Soren Kierkegaard

into the ninth notebook the text dissolves into hesitant little sketches, out-
lines, and key words .At this point he put the draft aside to focus onTwo
Edifying DiscoursesandPhilosophical Fragments, which apparently made their
way onto paper quite easily, so in April 1844 he could return to his unfin-
ished manuscript .He edited it and, in mid-May 1844, wrote the fair copy
in his own hand .During this editing phase he revised his text on several
levels .For example, sidewise on a page in the seventh notebook he wrote:
“Replace ‘triviality’ with ‘spiritlessness’ throughout.” At another point he
had originally written the following with reference to the psychological
observer: “Now what matters is quiet, silence, avoiding notice, so that one
rests as quietly as a fleck of dust on a girl’s bosom,” but the fair copy chastely
avoided this passage .The heavy paper on which the fair copy was written
also seemed to demand greater self-control than had the cheap paper in the
school notebooks .If we hold some of the early pages of the fair copy up to
a light we can make out a circular watermark, bearing around its margin
this authoritative Latin motto:PROPATRIAEIUSQUELIBERTATE—that is, “for
the fatherland and its freedom”—a not entirely unironic sentiment, by the
way, when we take into consideration the irrational forces that lurk within
the book’s subject matter, anxiety .The fair copy had also included a twelve-
page preface that Kierkegaard decided rather late in the process to eliminate
from the work, and in the upper right-hand corner of the first page of the
manuscript we can read the reason: “N.B. This is not to be used because it
would distract attention from the matter at hand .Therefore I have written
a little preface that is to be printed with the book.” The more appropriate
preface is two pages long and contains so many deletions and additions that
we must admire the typesetter for having coped with it successfully .The
rejected preface was inserted as the seventh preface in the bookPrefaces,
where its unruliness is not the least bit distracting.
Kierkegaard in fact spent less than four months on the manuscript ofThe
Concept of Anxiety, which even for him was so expeditious that in an
afterword to the book (which he considered but never used) he openly
acknowledged that “the present work has been composed rather quickly.”
Despite its seemingly rather taut composition, it is also an extremely com-
plex work, at some points close to unreadable, and absolutely one of the
best placesnotto begin reading Kierkegaard.
A look at the draft confirms the claim that the book was “composed
rather quickly.” For example, it is clear from the “Introduction” contained
in the first notebook that the work was originally to have been entitled
“On/The Concept of Anxiety./ A Pure and Simple Psychological Reflection
with Respect to / the Dogmatic Problem of Original Sin./by/
S. Kierkegaard / M.A.” Thus Kierkegaard had intended to publish the work