Soren Kierkegaard

these entries a salient place in the reader’s consciousness. They became in-
troductory sentences, redolent with fateful significance. Where these entries
had been located in the journalsbeforeBarfod began his cutting and pasting
cannot readily be determined. Indeed, even Barfod himself was apparently
not entirely certain, for he reported: “Duringthe summer of 1838,afterhis
birthday in May, butbeforehis father’s death in August, the deceased appears
to have wanted to sum up, in brief sketches, the story of his life up to the
age of majority [in those days, age twenty-five], on three sheets of fine
stationery, gilt-edged in small octavo size.”
The first three entries and the beginning of the fourth (the one about the
great earthquake) are on three sheets of gilt-edged paper. These sheets, the
reverse sides of which had not been written upon, were glued together at
some point: The first sheet, with the childhood motto, is glued to the sec-
ond sheet that has the motto about youth; this has in turn been glued to
the third sheet, that has the Shakespeare quotation plusthe first two linesof
the entry about the great earthquake that was cut off immediately below
the line ending with the words “a new, infallible.” In the first journal entry,
the word “Childhood,” which is underlined with a wavy line, is written
the same size as “Youth” in the second journal entry and “25 Years Old”
in the third. Since the writing is uniform and the journal entries are on the
same sort of paper, they were in all probability written at the same time. It
is not known who glued them together, but by all indications it was Barfod,
who may have found the three pieces of paper lying together. In fact, in
January 1838 Kierkegaard had had plans of writing “a short story with mot-
toes composed by myself”; with a little imagination, these “mottoes” could
be the journal entries in question.
To this bundle of loose ends must be added the bothersome fact that the
manuscript of these journal entries disappeared after the type had been set
for Barfod’s edition. The next set of editors, Heiberg and Kuhr, therefore
had to make do with reprinting the entry about the great earthquake from
Barfod’s edition, situating it in the elastic group of “loose papers” from
before the year 1838. In February 1911, however, the vanished original
manuscripts of the first three journal entries and the first two lines of earth-
quake entry turned up. They had been at Reitzel’s Bookshop, which now
turned them over to the university library. To his great chagrin, however,
Reitzel was compelled to report that he had been able to findneitherthe
remainder of the earthquake entrynorthe two succeeding entries, which
Barfod (and, with him, posterity) had linked to the great earthquake.
These technicalities are decisive for interpreting the great earthquake,
whose specific significance depends on when it was written down. What,
in fact, were the events that Kierkegaard introduced with his dramatic