Page:Selections from the writings of Kierkegaard.djvu/17

 lay on them as a curse, instead of his blessing. Kierkegaard calls it "the great earthquake, the terrible upheaval, which suddenly forced on me a new and infallible interpretation of all phenomena." He began to suspect that he had been chosen by Providence for an extraordinary purpose; and with his abiding filial piety he interprets his father's death as the last of many sacrifices he made for him; "for he died, not away from me, but  me, so that there might yet, perchance, become something of me." Crushed by this thought, and through the "new interpretation" despairing of happiness in this life, he clings to the thought of his unusual intellectual powers as his only consolation and a means by which his salvation might be accomplished. He quickly absolved his examination for ordination (ten years after matriculation) and determined on his magisterial dissertation.

Already some years before he had made a not very successful debut in the world of letters with a pamphlet whose queer title "From the MSS, of One Still Living" reveals Kierkegaard's inborn love of mystification and innuendo. Like a Puck of philosophy, with somewhat awkward bounds and a callow manner, he had there teased the worthies of his times; and, in particular, taken a good fall out of Hans Christian Andersen, the poet of the Fairy Tales, who had aroused his indignation by describing in somewhat lachrymose fashion the struggles of genius to come into its own. Kierkegaard himself was soon to show the truth of his own dictum that "genius does not whine but like a thunderstorm goes straight counter to the wind."

While casting about for a subject worthy of a more sustained effort — he marks out for study the legends of Faust, of the Wandering Jew, of Don Juan, as representatives of certain basic views of life; the Conception of Satire among the Ancients, etc., etc., — he at last becomes aware of his affinity with Socrates, in whom he found that rare harmony between theory and the conduct of life which he hoped to attain himself.