The problem with Ovid
'The Rotation Method’ is one of the most amusing sections of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The second-most famous melancholy Dane has some good advice for dealing with irritating absurdity: cultivate arbitrariness when confronted with flagrant examples of it. There is someone whose conversation you find insufferable. What to do? Kierkegaard’s narrator has some tips: ‘I discovered that he perspired copiously when talking. I saw the pearls of sweat gather on his brow, unite to form a stream, glide down his nose and hang at the extreme point of his nose in a drop-shaped body.’ There is much about cultural life today that can be profitably approached with the Rotation Method.
