I had intended, for some years, to write a book. The book was to have set out, at greater length than the present volume can permit and with more attention to the technical particulars than my powers of attention will at present sustain, certain reflections upon the concept of anxiety — that mood, namely, in which a man finds himself unable to determine, with any of the precision he is accustomed to apply in his ordinary affairs, what it is that he is anxious about; in which the object of the anxiety is, on examination, nothing, and yet the anxiety is, on examination, infinitely far from being nothing. I had drafted, over a course of some months, a preface to the book; the preface had grown longer than I had intended, and had begun, by the time I noticed it, to anticipate so much of the book's content that I was forced to consider whether the preface had not, by an unintended substitution, taken the place of the book.

I considered the question for an evening, sitting in the room in which I have lately conducted such of my reflections as require no instrument but the lamp. By the close of the evening I had concluded that the substitution had indeed occurred. The book was not, at the present hour, to be written; the preface was the entire content I had, in the present hour, the resources to bring to the subject; and the only remaining question was whether to publish the preface alone, on its own, as the book, or to suppress it in the hope that the book it had been written for would, in some later season, present itself to be written under it.

I have, after a further evening's reflection, chosen the first course. The reasons for the choice are the substance of the present volume. The reader who proceeds to § 3 will find them set out. The reader who is impatient is requested to set the volume down at the present point, with the publisher's assurance that he has not, by his impatience, missed anything which the remainder of the volume will undertake to recover for him.

I had supposed, when I first drafted the preface of which the present volume is the chief survivor, that the preface stood to its book as a man's introduction stands to the acquaintance he has effected; that is, as a polite preliminary which the substance of the acquaintance was, in due course, to redeem. I have since come to the suspicion that the relation is rather a different one. The preface, considered before the book has been written, stands to its book not as introduction to acquaintance but as anticipation to the thing anticipated; and the anticipation has, with respect to the thing anticipated, a property which the introduction does not have with respect to the acquaintance: namely, that the anticipation can be perfectly entire without the anticipated thing ever supervening. The introduction without the acquaintance is an awkwardness; the anticipation without the supervention is, on the contrary, a state of perfect equilibrium, in which the anticipating subject possesses the full content of the anticipation, with no diminution by the actual content's having yet appeared.

A preface in this state has the curious property of being, with respect to its book, both innocent and full. It is innocent because the book has not yet been written, and the preface therefore does not yet know what the book will say; it is full because the preface, in not yet knowing what the book will say, has the whole of the book before it as undetermined possibility, and so possesses the book in the way in which a dream possesses its content — entire, undisturbed, and incapable of being verified against anything more determinate. The preface dreams the book. The dreaming is the preface's proper office. The actual writing of the book would, by being the writing of a determinate thing, terminate the dreaming, and would substitute for the dream the small and irreducible thing which any actual book turns out, in the event, to be.

It will perhaps appear that the foregoing paragraph commends the prefaces and disparages the books; that in pronouncing the preface full and the book small I have, by an inversion familiar in the speculative literature of the past decade, raised the lower to the place of the higher. The appearance is not the substance. The preface that has remained a preface, declining the book, has its fullness only at the cost of having never been put to the proof; the book, in being written, surrenders the fullness of possibility for the smaller compass of the actual, and in the surrender becomes the only thing that can, properly, be read. Between the two, the choice is not, in the writer's case, an indifferent one; it is the choice of an author either to remain in the perpetually preliminary or to risk the diminution of the actual. The present volume's awkward position is that, by an arrangement which neither the author nor the preface had originally contemplated, the preface has become the actual; the dreaming has become the work; and the diminution which the writing of a book ordinarily produces has occurred in a form for which the customary names are not, on inspection, available.

I had wished to set this paragraph down before going further, since the matters which the remainder of the volume addresses — the doctrine of Mediation, the dignity of the promise, the writing-as-the-bird-sings, the silence of the room when the writing has been finished — are all matters which, on inspection, turn upon the same distinction: the distinction between an anticipation that has remained an anticipation and an anticipation that has, by the activity of its agent, undergone the diminution into actuality. The cultivated reader is asked to carry the distinction with him into the sections that follow.

Let me say, at once and without preparation, that a preface which has come to stand in the place of its book is not, on every occasion, an unsuccessful preface. It is, on most occasions, an unsuccessful preface; but it is not always so. There are subjects upon which a preface is the only literary form proper to the subject — subjects, namely, of which it can be said that any book one might write upon them would, in the writing, have inverted the relation in which the subject most properly stands to its writer. The subject in question would, by being made the matter of a book, have been reduced to the dimensions of what can be handled in a book, and in being so reduced, would have ceased to be the subject which had required the writing. Anxiety, I came in due course to suspect, was one of these subjects.

