Soren Kierkegaard

These verbal reflections do not conform to the usual notion of a journal
as a repository for confidences or intimate narratives; they bring to the genre
a sort of shimmering ambiguity. It is more the exception than the rule for
a journal entry to report something about its author straightforwardly and
without interruption, though of course it can happen, as in this example
dated October 29, 1837: “The reason that I like autumn so much more
than spring is that one looks at heaven in the autumn—in the spring one
looks at the earth.” Here we seem quite literally to have solid ground under
our feet, but before long we are forced seventy thousand fathoms u pin the
air, and in an entry such as the next one we haven’t the faintest idea ofwho
it is who cannot abstract fromwhichself: “Death and damnation, I can ab-
stract from everything, butnot from myself: I cannot even forget myself when
I sleep.”
To the dismay of the biographer, Kierkegaard cannot be pursued “histor-
ically.” He has left behind nothing but fragments and scattered traces, and
indeed it seems as if, from the very first moment he put pen to paper, he
adopted free, fictionalized production as his preferred mode. To make use
of a distinction he himself later formulated (and emphasized as a decisive
underpinning of every artistic work), Kierkegaard did notremember,herecol-
lected. Thus his “journal” or “diary” is perhaps best described with the words
chosen by the editor of “The Seducer’s Diary” when he had to assign that
work to a specific genre. According to this fictive editor, “his diary is not
historically precise or a straightforward narrative; it is not indicative but
subjunctive.” And so it is. Peter Christian—he couldremember; his diary was
a “straightforward narrative” and was thus “historically precise.” External
events and inner feelings were subjected to a reasonably sequential presenta-
tion whose reliability was buttressed both by references to verifiable dates
and locations as well as by a plainspoken narrative levelheadedness. With
Peter Christian, we generally know where things stand. Things are com-
pletely different with his younger brother, whose diary was “subjunctive”
and therefore was almost constantly pitching and tossing between actual
events and the artistic reproduction of those events.
In a so-called resolution which he penned in his study, dating it precisely
at six o’clock in the evening on July 13, 1837, Kierkegaard clarified his
current situation as a writer. “I have often wondered why I have such great
reluctance to commit various observations to paper,” the young man con-
fessed at the outset. When he reread his journal entries they seemed to him
either to be so “completely telegraphic” as to be almost meaningless, or to
be “entirely random,” because they had presumably been accumulated over
a considerable period of time and had then suddenly been written down,
as if it “had been a sort of day of reckoning, but that’s wrong.” In reading