and rendered unobtainable. Thereafter marriage is seen more as a weakness than as the sacred rite of passage which the life depends.
The ethical vision, entrusted to the aesthetic gaze, is bit by bit betrayed by it. In a remarkable and prescient work the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard foretold this process, invoking marriage as the core of ethical life, and the foundation of enduring commu- nities. Either/Or (published in 1843) presents the Romantic yearning in the form of a dilemma. In the first part is invoked the aesthetic way of life, in which the moment is elevated above al! long-term commitments, and duty surrendered to delight. Mo zart's Don Juan is the acknowledged hero, and the centre piece is the celebrated "Diary of a Seducer in which an innocent girl falls under the aesthetic gaze of a writer for whom her innocence is both a promise of redemption and a challenge to destroy. In the second part a mild mannered judge moralises over the ethical life, and spells out the dull routines of marriage as the true re demption: the passage to community upon which life depends. There is no doubt where Kierkegaard's sympathies lay. The unutterable tediousness of the "or" contrasts with the intellec tual, poetic and yes ethical exhilaration of the Either and the reader is not surprised to learn that Kierkegaard himself pressed to marry the girl whose life he had ruined by his prom ses, would never give "yes for an answer 4 I am here trying to summarize a phenomenon described in an other but related way by Mario Praz, in The Romantic Agony.