One Thing
A good friend of mine has found occasion to quote Kierkegaard on almost every occasion. On account of this friend, an utterly decent man, I filed an item in the back of my mind to pick up something of Kierkegaard and meet him for myself. Of course I had two unspoken, but prominent, impressions of Kierkegaard also in the back of my mind, and these date back many years. The first brings a fear of dense prose and compact ideas stretched into long threads of meandering exploration. Such imagery came through a certain tone of voice, a subtle turning of eye brows and lowing of posture, all of which shaded the few, or fewer, words, something like, “whoa. Kierkegaard.” But the second impression comes from similar nonverbal cues, of near-contempt and even ridicule for a thing called “Existentialism,” a category I somehow knew held claim on Kierkegaard. And so, by means of these two impressions, both phantoms, years passed without my having met him....