Soren Kierkegaard

days earlier, on June 13, 1844, a gentleman by the name of Johannes Clima-
cus had offered for sale hisPhilosophical Fragments or A Fragment of Philosophy,
164 pages, for a price of eighty shillings, which taken by itself was a manage-
able expense—unless five days before that one had spent three marks and
forty-eight shillings on Søren Kierkegaard’sThree Edifying Discourses,70
pages, or had spent two marks and thirty-two shillings on the same man’s
Two Edifying Discourses, 60 pages, which had appeared earlier in the year,
on March 5 .In economic respects, as in others, there were significant costs
associated with being “that single individual.”
In addition to its own preface,Prefacescontains eight numbered pieces
that are presented as prefaces to grandly conceived but never written books
or as detailed prospectuses for subscriptions to learned journals that also
never appeared, because Nicolaus Notabene’s wife, though in other ways
quite lovable, was opposed to every sort of publishing activity: “To be an
author when one is a married man, she says, is open infidelity.” Nicolaus
Notabene meekly confides in his reader that within several months of his
wedding he had gradually become “accustomed to the ways of married
life,” but that he was suddenly overcome with an irresistable “desire” to
write and therefore began taking notes and making other preparations .His
wife, however, soon became suspicious and threatened to confiscate every-
thing he wrote and put it to better use—for example, as a backing for her
embroidery or as curling papers for her hair .She rebuffed all sound reason
as mere foolery .Nicolaus Notabene had, however, succeeded in writing
his “introductory paragraph” which in hopes of reconciliation he wanted
to read to his skeptical wife, who to his sheer amazement accepted the
suggestion and delighted him by listening and laughing: “I thought all had
been won .She came over to the table where I was sitting, put her arm
intimately around my neck, and asked me to read a passage over again .I
begin to read, holding the manuscript high enough so that she could follow
along with her eyes .Excellent .I was beside myself, but not yet quite beyond
the passage in question when the manuscript suddenly burst into flames.
Without my having noticed it, she had slid one of the candles under the
manuscript .The flames got the upper hand and nothing could be saved,
my introductory paragraph went up in flames—to universal rejoicing, since
my wife rejoiced for both of us.” After this Nicolaus Notabene received
permission to write—prefaces, but nothing more .That was that.
The tale is a whimsical presentation of Kierkegaard’s own conflict be-
tween the institution of marriage and the instinct of poetry, but his love of
the preface as a genre began very early .On May 17, 1839, he had written
of the “indescribable joy of abandoning all objective thinking” in order,
instead, “properly to lose myself in the lyrical underbrush of the preface”