Kierkegaard's Journals

Even in the abridged form of the English translation the Journals of Kierkegaard are not to be read at a sitting, or even in a series of consecutive sittings. Their thought is at once too concentrated and their range too vast. Covering his jottings and reflections de omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis over twenty of his most creative years, the Journals could perhaps be assimilated in scarcely less a span. Not, therefore, a book to borrow. But emphatically a book to possess, to browse in and to browse upon, to open and to close at well-spaced intervals which allow ample time for digestion, for assimilation and rejection. A book to feed upon, for it contains in epigrams and tabloid essays the marrow of his thought. But for that very reason a book which, consumed gluttonously, must infallibly produce biliousness and dyspepsia accompanied by dizziness and nausea.There will be some who find Kierkegaard indigestible and nauseating anyway. And that not only for the reasons which he himself anticipated; the reasons which would reflect upon his readers rather than upon himself. Not only, that is to say, because 'every man is afraid of the truth,' and 'between man and truth lies mortification,' or because he sought 'to tear the veil from human twaddle and from the conceited self-complacency with which men try to convince themselves and others that man really wants to know the truth' (1153). Not only because of the 'scandal of the Cross' which he proclaimed, fully understanding that if you 'act just once so that your action expresses the fact that you fear God alone and do not fear men: you at once "scandalise" people,' and that 'whatever avoids "scandalising" is only what, out of fear of men and human respect, conforms entirely with worldliness' (1116

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• Kierkegaard's view of death

  Julia Watkin•History of European Ideas•1990

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