Soren Kierkegaard

acquired the sure grasp provided by experience, and ideas rushed in on him
from every quarter, like a meteor shower: “One thought succeeds another;
no sooner do I think it and want to write it down, than a new one comes—
hold on to it, gras pit—madness, insanity!”
Consequently, Kierkegaard’s journal entries most often have only loose
thematic connections with one another—or none at all: A shrimpmonger
can easily station herself right next to the dogma of the incarnation. An
entry dated “14th Sept. 35” is typical: “Difficulties not only bind people
together, they also produce a beautiful inner communion, just as when the
cold of winter produces on window panes figures that are erased by the
sun’s warmth.” This is a theme that invited variations, and five months later,
“Jan. 36,” Kierkegaard made another attempt: “Difficulties bind people to-
gether and produce beauty and harmony in the relationships of life, just as
the magic of winter’s cold conjures onto window panes the flowers that
will vanish with warmth.” Many journal entries share an inclination for the
lapidary, the trenchant zinger, and have a teasing partiality for a paradoxical
fillip in the final phrase. A typical example of this can be found on an un-
dated slip of paper: “Someone dies at the very moment that he has proven
that Hell’s punishment is eternal, caught in his own theory. Remarkable
transition from theory to practice.” Here the reader more than suspects
that Kierkegaard has taken his inspiration from Møller’s preferred mode of
expression, the “random thought,” which Møller had termed “a sort of
hermaphrodite,” because it was “half poetry, half prose.” At one point in
1838, one such hermaphrodite of the more theological sort found its way
onto paper: “That God could create beings who were free in relation to
himself is the cross which philosophy could not bear and upon which it has
remained hanging.” Another entry appeals a bit more to the senses, but is
no less edifying: “The distant baying of a hound, calling to faraway, friendly,
and familiar places, provides the most beautiful proof of the immortality of
the soul.”
Tucked in among these carefully calibrated sentences we also encounter
brief statements that can lodge themselves in the back of the brain and
engender altogether too much reflection, precisely because what is said
doesn’t really make any sense: “The moon is the earth’s conscience.” And
then of course there are flighty little sayings that have simply alighted on
the paper by accident: “P.S.: Now and then I get a strange desire to make
an entrechat with my legs, to sna pmy fingers, and then die.” Or bizarre,
unnecessary, helpful hints: “One way to prevent the theft of your watch:
Let the hair nearest your neck grow, braid it into two pigtails which encircle
your neck, and hang your watch from it.”