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The Jewel on Thin Ice

• September 2009
• Simple Living Climb

Dear Steph,
I was touched to see that you asked your friend to answer my question
about fingerboarding. My climbing partner injured his knee and I still
wanted to work out with him so I tried to come up with a workout that
we can do together.

I also wanted to share something with you in return and although
Kierkegaard died 150 years too early to have been my friend, his
little parable seems to have been written for passionate risk takers.

There are very few things that feel as good as being understood for
who you are. Seeing my own thoughts reflected in somebody else’s (even
if he has been dead for a century) filled me with intense happiness
when I first read his reflections. The calm happiness you show in your
videos made me think of Kierkegaard’s ice skater and I was hoping it
would make you happy to recognize yourself in this story where the
extreme athlete acts out of a true love for life.

Your lifestyle and way of interacting with the world around you seem
truly amazing and have been a inspiration over the past days.
Tammo

The Jewel on Thin Ice

What is the difference between an engaged, passionate age and the
objective spectatorship of modernity?

“If the jewel which every one desired to possess lay far out on a frozen lake
where the ice was very thin, watched over by the danger of death, while,
closer in, the ice was perfectly safe, then in a passionate age the crowds
would applaud the courage of the man who ventured out, they would tremble
for him and with him in the danger of his decisive action, they would grieve
over him if he were drowned, they would make a god of him if he secured the
prize. But in an age without passion, in a reflective age, it would be
otherwise. People would think each other clever in agreeing that it was
unreasonable and not even worth while to venture so far out. And in this way
they would transform daring and enthusiasm into a feat of skill, so as to do
something, for after all “something must be done.” The crowds would go out
to watch from a safe place, and with the eyes of connoisseurs appraise the
accomplished skater who could skate almost to the very edge (i.e. as far as
the ice was still safe and the danger had not yet begun) and then turn back.
The most accomplished skater would manage to go out to the furthermost point
and then perform a still more dangerous-looking run, so as to make the
spectators hold their breath and say: “Ye Gods! How mad; he is risking his
life.”

The Present Age, pp.37-38 (SV XIV 66-67)

Soeren Kierkegaard