Soren Kierkegaard

bills, only sixteen are included in the auction catalog .Blicher’s poetry ap-
pears on the bills from 1836, but is not in the catalog, nor is Holberg’sPeder
Paarsor Heine’sTragedies .For another thing, Kierkegaard’s reading was
unusually varied and disconnected .He read zigzag style, surfing and zapping
from one point to another, and he honestly confessed his selective tenden-
cies .“When I read a book,” he wrote in an entry from January 13, 1838,
“it is not so much the book itself which pleases me as the infinite possibilities
that must have existed at every point, the complex story, rooted in the
author’s individual personality, in his studies, et cetera.” Kierkegaard was
an active reader who was not satisfied with opening a book, but stepped
into the book himself, with his entire personality, so to speak, in order to
involve himself totally with the work .Even texts ingested in quite small
doses were enough to set up powerful oscillations within his productive
fantasy, and this helped confirm his own “thesis,” put forward in March
1837, to the effect that “great geniuses” cannot really read a book, because
“when they read they always develop themselves more than they under-
stand the author.”
And so did Kierkegaard: He developed himself as he read .Regardless of
whether he held in his hands the most sublime poetry or sheer cock-and-
bull stories, serious literature or trash, scholarly works or nonsense, he de-
veloped himself—as an author .He managed to assemble a remarkably mis-
cellaneous library in his head, up front in his consciousness, out near his
temporal lobes, from which his fabulous memory could conjure forth the
most varied assortment of works, juxtaposing them with lightning swiftness.
The talent for imitation, the perfect pitch, the ability to seize hold of de-
tails—all these contributed to make Kierkegaard into Kierkegaard, there
can be no doubt of that.
At the same time, however, we are therefore entitled to have our doubts
about how Kierkegaardian Kierkegaard really was.