Soren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard the copyist answers these questions in an extremely original
way in the third chapter ofThe Point of View, which he entitled “The Role
of Governance in My Writings. ”He did indeed find it “somewhat embar-
rassing ”to have to talk about himself, but the embarrassment was manage-
able, as is made clear by the following passage, which could rightly be called
Kierkegaard’s “confessions, ”and which therefore deserves some attention:
“What hasn’t this pen been capable of when it was something that required
daring, enthusiasm, passion almost to the point of madness! And now, when
I must speak of my relation to God, of what is repeated every day in my
prayers, which give thanks for the indescribable things he has done for me,
so infinitely much more than I could ever have expected;... when I now
must speak of this, a poetic impatience awakens in my soul. With more
determination than that king who cried ‘my kingdom for a horse,’ and with
a blessed determination that he lacked, I would give my all, including my
life, in order to find something more blessed for thought to find than for
the lover to find the beloved—‘the expression’—and then to die with that
expression on my lips. And look, they are offered to me—thoughts as en-
chanting as those fruits in the fabled garden, such rich, warm, passionate
expressions, so soothing to the urge for thankfulness that is within me, so
cooling to the heat of longing. And it seems to me that if I had a winged
pen—indeed, if I had ten of them—I would not be able to keep up with
the rapid pace at which the riches are offered to me. But then when I take
up my pen, I am for a moment unable to move it, just as one speaks of
being unable to move one’s foot. In this state, not a line about this makes
it onto paper. It is as if I heard a voice saying to me: ‘Stupid man! What is
he thinking of? Doesn’t he know that obedience is dearer to God than the
fat of rams? Perform the whole thing as an obligatory task.’ Then I become
completely calm. Then there is time to write every letter with my slower
pen, almost meticulously. And if that poetic passion reawakens in me for a
moment, then it is as if I heard a voice speaking to me as a teacher speaks
to a boy, when he says ‘Now hold the pen properly and write each letter
with equal care.’ And then I can do it, then I dare do nothing else. Then I
write every word, every line, almost totally unaware of the next word and
the next line. And then, when I read it through afterwards, it satisfies me
in a very different way. For even if one or another ardent expression has
eluded me, what has been produced is something else—not the product of
a poetic or intellectual passion, but the passion of the fear of God, and for
me it is worship of God.”
The text itself displays what it wishes to demonstrate. It seeks “the expres-
sion ”that must be enclosed in quotation marks to protect its profound singu-
larity, but it instead discovers “the expressions, ”a turbulent upwelling of
metaphors that make Kierkegaard’s confessional text into an aesthetic text