Soren Kierkegaard

some of his romantic models—for example, super-stylists like Jean Paul,
E.T.A. Hoffmann, and G. C. Lichtenberg—Kierkegaard had indeed en-
countered informal, easy writing of a rambling sort, and now he thought
he was able to explain why it had seemed to him “unpleasant, indeed almost
repulsive” to commit his ideas to paper: “The reason was evidently that in
each instance I was thinking of the possibility of publishing these thoughts,
which perhaps would have required that they be given a more detailed
treatment, an inconvenience with which I had no desire to be bothered.
And while I was suffering from the exhaustion brought on by abstract possi-
bilities (a certain literary nausea), the aroma of the idea and the mood evapo-
rated. I think it would be better, instead, to take notes more frequently,
permitting the ideas to emerge still bearing the umbilical cord of their origi-
nal mood.” In so doing he hoped to achieve the “fluency in writing, in
written articulation, which I possess to some extent in speaking.” Further-
more, as he had read in Hamann, there were “ideas that a person gets only
once in his life.” The young man concluded: “This sort of backstage prac-
tice is surely necessary for every person who is not so gifted that his develop-
ment is a sort of public event.”
Kierkegaard’s own development had not yet become “public,” but it is
clear that the twenty-four-year-old university student was thinking about
his writing in relation to a public forum. And this was precisely the reason
he felt that individual journal entries had to be given more of the character
of finished pieces than he had been able to manage—and the result had
been that the ideas had evaporated while he waited and worried about their
form. From now on, things were going to be different. He would write
more frequently, informally, and impressionistically, so that he could catch
ideas in flight, capture the aromatic moment, the sight, the sound, the life.
These exercises were carried out in twenty-six extremely varied note-
books, large and small, which he employed from 1833 until 1846, titling
ten of them alphabetically with double capital letters: AA, BB, CC, DD,
EE, FF, GG, HH, JJ, and KK. He assigned titles to the notebooksafterhe
had started using them, probably in the latter part of 1842, and accordingly
they do not reflect any simple chronological sequence. Indeed, he used
several of the notebooks simultaneously and wrote in others on the right-
hand (recto) pages from front to back, then turned them over and wrote
on the other (verso) pages from back to front. The other sixteen notebooks
contain travel diaries, notes on lectures at the university, and excerpts from
Kierkegaard’s often quite varied reading. The journals are an extensive and
very miscellaneous complex, an experimental laboratory that was as much
existentialascontrived—and as time went by, this laboratory assumed vital
importance in Kierkegaard’s continuing process of self-understanding.