Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

"If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair? If it were thus, if there were no sacred bond uniting mankind, if one generation rose up after another like the leaves of the forest, if one generation succeeded the other as the songs of birds in the woods, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea or the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless whim, if an eternal oblivion always lurked hungrily for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches - how empty and devoid of comfort would life be!"

Søren Kierkegaard lived in a melancholy way and this biography of him inescapably has the same character. Kierkegaard exemplified human life as a trial at the end of which lies the eternal, towards which people whose vision remains clear try to strive. That he lived during a period in which Europe was rapidly modernizing in every manner makes his philosophy more interesting. He saw a world in which most people, including Christians whose religious belief tended towards the merely aesthetic, lived under what he saw as a form of illusion. To pull people out of an illusion you have to do so gently and also be willing to step consciously into the illusion with them. Kierkegaard wrote evocatively and reflected deeply on his inward state, before passing away at the young age of 42. In that time he thought, a lot, about how to live well as a human being. Perhaps in a less confused age the answers would have come more naturally and with less pain inflicted on himself and others.

This biography is structured atypically, in that it does not follow a chronology but rather dips in and out of episodes from his life. What did Kierkegaard do? Not much other than write, preach, reflect on minor (to us) personal dramas while anxiously awaiting his final departure from the world, something that he always felt to be right around the corner. Kierkegaard did not exactly live a cheerful life. But he strived hard to find meaning in suffering and see joy on the other side of it. In that, he could be called either a Platonist, Stoic, Sufi or whatever one prefers � the basic outlook bears much in common. This biography is worth it for the elegant prose, as well as the moving excerpts from Kierkegaard's own books.