Soren Kierkegaard

plete with a silk ribbon so that it could be hung from the Christmas tree in
every spiritless bourgeois home: “Then there would have been something
in the air all over town, as if things were really astir; the crush of coaches
driving out to congratulate the professor would have been so great that for
days it would have been impossible... to get across the Knippelsbro [the
bridge to Christianshavn]. Professor Heiberg was just the man for that!”
A couple of months after he wrote these lines, which are from early
November 1847, Kierkegaard hit on the idea of publishing a work by sub-
scription. “I have ascertained that the subscription arrangement has the fol-
lowing advantages, ”he wrote optimistically. For one thing, this sort of an
arrangement would help guarantee that even a large book would be read,
because it would be sent to the readers in short installments, and for another,
it would help create a quiet, intimate relation between author and reader.
Kierkegaard therefore decided to circulate the following invitation: “Since
I have been pleased to learn that my edifying discourses, which address
themselves to the individual, are still read by many individuals, I have con-
sidered accommodating these readers of mine, and perhaps gaining addi-
tional individuals as readers, by permitting such edifying writings to appear
in the future in smaller increments and on a subscription basis....There-
fore, starting July 1 of this year I intend to publish quarterly, under the
general titleEdifying Readingsmall volumes of 96 or at most 128 pages....
S. Kierkegaard. January 1848. ”As a special attraction, Kierkegaard held
forth the prospect he would “round off each little volume in lyrical or
dialectical fashion as a small unit in itself, so that it could be viewed and
read as an individual book.”
None of this came to anything, but there were echoes of advertising lan-
guage toward the end of April 1848, when Kierkegaard, at work on the
manuscript ofThe Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, titled it “New
Discourses on the Lilies and the Bird. ”The text on which Kierkegaard
wrote his text was Matthew 6:24–34. This was one of the texts Kierkegaard
loved most and had treated quite a number of times before, particularly in
the second part ofEdifying Discourses in Various Spirits, which appeared
March 13, 1847, and in the first part ofChristian Discourses,whichcameout
on April 26, 1848. This time, however, something special was to happen:
“These discourses will... develop the conflict between poetry and Chris-
tianity: how in one sense, Christianity is prose—in comparison to poetry,
which is desiring, enchanting, narcotizing, which transforms the reality of
life into an oriental dream, as when a young girl might wish to lie on a sofa
all day and let herself be entranced—and yet it is indeed the poetry of eter-
nity. ”It is clear that the depictions of nature must be imbued with more
“poetic hues and splendid coloration ”than they had been given earlier, not