* And now in 1848!
*This article was written in 1847 but was later reworked and expanded.
*By the way, please remember that it was a pseudonymous writer and that in connection with a polemical article I had the added difficulty of making it a poetical response—consequently in the character of the pseudonym.
**Between laughter, properly understood, and me there is a secret, happy understanding. I am—properly understood—a friend and lover of laughter; in one sense, that is, seriously speaking, I was no doubt the best and truest friend and lover of laughter at the very moment when all the others, all those thousands upon thousands, became ironic and I, ironically enough, became the only one who had no understanding of irony.85
*That it was also for other reasons in addition to the reason cited here, I shall not develop here, not even this, that it was also, if possible, to make my contemporaries aware of a literary immorality all too appalling and engulfing in proportion to the little country that I, as an emergency volunteer [sig Devoverende] ventured [vovede] for a time to become—alas, the poor Magister of irony!—the sacrifice to that laughter, yet something that in one respect filled my soul with sadness (but then irony and sadness are, after all, really one and the same), since the one called the common man in the nation has scarcely had many in [XIII 604] Copenhagen who Christianly have loved him more sincerely than I have—but of course I have been neither a journalist nor an agitator.
*The reader will recall that this was written in 1847. The world upheavals in 1848 have forced the understanding considerably closer.
**Everyone who is at all dialectical will see that it is impossible to attack “the system” from a point within the system. But outside there is only one indubitably seminal point: the single individual, ethically and religiously, existentially accentuated.
*And now in 1848!
**For an interpretation of the present age, see, for example, A Literary Review by S. K., Copenhagen 1846, the last section.92
*See Either/Or, I, p.1, first Diapsalm; see also p. 23, “In vain do I resist. My foot slips. My life nevertheless remains a poet-existence” etc.95
**See Either/Or, II, p. 217; see Concluding Postscript, p. 188.96
†This movement from “the poet” to religious existing is basically the movement in the entire work as an author regarded in its totality. See Works of Love (II A, B97) concerning the use again made there of “the poet” as the terminus a quo [point from which] for Christian religious existing. As for the movement, which is described in a series of books, from the philosophical, the systematic, to the simple, that is, the existential, this movement, only in another situation, is essentially the same as from the poet to religious existing.