holds onto the seat ahead of him in order to stop the carriage... .No, the
only thing to do is to get out of the carriage oneself and restrain oneself.”
While traveling in one of the new omnibuses—say, the North Star—
Kierkegaard here indicated the dilemma to which his own and every subse-
quent social critique had to be referred: If a critic wants to have the impact
needed in speaking critically about the media, the critique must take place
in the media .If we want to escape from this dilemma, we must therefore
obey Kierkegaard’s instructions, we must get out of the carriage and hold
onto ourselves .And this means that we must hold fast to the little bit of
freedom that the power-hungry media world still must grant the individual:
the local world, conversation, silence .“God’s true intention was that a per-
son was to speak individually with his neighbor or at most with several
neighbors .Man is not greater than that .In every generation there are a few
people who are so gifted and mature that they are justified in using a gigantic
means of communication such as the press .But that before long everyone,
and especially all the second-raters, should use such a means of communica-
tion when they have nothing at all or only nonsense to communicate—
what a disproportion!”
To Travel Is to Write—and Vice Versa
Just about everyone did it, for shorter or longer periods of time and with
varying results, but they all did it—they traveled .But not Kierkegaard .The
painters went south, toward the light, the scents, and the sounds of Italy,
Turkey, and Greece .Intellectuals journeyed to the universities and the li-
braries of Germany and France .Some traveled as far away as was humanly
possible, P .W .Lund made his way to the fossils and giant anthills of Brazil,
and Poul Martin Møller had been in China where he wrote poetry about
the black Danish bread he missed so sorely .And finally there was Hans
Christian Andersen—teased by Kierkegaard because he was more apt to
“rush off in a coach and tour Europe than to look into the history of
hearts”—who in fact did travel so far and wide (including into the history
of the heart, for that matter) that he spent all of ten years outside the borders
of his native land.
Railroads were the great construction projects of the age .They began in
England in 1830 and soon spread to the European continent, making it
possible for the younger generation to travel to lands that their fathers had
had to content themselves with dreaming and poetizing about .Kierkegaard
never saw the part of the world that lay south of Berlin .So he had to read
his way to an understanding of how things really were in the Greece where