CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 11
‘I am very exhausted, but I have almost reached my goal’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 5: Journals NB6–NB10, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 98: NB7, 36 (August to November 1848).
‘After becoming an author, I actually have never once experienced’: S. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 75.
‘Then I become completely calm’: ibid, pp. 71–3.
‘the world, if it is not evil, is mediocre … this humanness’: ibid, pp. 71–2, 88.
‘It was my plan as soon as Either/Or was published’: ibid, p. 162.
‘I understood that my task was to do penance’: ibid, p. 162.
he has felt such a ‘driving need’ for penance: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 4: Journals NB–NB5, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 139–40: NB2, 9 (1847).
‘this is how I serve Christianity’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 5: Journals NB6–NB10, p. 44: NB6, 62 (July or August 1848).
‘I showed the girl my confidence in her’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 2: Journals EE–KK, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 174: JJ 145 (1843). The entry was deciphered by modern scholars using a microscope.
‘An individual with a sense of humour meets a girl’: ibid, p. 176: JJ 155 (1843).
‘It amused him every day to see the sugar melt’: Encounters with Kierkegaard, ed. Bruce Kirmmse, trans. Bruce Kirmmse and Virginia Laursen (Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 208. On Israel Levin, see also Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff and Johnny Kondrup, Written Images: Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals, Notebooks, Booklets, Sheets, Scraps, and Slips of Paper, trans. Bruce Kirmmse (Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 150–58.
Kierkegaard ‘did not cut a particularly good figure on a horse’: Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 232 – from Hans Brøchner’s recollections on Kierkegaard, written in 1871–2.
True Christianity … went through more than a hundred editions: see Christopher B. Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness (Ashgate, 2011), p. 12.
Arndt urged generations of Protestant Christians to purify their souls: see Johann Arndt, True Christianity, trans. Peter Erb (London: SPCK, 1979), pp. 70–82 and passim.
‘A Christian is truly in the world but not of the world’: ibid, p. 75. On Kierkegaard’s reading of Arndt, see Joseph Ballon, ‘Johann Arndt: The Pietist Impulse in Kierkegaard and Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Devotional Literature’, in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions, Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart (Ashgate, 2009), pp. 21–30.
Within his lifetime Copenhagen has acquired the features of urban life: see George Pattison, ‘Poor Paris!’ (Walter de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 21–46.
‘a variety of black silk capes’: see Niels Thulstrup, The Copenhagen of Kierkegaard, ed. Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, trans. Ruth Mach-Zagal (Reitzel, 1981), pp. 53–8. In her little book Lif i Norden [Life in Scandinavia], the Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer recounted her experience of walking along Østergade in 1849, and described the street as ‘a kind of inferno’, ‘entirely hostile to humankind’.
he recalls how he played the role of flâneur on the streets of Copenhagen: see The Point of View, p. 61.
‘nothing other than a very talented and well-read feuilleton writer’: see George Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion, and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 30–49.
‘No Grand Inquisitor has such dreadful torments in readiness as anxiety has’: S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 115–16.
‘And this is the wonderful thing about life’: ibid, pp. 78–9.
‘This is an adventure that every human being must go through’: ibid, p. 155.
‘The more profoundly a human being is in anxiety’: ibid, p. 156.
When a human being ‘passes through the anxiety of the possible’: ibid, p. 158.
‘Then anxiety enters into his soul’: ibid, p. 159.
‘With K. it frequently happened that when he reflected on some minor matter’: see Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 61 – from a letter from Hans Brøchner to H. P. Barfod, 10 November 1871.
a character called Søren Kirk in Gjenboerne: ‘I remember that one evening,’ wrote Hans Brøchner, ‘when I was on my way to a rehearsal for the play, I met Kierkegaard on Højbroplads and spoke with him. He said to me in a joking tone: “Well, so you are going to play me in Hostrup’s comedy?” I related the contents of the role to him and told him my understanding of it. At the time I had no impression that Hostrup’s joke affected him.’ In his 1891 memoir, Hostrup recalled meeting Kierkegaard with Emil Boesen: ‘the strange thing about this meeting was that he proved to be extremely friendly toward me, despite the fact that – according to his journals – he was extremely embittered about Gjenboerne. I looked at this strange man with the greatest of interest, and both before and since I have been deeply moved by several of his books.’ See Encounters with Kierkegaard, pp. 61, 287.
he deleted his own name from the title pages and gave each book a pseudonym: see S. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments / Johannes Climacus, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 176–7 (Pap. V B 39), The Concept of Anxiety, p. 177 (Pap. V B 42).
‘You are in a cocoon of thoughtfulness’: S. Kierkegaard, Prefaces / Writing Sampler, ed. and trans. Todd W. Nichol (Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 9.
‘a book that does not owe its origin to an inexplicable inner need’: ibid, p. 13.
‘for it would indeed be too bad if the public’s gossip were to go to waste’: ibid, p. 19.
‘lofty endeavour to restore lost souls to society’: ibid, p. 178.
‘To be an author in Denmark is almost as troublesome as having to live in public view’: ibid, p. 15.
he decided to stop writing upbuilding discourses: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 2: Journals EE–KK, pp. 194, 203: JJ 220, 255 (1844).
In his discourse ‘To Need God is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection’: see S. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 321–5.
only the one who was in anxiety finds rest: S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 21.
‘you gather everything together all at once and surround yourself with it’: S. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, ed. and trans. Henrik Rosenmeier (Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 164 – letter to Emil Boesen, undated.
‘See to it that you love yourself’: ibid, p. 236 – letter to Henriette Kierkegaard, December 1847.
‘He understood as few do’: Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 242 – from Hans Brøchner’s recollections of Kierkegaard, written in 1871–2.