I shall not labour the point. I observe only that a man who has spent some years in the imagining of a book on anxiety, and has at last set down a preface, and has found that the preface is, in respect of the imagined book, simultaneously more than he could have hoped for and less than the book would have been, has at any rate this much in his favour: that he has, in the form of the preface, performed at the same scale at which his subject would, in any case, have permitted him to perform. The preface has not betrayed the subject. The book might, by its very dimensions, have done so.

I am aware, in setting down these remarks, that the literary procedure I have described — to publish a preface without its book — is not, in our time, a procedure which the cultivated public is in the habit of receiving with patience. The cultivated public expects a book. It has been led to expect a book by a literature in which the announcement of a book has come, by long custom, to take the place of the book announced. The public, perceiving the announcement, supposes the book to be forthcoming; the public, on receiving in due course not the book but a further announcement of the book, supposes the book to be still more nearly forthcoming; the public, after a long course of such supposings, has, by an entirely natural development, come to regard the supposing as the having, and to suppose itself, on the strength of the announcements, to be in possession of a literature of which no volume has, properly speaking, ever been delivered.

The procedure has its conveniences. To the announcer it offers the dignity of authorship without the labour. To the public it offers the satisfactions of readership without the inconvenience of reading. To the booksellers and reviewers it offers an indefinite stream of occasions upon which to exercise their respective offices, the announcement being susceptible of repeated notice while the book, were it ever to appear, could be noticed only once. To the speculative thought of our age it offers the elegant feature that what has been announced as the next development of the System has, in the announcement, already been the next development of the System, and is in this way both projected and accomplished by the same speech-act. The Logical System, of which I had the honour to publish the first instalment two New Years since, and whose second instalment I have twice postponed without complaint from any subscriber, is a small example. The Aesthetic, the Ethical, the Dogmatic, and the System tout court, of all of which the announcements have for years sustained our literature, are larger examples. The public has, in respect of every one of these, received what was promised; namely, the promise; and there has been no occasion of disappointment.

I record the procedure in this paragraph not in any spirit of accusation. I have, by the seven prefaces published before the present, been a participant in the procedure. I have, in Det logiske System, in Urania, in the Tale for Total-Afholdenheds-Selskabet, in Fire og Tyve Prædikener, in Lyriske Productioner for hiin Enkelte, and in the Philosophiske Overveielser, accepted the office of editor, publisher, compiler, and modest intermediary; I have permitted the books to appear under names other than my own, and the labour of the prefaces, which is the only labour the books contain, to be ascribed to the modest editorial industry of one who merely sees other men's volumes through the press. I have done all this with a clean conscience, on the supposition that the prevailing literary procedure of our age — to publish announcements of works in lieu of works — was the procedure which the cultivated public, on whose understanding I have throughout depended, would acknowledge as the procedure proper to our age. The cultivated public has acknowledged the procedure. The volumes have been received. The undersigned has been the publisher of seven books whose authorship, on the title pages, has been variously assigned, and whose actual authorship has been to no person's serious inconvenience left unspecified.

The present volume is the first of the eight upon which the undersigned has placed his name as author. The reader who has read the foregoing paragraph will appreciate the awkwardness of the position. Having, for seven volumes, conducted myself as the editor and publisher of books whose contents I had myself written, I now publish, on the eighth occasion, a volume in which the contents are, as before, written by me, but in which the title page acknowledges the writing without intermediary. The eighth volume is therefore, of the eight, the only one whose authorship is what it appears to be. It is also, by an unembarrassing consequence, the only one of the eight whose authorship has anything in particular to lose.

I had intended, in this section, to address the doctrine of Mediation, which has, in the systematic writings of our day, become the chief instrument by which the announcement of works is converted into the works announced. The reader will be familiar with the doctrine. He will know that the doctrine teaches that what was, in the previous paragraph, posited as Being passes over, by an internal necessity which the doctrine acknowledges but does not demonstrate, into what is, in the subsequent paragraph, posited as Nothing; and that the passage between the two — the Mediation, namely — is the determination which constitutes the proper content of speculative thought. He will know also that the doctrine, having begun in this modest way in the Logic, has been extended, by a process which the doctrine again acknowledges but does not demonstrate, to the whole of philosophy, the whole of theology, the whole of the literature of the age, and to such departments of practical life as the moral instruction of the young and the conduct of friendships across the boundaries of confessional adherence. The doctrine, in its extended form, is now the most reliable instrument by which the cultivated public of Copenhagen distinguishes those of its members who have understood the speculative thought from those who have not. The instrument is reliable because it requires no further qualification than the willingness, when an embarrassment of the understanding presents itself, to pronounce the word Mediation with a certain solemnity, and to add, by way of explanation, the further word Aufhebung; with which two words the embarrassment is, by the procedure of the doctrine, taken up into a higher resolution which the speaker is not required to articulate, the requirement being that he should not articulate it, since articulation would be a fall back into the lower standpoint from which the doctrine has just delivered him.

