It is an awful satire, and an epigram on the materialism of our modern age, that nowadays the only use that can be made of solitude is imposing it as a penalty, as jail. What a difference there is between those times when, no matter how secular materialism always was, man believed in the solitude of the convent, when, in other words, solitude was revered as the highest, as the destiny of Eternity--and the present when it is detested as a curse and is used only for the punishment of criminals. Alas, what a change.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Solitary Confinement
The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. Peter P. Rohde, tr. Gerda M. Anderson (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960; rpt. 1990), p. 23 = Kierkegaards Papirer VIII1 A 40 (1847):