anthology, first read when I was sixteen, to my intellectual formation.

I still have my original copy of the book with its yellowed pages and now-faded highlighting.

A book I read subsequent to Bretall was William Barrett's Irrational Man; I may have been seventeen by the time I began to work my way through Barrett.

For some reason, I tend not to credit Barrett's book as I should. This may be because Barrett offered an interpretation of "existential philosophy," whereas Bretall's Anthology provided me with primary source material.

Yet, picking up Barrett's book again--with its red ink underlining and cracked spine--I find myself pulled back in time, into the strange thrill I felt when I first encountered the Sartrean mantra "existence precedes essence."

Why did such an assertion strike me, at the time, as so powerful, so profound? Like many American adolescents of the mid-to-late 1970's, I was ambivalently rebellious but definitely restless: frustrated and alienated by my bourgeois upbringing in the suburbs of a post-War industrial capital. But why should Sartre's simple (some might argue simplistic) summation of Heidegger's attempt to turn the history of European metaphysics on its head "speak" to my condition?

It is baffling to consider how deep was the impact of that phrase--especially baffling in light of the fact that, at the time, I knew nothing, or next to nothing, about the history of European metaphysics. I knew only Kierkegaard's almost pathological rejection of Hegelian system: but that, too, had struck me as unerringly on target.

Perhaps the appeal of these books and the ideas to which they introduced me lay in the message that I, as a restless adolescent, took from them:

Your situation here is temporary and, in any event, is an accident of birth. You are not stuck here, nor is your ultimate fate determined. If you do not yet know who you are, it is because who you are has not yet been decided. Existence precedes essence. You are not yet who you shall become...

Such a message was gospel to me; it was a source of strength and of hope (not, as many seem to read the message of Existentialism, one of despair). It taught me that my feelings of alienation were perfectly natural--and that those who did not share them were probably in for a rude awakening at some point in the future.

Of course, the irony is that, nearly four decades on, the same message continues to reverberate in my consciousness: You are not yet who you shall become...

But, at this point, "who I shall become" no longer interests me: for "I" no longer interest me--at least not in the obsessive, self-absorbed manner of the modern American adolescent.