I had intended, as I say, to address the doctrine. I find on reflection that the doctrine has, in the foregoing paragraph, addressed itself; that what I had intended to say about it would, if said, have repeated what the doctrine, in its own operation, repeats; and that the proper thing to do, having brought the doctrine into the section by way of intention, is to permit it to leave the section by way of self-exhibition, without my further intervention.

I will permit myself only this. I have an angest of Mediation; I cannot help it. The word affects me not by its meaning, which is, on inspection, indeterminate, but by the uniform repetitiveness of its use, as a man is affected day in and day out by the sound of someone filing a saw. My building, my health, my whole constitution are unfitted for Mediation. I beg the reader, on the present occasion, to spare me from it; and to spare me, in particular, from being the innocent occasion which provides some philosophical chanter the opportunity to recite, like the schoolchild in the choir-door, the tale of how modern philosophy began with Descartes and the tale of how Being and Nothing pooled their deficit and produced Becoming. The tales are known to every man who has stood confirmation at a university. The cultivated reader knows them. I know them. The undersigned would prefer not to be the occasion for their further recitation.

There is, in the speculative literature of our age, no word more often pronounced than the word Overgang — transition; and no word more rarely meant. The systematic writers proceed from one paragraph to the next by transitions which they declare to be necessary, and which, on inspection, turn out to consist in the assurance that the necessity is there, although the demonstration of it has, by an oversight which the writer regrets, been omitted. The reader, having received the assurance, supplies the demonstration himself, by an inward operation that the doctrine has, in advance, named Mediation. The matter then stands as follows: the writer asserts the transition; the reader supplies the necessity; the necessity has been supplied by no one; and the System advances.

I observe, in respect of this procedure, that there is one motion of which the doctrine of transitions can give no account, and which neither writer nor reader, by the operation of Mediation, can perform: namely, the motion by which a writer, having for some seasons drafted in his notebook the headings and the preliminary sketches of a book, sits down and writes the book. This motion is not a transition. It is not the gentle passing-over by which Pure Being is said to slide into Pure Nothing. It is a thing of altogether another order: a discontinuity, a break, a setting of the foot upon ground which was not, at the moment before the setting, ground at all. There is no logical relation of necessity between the heading and the chapter. The heading does not, by its own internal motion, pass over into the chapter. The chapter is written, if it is written, by an act on the part of the writer whose category is neither Being nor Nothing nor Becoming but, if I may venture a Danish word that the speculative philosophers have not yet adopted, Springet — the leap.

The leap has the property that it cannot be anticipated by the System. It cannot be deduced from the heading. It cannot be Mediated. It can only be performed; and the performance is, with respect to all that has preceded it, a piece of fresh activity which the preceding has not, on inspection, made necessary. The cultivated reader will at once observe the consequence. The literature of announcement — that procedure which has occupied the present volume since § 4 — is precisely the literature which has accommodated itself to the absence of the leap. It announces; it postpones; it announces the postponement; it Mediates the announcement and the postponement into a higher unity by which the absence of the leap appears as a higher form of the leap's presence. The leap, which would have been the writing of the actual chapter, is thereby indefinitely deferred. The deferral is not a defect of the procedure; the deferral is the procedure. A literature founded upon transitions has no use for leaps; a literature founded upon leaps has no use for the indefinite postponement which transitions, by their nature, supply.

I record the matter without expecting any of my contemporaries to be moved by it. The doctrine of transitions has been, for a decade, the comfort of the writers and the reassurance of the readers; to introduce in its place the doctrine of the leap would be to disturb the comfort and to withdraw the reassurance, with no compensating gain except that the books, in being written, would at last be books. The cultivated reader will himself judge whether the compensating gain is worth the disturbance.

Let me speak now of the promise. The promise has, in the literature of our age, a particular dignity. A promise has the excellent property that, like courtesy, it costs the one who issues it nothing; and yet the issuer may, without strain to his conscience, allow it to signify a work which is more remarkable than any wonder of the world. The promise has, with respect to the public, a mollifying and pacifying influence; it operates as a distributive medium by which any uneasy concern about the matter being made clear is dispersed. One feels at times a fleeting movement that one ought not, after all, to let the truth stand in a doubtful posture; one feels a responsibility — and then one has a promise to rely upon, and one is secure in a comfortable agreeableness. The matter does not, in any case, properly concern one, and now Mr. X. has promised, decisively for all time, to clarify it as he has clarified everything else. What danger, then, is at hand?

