“[P]sychoanalysts, historians, and students of human nature seem unable to unveil the mystery of Sören Kierkegaard’s private life. . . . [T]he safest conclusion may be that the life of the spirit was to him the all-dominating concern to which everything else must be sacrificed. He felt called upon to do the ‘extraordinary thing’ but as a writer and Christian, his inability to follow his heart’s longing added to the painful memories of this penitent sinner. . . .
“In his diaries he calls himself a Janus whose one face laughs while the other one weeps. As a young man of twenty-five he wrote, ‘I too have both the tragic and the comic in me: I am witty and the people laugh-but I cry.’ A year earlier, his diary had spoken of practicing ‘vengeance upon the world’ by acting gaily and consoling others but hiding his own anxiety, hoping that ‘if I can continue with this to my last day in life, I shall have had my revenge.’ He experienced, indeed, an oceanic feeling of anxiety which modern depth psychology calls a sense of unrelieved suspense. An entry in his diary, dated 1839, reads, ‘When I am alone in my kayak like a Greenlander, on the world’s immense ocean, as much above the waters as underneath and always in God’s hands, then it does occur to me to harpoon a sea monster on some good occasion . . . but I don’t have the skill to do so.’ He was no Captain Ahab to attack Moby Dick, the white whale representing evil. His spiritual abode was the same melancholy that had haunted his father: ‘What the English say of their home, I have to say about my sadness; my sadness is my castle’ (1839).
“It was both the burden and pride of Kierkegaard to be a writer, and the many facets of his strange personality expressed themselves brilliantly in his work. He spoke as a poet and scholar, seducer and moralist; he was joyful and witty but also desperately sad; a passionate fighter and a detached observer of others and himself, he was nothing to the exclusion of anything else. Like the possessed man in the parable of the Gadarene swine, he was ‘many’ during the first phase of his writing, and it is one more of his life’s mysteries that these almost unbearable tensions did not explode in the complete disorder of mental derangement.
“This uncanny versatility of his genius expressed itself in the scintillating varieties of his style. Each time it is perfectly adapted to the overtones it wishes to convey. When he makes the seducer speak, his vocabulary is glib and persuasive; the faithful husband’s words are clear and firm; the somber tone of his melancholy spreads a note of gloom; his religious ecstasies are truly infectious; his elegant humor is of the most facile kind; his vitriolic attacks upon church and clergy rally the reader to intense partisanship; and his sermons speak even to modern man’s condition with the pathos of Biblical authority. And finally, when he wants to be nothing but the skeptical critic, he conveys an air of superiority that is convincing because it rises not from doubt but from a newly won and profound faith.”
— from William Hubben, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka: Four Prophets of Our Destiny (Collier Books, 1952)