Soren Kierkegaard

respect.” For it is in fact an artistic feat to be able to transfer to the written
page the cadences of speech, the pauses, the breathing; it is an expressive
act that must capture something fleeting while it is on the wing. Kierkegaard
explains: “It is especially with respect to rhetoric that my punctuation devi-
ates from the norm, because it is quite advanced. I am particularly preoccu-
pied with the architectonic-dialectical aspect, which is simultaneously clear
to the eye in the proportions of the sentences, and to the voice, when one
reads them aloud, as rhythm—and I always have in mind a reader who reads
aloud.” For this same reason he restricted his “use of the comma,” which
put him in “constant conflict with the typesetters, who in their well-mean-
ing way insert commas everywhere, thereby disturbing my sense of
rhythm.” Kierkegaard also had his own way of using the period: “In my
opinion, most Danish stylists use the period altogether incorrectly. They
dissolve their discourse into nothing but short, choppy sentences, but this
has the result of depriving the logical element of the respect that is its due.”
He wanted to see similar respect paid to the question mark, which most
writers did not treat with the requisite restraint: “In general the question
mark is misused in a foolish manner, by being employed in abstract fashion
whenever there is an interrogative clause. I often use semicolons and con-
clude with an omnibus question mark.”
No wonder Kierkegaard was not always welcome at the print shop,
where the young fellows who set the type were surely irritated when he
would suddenly decide to change his customary practice, as evinced in the
entry entitled “My Punctuation from Now On,” which contains instructive
guidelines for changes in his use of the colon and the quotation mark. But he
himself viewed these difficulties as worth the trouble: “I would confidently
submit to a test in which an actor or an orator who is accustomed to modu-
lating his voice would try reading a short selection from my discourses, and
I am convinced that he will admit that much of what he would otherwise
have to decide for himself, much of what is usually explained in stage in-
structions hinted at by the author, he will here find indicated by means of
the punctuation.” One feels a quiet shudder when one thinks of how later
generations—motivated in equal measure by concern about the level of
sales and concern about the level of reading difficulty—have modernized
Kierkegaard’s texts, inserting commas and periods wherever somebody de-
cided it was necessary.
Kierkegaard says that his merit is “the cultivation of lyrical prose”; indeed,
in his writings he has been able “to produce a greater lyrical effect” than
poets have been able to do with their verse. This is a grandiose and unveri-
fiable assertion, but if his prose cannot be directly classified as lyrical, it at any
rate possesses many of the earmarks of the lyrical, including this fundamental