A promise is highly portable; and therefore there is nothing which the swift messengers prefer to carry than a promise. A promise, although it signifies everything, signifies likewise in its courteous form no more than that it furnishes an excellent ingredient in the tea-chatter, inasmuch as the promise, like the punch in the drinking-song, goes the whole evening round the table without the one promising embarrassing the next. A promise is an effervescent powder, by which the whole of humanity is incomparably well served.

I have set down the foregoing paragraphs almost without alteration as they stood in my notebook three years ago, when the present meditation first occurred to me. I find on rereading them that I am no longer in the temper to extend them. The figures — the punch, the effervescent powder, the messenger, the table — would, if I were now writing the paragraphs for the first time, suggest to me a continuation by which the satire could be brought to a fuller fruition. I will not continue. The continuation, were I to undertake it, would constitute a further announcement of a further book; and I have at the present hour no further appetite for the announcement of books.

I add only this. A promise, viewed in light of what was said in the preceding section concerning the leap, is the form by which the substitute economy of our age has rendered the leap unnecessary. The writer, before the question of his book is pressed upon him, anticipates a leap; the writer, on its being pressed upon him, issues a promise; the public, receiving the promise, ceases to press; the leap is therefore not required; and the writer, having issued the promise, is at liberty to spend the remainder of the season in such other occupations as do not require the performance of leaps at all. This is the speculative significance of the promise. It is the postponement of the moment indefinitely, in such a fashion that the postponement is not felt by anyone as a defect — neither by the writer, who has been spared the leap, nor by the public, which has received the assurance that the leap will, in some unspecified hour, be performed by another hand.

What is left, when the announcement and the mediation and the promise have all been declined?

It is not very much. It is, perhaps, the following. There is a manner of writing which I believe was, in an older time, the manner in which books were written. The one who has written a book has thought somewhat over the matter of which he speaks, and supposes, as a consequence, to know it somewhat better than is in general known. He is, moreover, not wholly unacquainted with what has been previously written upon the matter, and exerts himself that every man may have his right. In the absence of the prodigious task of understanding all men, he has chosen, what some will call no doubt provincial and foolish, to understand himself; as now at once, why he wishes to be an author: namely, that the impulse in him is not, what an impulse in spirit never ought to be, an outward-reflected impulse; that he does not, with great solemnity, resolve to write a book in order to help others, since he knows that essentially every man is equally wise, and above all that essentially every man must help himself. Is the impulse on the contrary an inward and inwardly-reflected one, then one writes a book as the bird sings its song, as the tree puts forth its crown; is there anyone who is gladdened by it, so much the better.

I have set down the doctrine. I cannot now demonstrate it; I can only continue, in the next paragraphs, on its assumption. The reader who finds the doctrine implausible is invited to set the volume aside. The reader who finds it merely difficult is invited to proceed.

The bird-singing comparison has, perhaps, suggested to the cultivated reader an excessively serene picture of the writer at his work. I shall, in the present section, correct the suggestion.

The bird does not, in singing its song, encounter the difficulty which the writer, in writing his book, encounters at every sentence. The bird sings what it has, without alternatives; the writer writes what he could, with alternatives at every word. The writer, sitting at his table with the lamp at the level he has set it, the inkstand to his right hand, the manuscript before him, and the next sentence not yet committed, stands — and the metaphor is, I think, exact — at the lip of a small precipice. He looks down. He sees nothing in particular; he sees, that is, the empty page which he is about to fill, and which presents, in the moment before he begins, no inducement and no obstruction, but only the bare possibility of every sentence and the bare impossibility of any. He could write anything. The freedom of his pen, in the moment before the pen descends, is in its purest possible form; it is bounded by nothing except his own resources, and is, in respect of the matter at hand, infinite. He looks at this freedom. He feels, in looking at it, a certain Svimmelhed — a dizziness, that is, of a kind which is not occasioned by the contemplation of physical heights, although it has been observed by those of my acquaintance who suffer from both that the two are not entirely dissimilar.

The dizziness is the writer's portion at every sentence. It is not, in the experienced writer, ordinarily acute; he has, by repeated descents of the pen, learned to act in the presence of it without being detained by it. But it is, even in him, never absent. To sit before the blank page is to be aware that one could, and that the could is not closed off by the having-already-done. The systematic philosophers have not, to my knowledge, addressed this phenomenon. They have proceeded on the assumption that the next sentence is, at every juncture, determined by the previous sentence and by the rules of speculative motion; that the writer is the instrument by which the determination expresses itself; and that the determination, being internal to the matter, leaves the writer no occasion for dizziness. The doctrine is convenient for the publication of large volumes at fixed intervals. It is, on inspection, false. The next sentence is at every juncture not determined by the previous; the writer's freedom is at every juncture prior to the determination he gives it by writing.

