Soren Kierkegaard

own works at least two times—indeed, some portions even three or four
times—but there were also the “meditations” when he took walks, which
were so conducive to his productivity that when he arrived home, he often
had the work finished, in fact he had even “committed its stylistic form to
memory.”
Kierkegaard’s indignation at the accusation of being a “hack” is under-
standable, and the charge is so erroneous that it is easy to forgive him for his
self-congratulatory documentation of the unreasonableness of the charges.
“Thus, there were times,” he writes, with extravagant self-consciousness,
“when I could sit for hours, enamored with the sound of language—when,
of course, it resonates with the pregnancy of thought. Thus I could sit for
hours at a time, ah, like a flautist who entertains himself with his flute. Most
of what I have written has been spoken aloud many, many times, often
perhaps scores of times; it was heard before it was written down. I have
lived and enjoyed and experienced so much in the evolution of these
thoughts and their quest for form that the structure of my sentences could
be called my world of memories.” And earlier, in one of the letters he wrote
to Boesen from Berlin, Kierkegaard had noted that he had “written another
large portion ofEither/Or,” but that it had not “gone so quickly” because
it was “a purely poetic production that makes quite particular demands that
one be in the proper mood.”
For the most part he was indeed in the proper mood. Who else could
move so easily from the charming to the demonic, from sentimentality to
a cynical snort? Who else could manage an everyday conversational tone
even when dealing with the subtlest abstractions? Who else could situate
platitudes or uproarious comedy just a line and a half after the most recon-
dite profundities? Or withdraw, become diffuse, vague, and incomprehensi-
ble—and then in the next instant snap his fingers with a seductive stylistic
fillip, inspire his pen, and become so intensely captivating that the reader
simply loses track of himself? In sum, what Danish writer had ever produced
anything so fertile and prodigious? And then they call it “hack writing”!
His pride deeply wounded, in 1847 Kierkegaard went to extremes to
compose an entire series of entries about the originality he has expressed
via his punctuation. Here he explains that with respect to spelling he submits
“unconditionally to authority (Molbech),” and mentions Christian Mol-
bech’sDanish Dictionary, which he would never dream of “wishing to cor-
rect, because I know that I lack expertise in this area.” With respect to
punctuation, on the other hand, he is equally unyielding and serves as his
own authority: “The whole of my makeup as a dialectician with an unusual
rhetorical sense, all my quiet conversations in the company of my thoughts,
my practice of reading aloud—all this necessarily makes me first-rate in this