Gabriel Jeroschewitz, January 4th, 2026: This is a true-ish story?  1966

The Bells and the Book

When I was twelve, my mother got me a job in a church library that nobody visited. That was the first sign something was wrong — not wrong in the moral sense, but wrong in the way a painting is bad when it’s hung slightly crooked, and no one bothers to fix it.

The air smelled like dust and candle wax, which is to say: it smelled like the inside of a memory. Sunlight came in through the stained glass at odd angles, falling across rows of theology books whose spines had lost the will to tell you their names. It was the kind of place where time didn’t move forward so much as it puddled around your feet.

I wasn’t there for God. I wasn’t even there for money. I was there because the quiet felt like a kind of witness — not to my life, not to anyone else’s, but to the fact that there was a space in the world where nothing was expected of me except sweeping and dusting. Sometimes I read whatever I find lying around.

It was on one of those afternoons that I found the book. A slim, cracked volume called The Sickness Unto Death. I didn’t know who Søren Kierkegaard was. I assumed he was either a dead theologian or a Scandinavian metal guitarist.

The first line stopped me cold: The greatest danger, that of losing one’s self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing at all.

I remember sitting there after closing, the doors locked, the light fading into that peculiar blue that makes everything look like it’s underwater. The words frightened me — but not with fire or brimstone. They scared me with recognition.

Kierkegaard wasn’t talking about sin the way Sunday school had. He was talking about something slower, quieter: a sickness of forgetting yourself. Not sorrow, but despair. Sorrow, he said, is when the world wounds you. Despair is when you wound yourself by either pretending to be someone you’re not or refusing to be who you are meant to be.

That sounded reasonable… until I started thinking about it too much.

The bells rang every hour. They didn’t change, but their meaning did. Some days, they felt like reminders. Other days, they felt like accusations. I began to suspect they were trying to communicate something to me — but in a language too old to translate.

By the third week, I had stopped sweeping. The dust seemed to want to be there. It had settled into the corners with a kind of monastic dignity. I didn’t have the heart to disturb it.

Instead, I began cataloguing the people who didn’t come—this required imagination. I invented an old woman who had been visiting the library every day for thirty years without actually stepping inside. She would stand in the doorway, sigh, and leave.

Then there was the man who came only on Wednesdays, dressed in a tuxedo, who never spoke but left an unmarked envelope on the desk containing a single feather.

These people were more vivid to me than the real ones, which mainly consisted of Father Bernard — a man with a face like a walnut and a voice like a leaking faucet — and Mrs. Calhoun, who came in once a month to borrow books she never read, so that she could scold me for dust on the hymnals.

The surrealism began slowly.

One afternoon, while reading Kierkegaard’s bit about the finite and infinite, I noticed that the words on the page were changing. Not in a supernatural way — more in the way your memory changes when you look at it too long.

“Faith,” he wrote, “is balance.”

Except now it said: “Faith is balancing on a chair with only one leg, in a room that is slowly filling with bees.”

I blinked. The words returned to normal.

I told myself I was imagining it, but over the next few days, other changes began to appear.

“The one who only believes in the finite sinks into meaninglessness,” became: “The one who only believes in the finite sinks into a large vat of lukewarm pudding.”

“The one who only believes in the infinite drifts into fantasy,” became: “The one who only believes in the infinite drifts into a fantasy where he is married to a giant talking fish named Geraldine.”

I began to wonder if Kierkegaard himself had been messing with me.

The bells grew stranger, too.

At first, they struck the hour as usual. Then they began adding extra chimes — five at three o’clock, thirteen at noon. Then they stopped altogether.

One day, instead of bells, I heard the shuffle of cards.

Another day, the bells rang in reverse, starting high and descending into a dull metallic cough.

I mentioned this to Father Bernard, who said, “Ah, that’s just the church adjusting itself.”

Adjusting itself to what, he didn’t explain.

By mid-summer, I’d stopped leaving at closing. The library felt more real after everyone had gone. The shadows behaved themselves better. The books whispered less.

That was when I started talking back to the book.

“I understand,” I told Kierkegaard one night, “but what if the self you find is boring? What if the self you find likes boiled vegetables and hates music? What if the self you find is actually somebody else’s?”

The book didn’t answer — at least not directly. But I swear the next time I opened it, it had inserted a sentence that hadn’t been there before:

“It is better to be yourself badly than to be someone else perfectly.”

I began experimenting.

One week, I tried living entirely in the finite. I swept, dusted, counted the number of tiles in the library (827), and refused to think about anything beyond it.

Result: The bells began ringing in what I can only describe as Morse code for “Stop.”

The following week, I tried living entirely in the infinite. I stopped sweeping altogether, read only Kierkegaard and imaginary books, and convinced myself I could hear the thoughts of the dust particles.

Result: The bells didn’t ring at all. Instead, the stained glass began to hum.

Toward the end of the summer, something changed.

I came in one morning to find The Sickness Unto Death missing from its shelf. In its place was a mirror.

It wasn’t a standard mirror. It was slightly warped, like a funhouse mirror that had been told to behave.

When I looked into it, I didn’t see myself exactly. I saw a version of myself who was clearly waiting for me to make a decision.

“What do you want?” I asked.

The reflection shrugged.

Last week, the bells rang every hour as usual, but now each chime seemed to erase something. I would hear a bell and forget the name of a colour. Another bell — and I couldn’t remember my own birthday.

The final bell came just as I was closing the library for the last time.

It took away my memory of why I’d come there at all.

Years later, I found another copy of The Sickness Unto Death in a secondhand shop. The same sentence waited at the beginning, patient as ever: The greatest danger, that of losing one’s self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing at all.

I read it and felt the same strange recognition I’d felt that summer.

Except this time, I wasn’t frightened.

I realized that losing yourself isn’t always a tragedy. Sometimes it’s just the church bells ringing in a language you’ll never learn, and you standing there, deciding whether to listen.

And if you ask me if Kierkegaard was right, I’ll tell you this:

The sickness unto death isn’t dying. It’s forgetting to live with the part of yourself that wants to rise — even if it rises into something absurd.

Because absurdity, I’ve learned, is just the infinite wearing a silly hat.

And the finite? The finite is the dust settling in a church library no one visits, dignified as ever, waiting for someone to notice.