It is for this reason that the procedure of announcement and promise has, in the speculative literature of our age, prospered. The procedure protects the writer from the dizziness. To announce a sentence is to be relieved of the obligation of standing at the lip of the precipice while the sentence is composed; the announcement performs, with respect to the public, the office which the sentence would have performed, and the writer is at liberty to remain in the room without the inkstand and the manuscript before him. The whole literature of our age is, in this respect, an enormous device for sparing its authors the experience of freedom which the writing of a book, sentence by sentence, would have required them to undergo. The cultivated reader will perhaps judge that the device has, on the whole, served Danish literature ill; I judge only that it has served Danish authors agreeably, and that the agreeable service is the chief reason for the device's long continuance.

I had not intended to set down the foregoing on the present page. I had intended, in this section, to continue the description of bird-singing with examples drawn from the older literature. The matter of dizziness has, however, asked to be set down here; the cultivated reader will perceive that it follows naturally from the bird-singing doctrine, in that the bird-singing doctrine, fully understood, requires that the writer accept the dizziness as part of the office, and not seek to be relieved of it by the substitute economy. I leave the further description of bird-singing to such readers as may wish to undertake it for themselves.

To want to understand oneself, as I have just said one is bound to do, makes for slow progress and is sufficiently troublesome. What one finds out, whether glad or sad, one assimilates at once in succum et sanguinem. One does not find out, for example, that all the proofs for the immortality of the soul that have been adduced both within and outside Christianity are insufficient because the true proof first lies in the Mediation of them all; but one seeks a proof that convinces oneself, so that it shall not end with the proof for the immortality of the soul being the only immortal thing — which one then lets rise into the sky like the children their kite, without so much as having, like the children, a string to it. One does not become indifferent in one's knowledge like a town-crier who is only concerned to cry out, concerned to be rid of his goods, concerned to get the highest price at auction; but one continually stakes one's life upon it, because one is persuaded that to be able to sympathēsai tais astheneiais tōn anthrōpōn — to feel with the weaknesses of men — is the true principle of knowledge. The disposition to everything human lies in every man, and the more clearly the deeper a man he is. Without suffering there is no true knowledge; for suffering is precisely the determination of inwardness which procures for one one's own knowledge, and assures one against being able to speak the truth in the manner of Balaam's ass.

I am aware that by suffering I have not meant — and the reader is asked not to suppose me to have meant — head-aches and the lamp burning late in the student's chamber. I have meant something else. I have meant an honour from which not even the simplest of men is excluded, from which the scientific labourer is distinguished only insofar as he suffers what he suffers more distinctly and more determinately and under the form of consciousness. I have meant a thing of which one is high-minded enough to believe with enthusiasm that suffering is the divine secret of earthly existence, that only in suffering is one in covenant with God, and that therefore, if anyone is excluded from wisdom, it is only the happy man whom happiness has made so light-minded that he has suffered nothing at all — which the more serious will always guard against, even if he does not, through his outward circumstances and through his fortunes, come to suffer; for he will know how to acquire suffering sympathetically.

I had not intended to set down these things on the present page. I had intended, in § 10, a further description of the procedure of writing-as-the-bird-sings, with some examples from the older literature in which the procedure could be observed in operation. The doctrine of suffering as the principle of knowledge has, however, on this page, asked to be set down; and I have, in the absence of a more pressing demand, permitted it.

I shall add only that I have not, in the foregoing paragraphs, intended any of those flourishes by which a writer who has not himself suffered persuades himself and his reader that he has nevertheless understood suffering. The reader who supposes that he has been deceived by such a flourish is at liberty to apply the procedure announced on the title page, and to return the volume to the publisher for a refund of the price.

The Greek thought, when it concerned itself with such matters, did not abandon men in the intention of sounding like a voice from the clouds, but remained on the earth, in the marketplace, among the doings of men. This is what one of the older sources tells us about Socrates: that he gave up the art, gave up the investigation of natural things, and thereafter began to philosophise in the workshops and on the square. Therefore there rests over the Greek science, even while it is so uplifting, a thoughtful melancholy in which it is reconciled with the earthly. It knows fully well its exalted descent; it does not deny it; but it takes no vain joy in the difference, and accommodates itself for that reason into the daily. It is like a god going about in human form, and every moment performing a miracle with a poor everyday expression, while in all things he resembles an ordinary man, save only that that melancholy now and again, as a light shading of pensiveness, bends his figure, now reveals itself as a divine jest, which rejuvenates his figure almost into a kind of mischievous play.

