What pain

Hogmanay 2010, revisited. I was told yesterday that my new blog picture captures me looking "pained."
    In 1965, in Edinburgh, Scotland (the city whose Hogmanay celebration was portrayed in the photo I used on January 1), as I was walking by a long mirror on a street one morning, on my way to the divinity school, I thought I recognized someone mentioned in Kierkegaard. I had a few years earlier read his essay in Either/Or titled "The Unhappiest Man," which I seem to remember he developed from reflecting on the New Testament "Man of Sorrows." I suspect that I was merely flattering myself by borrowing Kierkegaard's label from the person my mother had associated me with from my infancy. (Yes, apparently. At any rate, in our home my official baby portrait was hung alongside a representation of Jesus Christ.)

However, I seem to have been misremembering Kierkegaard's concept of "the unhappiest man," which may have had nothing to do with the New Testament. Says Wikipedia:

The third essay, called "The Unhappiest One," [even the title is apparently different from what I remembered], discusses the hypothetical question: "who deserves the distinction of being unhappier than everyone else?" Kierkegaard answers, "The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. He is always absent, never present to himself."

How, then, could I have been unhappy, or be unhappy now? I seem perpetually to be "present to myself"—unless I fail to understand what Kierkegaard meant by that; am I in some sense of his hardly ever present to myself at all?

Today, certainly, forty-five years later, I don't think of myself as unhappy, let alone "the unhappiest." But I do feel some of the sorrow of the world. I can't read about a newly elected congresswoman's being gunned down yesterday and six people's being dead today as a result without feeling some sadness over it. I couldn't even take bird feed out a little late this morning without feeling sorry for the birds who'd already arrived to find the feeders empty from yesterday. I can't think about even the concept of the food chain without some generalized sorrow over the profound injustice of Nature itself.
    Yet, I didn't recognize someone in pain when I posted my new blog profile photograph the other day. Since learning that to someone else I looked "pained," I've examined the photo more closely, and I think I might see something, in the set of the mouth, perhaps.
    At first, I "remembered" taking the photo on New Year's morning, by mounting my camera on a tripod and clicking a remote control, but when I got out the uncropped original it reminded me that I preferred the photos I had taken the night before by holding the camera up with my left hand and, with some difficulty (for the Nikon D60 SLR is a bit heavy), pressing the release with my index finger:
 

And here are two others, taken in the preceding minutes:
 

    From the angle, I can confirm that the camera was definitely not on a tripod. I was sitting as close as I could to the big lamp on the long, narrow library table I made years ago. No room for the tripod.
    So, it's possible that the set of my lips is just because of the weight of the camera—or perhaps a twinge of arthritic pain.
    I took the pictures on Hogmanay, New Year's Eve 2010, just before going to bed a little after eight o'clock. I think I might have been feeling the weight of the year. Something, at any rate, prompted me to do a few self-portraits, not something I'd ever done just before retiring for the day...
    ...or before retiring for the year, a year of unbroken days of sad headlines and the murderous operation of Nature.