I have wished, in the present volume, that what I have written should stand in some such relation to my reader. I shall not pretend that the wish has been fulfilled. I shall observe only that the wish is the wish of the volume, and that the reader who, on closing the volume, has not found the wish fulfilled is requested to consider that the failure is the failure of the wisher, not of the wish; and to extend the wish, for the time being, to whatever further attempts at the same form he may himself, in his own writing, undertake.

There is, alongside the procedure of announcement and the procedure of promise, a third procedure by which the writers of our age have arranged to escape the labour of writing. I have not yet named it. I shall name it now.

The procedure is the following. Having for some years prepared, in the notebook, the sketches and headings of a book; having declined, by the method already described, to write the book; having issued, instead, the customary announcements and accepted the customary subscriptions — the writer then, one morning, publishes the book. The book has not, in the meantime, been written. It has been, in the proper sense of the verb, assembled. The writer has procured, by application to such of his predecessors as had previously written upon the same matter, ten earlier books on the subject; he has, in a labour of compilation requiring no more than the customary diligence, combined the ten earlier books into an eleventh; he has set his name upon the title page of the eleventh; he has sent the eleventh to the printer; and the eleventh has appeared, in due course, in the booksellers' windows, bound with the dignity proper to the season and announced by the periodical organs in advance of its appearance.

The cultivated reader will perceive that the eleventh book, by this procedure, has appeared without a leap. It has not been written; it has not been suffered; it has not, at any of its sentences, occasioned in its writer the dizziness which the writing of a book ordinarily occasions. It has, on the contrary, appeared with the suddenness which the speculative philosophers, by an instinct I cannot but admire, have made the proper category of their motion. The eleventh book is plötzlich: it was not, and then it is; the process by which it has become has been external to it; it presents itself, on the booksellers' shelves, as a finished object whose own becoming has been spared it.

The procedure has a curious psychological feature, which I have observed in several writers of my acquaintance and which I record here for the cultivated reader's notice. The writer who has produced an eleventh book by this method is, after the production, in a state which is on the surface satisfied and on inspection something else. He has the book; he has the reviews; he has the subscriptions; he has the satisfactions of authorship in their fullest available form. He has not, however, the inner relation to the book which the writing of a book would have established; he has, in place of the inner relation, a closed-up-ness — an Indesluttethed, as I shall venture to call it — in which the satisfactions of authorship and the inner relation that would have justified them stand to each other as the shut door stands to the room within. He has shut up his book within himself, and himself within his book, and the result is a small fortified silence in the centre of his literary activity, which the further activity is increasingly required to surround and protect. He cannot, after the eleventh book, write a twelfth which is not also an eleventh, since the procedure he has adopted does not admit of a different next instance; he is committed to the procedure for all his subsequent volumes; the silence in the centre of his activity grows; and at last, by an outcome which I have observed in two cases and conjecture in several, the silence consumes the activity, and the writer either ceases to write or, what is more common, ceases to read what he has written, since the reading would expose the silence which the writing has so carefully protected.

I record the phenomenon without proposing a remedy. I do not know that a remedy is available. I observe only that the eleventh book is, in this respect, the speculative procedure's perfected form: the form, namely, in which the leap has been not deferred (as in announcement) and not displaced (as in promise) but replaced by an arrival without becoming. The reader who has followed §§ 6, 7, and the present § will perceive that the three procedures — announcement, promise, eleventh-book — are not three independent expedients but three moments of a single motion, by which the speculative thought of our age has, in its literary practice, organised the systematic avoidance of the writing of books. The cultivated reader is invited to consult his own shelves for confirmation. He will find the confirmation in such abundance as to render any further demonstration superfluous.

I had thought I should at this point, having spoken of the bird-singing-its-song and the god-walking-in-the-marketplace, address the reader more directly than I have so far permitted myself. I find on reflection that there is no longer occasion for the direct address. The reader who has come this far through the present volume has shown by the act of coming this far that he is the kind of reader to whom the direct address would, if undertaken, be superfluous. He has already understood that every man is referred to himself, and that this is the main thing. He is therefore my reader; but for that reason I cannot know with certainty that he is not already further along than I.

Nevertheless I think it will, in one way or another, have some significance for such a reader to read what I write; while, to repeat, of course it could never enter my mind to set myself up and into the importance of supposing that it was, for others' sake, necessary that I should write a book. Only when the impulse and the need in me has determined me to write, only when I am finished, only then can it occur to me to think of a reader. By means of this consideration I am also relieved of every untimely concern about the book's fate. Now, presumably, the present book will appear; with certainty I cannot know it. If, then, it encounters a reader who has some benefit or pleasure of it, then it is for me an uncertain and uncalculated income, and herewith we are quits, to mutual contentment and pleasure.

I have set down the foregoing paragraphs over a period of three winters. The earliest of them, the third and the seventh, were drafted at a country estate in the late autumn of 1844, in a borrowed room whose window looked out upon a stand of beech, and in which I had been settled by the kindness of an aunt who has since died and to whose memory I would dedicate the present volume if dedications were proper to a volume which has, by its own argument, declined the apparatus of dignity. They were drafted as a preface — what I called at the time an almindeligere Forord, a more general preface — to a book on the concept of anxiety which I had intended to publish under a pseudonym; the pseudonym would have permitted me to speak more freely than I am now permitting myself, and the book would have permitted me to address at greater length than the present volume permits the matters which the preface, in its drafting, kept passing over toward.

The pseudonym was not adopted. The book was not written. The preface, which had been drafted in advance of both, found itself, at the end of three winters, the only document the project had produced. I had it copied out, in a clean hand, and set aside in a drawer; from which drawer it would, presumably, never have been taken out, had not the conditions under which I have for these many years conducted my literary affairs altered, during the past months, in such a way as to permit the preface to be at last published, on its own, without its book and without its pseudonym, under the present circumstances and under the present signature.

I shall not describe the alteration of the conditions. I shall only observe that the alteration has been the occasion of the publication of the present volume; that without the alteration the volume would not exist; and that the volume's manner of being a preface that has at last come into print after the book has been taken away corresponds, in a fashion the reader may, if he wishes, develop further on his own account, to the manner in which it has come into print.

Of the matters which the alteration of the conditions has occasioned, I shall say in the present paragraph only what is necessary for the reader to be able to set the volume into its proper place in the small series of which it is the last.

I have, in the years 1844 through 1846, published seven volumes under the editorial and publishing fictions which the conditions then obtaining required. The volumes were the Forord of June 1844, the Urania of December 1844, the Logiske System of January 1845, the Tale for Total-Afholdenheds-Selskabet of April 1845, the Philosophiske Overveielser of the same month, the Fire og Tyve Prædikener of December 1845, the Anden Udgave of the Logiske System of January 1846, and the Lyriske Productioner of the spring of the same year. Each volume bore upon its title page some indication of an authorial situation other than the situation in which it was in fact produced. I have, in the publisher's preface to each volume, supplied the necessary fictions; the reader who has read the seven volumes will know in what each fiction consisted, and will not require me to repeat the inventory.

The present volume is, of the eight, the only one upon which the title page bears the indication af Nicolaus Notabene — by Nicolaus Notabene — without further qualification. The volume is by me, in the sense in which a volume can be by its author. There is no editor, no publisher's intermediary, no anonymous correspondent, no Magister Sophiensen, no member of a Society pledged to anything, no exhausted lyric author whose name must be withheld. There is, on the title page, the name; and the name is the name of the man who has, in fact, written what is in the volume.

The reader will perhaps wish to know what alteration of the conditions has made the present manner of signature possible. I shall not gratify the wish in any detail, the matter being one which does not properly concern the reader, and the volume being neither the place at which to record it nor the form within which it could be set down without an embarrassment which I would prefer to spare both the reader and myself. I shall observe only this. The conditions under which I had conducted my literary affairs for some fifteen years — conditions of which the Forord of 1844 supplied a sufficient account, and of which the publisher's prefaces to the subsequent volumes have made the working out visible — were, in the summer of the past year, lifted; not by any act of my own, and not by any conversion of the agency by which they had been imposed, but by the simple departure of that agency for engagements of its own with which my literary affairs are no longer reconciled. I do not record the departure in any of the registers by which a man records what has come to him in this life. I do not name it. I leave it where it stands.

The lifting of the conditions has, however, made it possible for me to set down at last upon a title page the name under which I have for some years written. I have done so. The volume is the first which bears the name in this manner. It is also, by my present intention, the last; the present meditation having brought me to the point at which what I had to say has been said, and the further volumes I had once projected having, in the new conditions, lost the character which would have made them worth the writing. The reader who has followed the series through its seven previous volumes is invited to accept the present volume as the conclusion of the series. I do not propose another.

I have observed, in the paragraphs above, that the procedures of our age's literature — announcement, promise, eleventh-book — have, in their several manners, organised the avoidance of the writing of books. I have observed that the writing of a book is a leap; that the leap occasions a dizziness; that the dizziness is the proper portion of the writer who has not yet committed his pen. I have now to observe that there is, in a writer's life, a particular interval in which the leap is, for the first time in many years, possible; and that this interval has its own name, which the speculative philosophers, having never reached it, have never recorded.

The interval is the Øieblik. The word, as it is used by the older theologians, designates the moment in which eternity touches the temporal; in which a soul, having been for long years carried along by the customary motions of its life, is, by some intervention of providence or by some recognition of its own, brought to a standstill, and is at liberty either to continue along the previous motion or to commence a new motion which the previous had not, by any of its determinations, made necessary. The Øieblik is, in this sense, the temporal name of the leap. It is the moment in which the leap becomes, for the writer who happens to be standing in it, available.

The Øieblik has the property that it cannot be prolonged. It is, by its nature, brief. A writer who has, in some hour of his life, found himself in such an interval — and the writer has not always known that he was in it; sometimes he has known only afterwards, and only by the recollection of what was and was not done — has a small window in which the leap may be performed, beyond which the interval closes and the customary motions resume. The Øieblik is therefore the time of the writer's earnestness, the time in which he is summoned to be what he is and to do what he can do; it is the time, also, in which the substitute procedures — announcement, promise, eleventh-book — are most acutely available, since the alternative to the substitute is the demand of the moment, and the demand of the moment is the demand to leap. A writer who, in the Øieblik, takes refuge in the substitute procedures has not escaped the moment; he has, by his action, defined it as the moment in which he failed of the leap, and the failure becomes the meaning of the interval ever afterwards.

I record the matter because I have, since the summer of the past year, been aware of being in such an interval. The conditions which had previously made the leap impracticable were, by the departure of which I have spoken in § 15, removed; the substitute procedures by which I had, for many years, accommodated the impracticability lost their occasion; and there opened before me a small period in which the leap was at last available, and in which my long-prepared book on the concept of anxiety could, by such resources as remained to me, have been at last written. I record now that the leap has not been performed. The book has not been written. The interval has been spent in such labours as the present volume represents — in the writing-up, namely, of the preface which had been drafted years before the interval opened, and in the framing of the preface for publication. The interval has, by these labours, been substantially consumed; what remains of it I cannot say, since the Øieblik is, by its nature, not measurable by the writer who stands in it.

I do not draw a conclusion from this state of affairs. I observe only that the present volume is, in respect of the interval in which it has been brought to print, an instance of the very procedures which it has, in the paragraphs above, sought to expose; that the preface has, by its publication in place of the book, performed for me what announcement and promise and eleventh-book have performed for my contemporaries; and that I am therefore not, in the foregoing analysis, exempt from the criticism I have offered. The cultivated reader is asked to extend to me such indulgence as he extends to himself, who, in the like intervals of his own life, has likely made the like choice; and to consider, in respect of his own next Øieblik, whether it would be possible — not advisable, only possible — to make a different one.

I close with a paragraph which had been intended, in the draft of three winters ago, to be a paragraph not of conclusion but of further introduction; the book which was to have followed it not having been written, the paragraph has had to serve, in the present volume, as a closing paragraph, for which office it was not designed, and which it will perhaps not perform well.

A book that is written as the bird sings its song does not, when it is finished, leave the writer in any particular condition. The writer is, after the book, what he was before it; the book has merely passed through him, as the song through the bird, and has gone where books go, namely, into the hands of whoever takes the book up. The writer's life, before and after the book, is what it has been. He sets down his pen. He looks at the room in which he has been writing. The room is as it has been. The chair on the other side of the table is empty, as it has, for some months now, been; the lamp is burning at the level at which it is set in the evening; the fire is down. There is nothing further to be done in the room, and nothing further can be done outside it for the present hour; and the writer therefore does not rise from the chair, but sits a little longer, in the way one sits when one has finished, and the room is what it has long been, and the silence of the room is what one had not, when one was younger, expected the silence of a room could be.

It is in this manner — in this silence, after the song, in the room which has become, by the alteration of the conditions, a room in which a man may now write without prohibition and may now also be alone without arrangement — that the present volume has been brought to its close. I have nothing further to say. I have not, in the closing pages of any of the previous seven volumes, said as much as I have said here. I shall not, having said this, undertake to say more.

The volume is finished. The pen is laid down. The lamp will, at some point in the next hour, be lowered. The room will then be such that what has been written in it can be put away; and the present volume can be sent, by such hand as the publisher will, when the morning comes, send for it, to the printer in his shop, and from the printer to the bookseller in his, and from the bookseller to whatever reader will, in the year now beginning, take down the small unornamented volume with its plain title and its plain signature, and read it through to the end, in the manner in which I have wished, for some years now, that a book of mine should be read.

I commit it to him. I have done.

Nicolaus Notabene

Copenhagen, the Octave of Epiphany, 1847

Faaes hos Universitetsboghandler C. A. Reitzel. Pris 1 Rdl. Anden Udgave er ikke at forvente.