The Neurotic Artist

On the flight across the Atlantic, I had browsed in a paperback version of Kierkegaard's Diaries. How grim they are. Kierkegaard describes self-loathing, pessimism, dread, isolation, guilt, and anomie. He writes of wanting to shoot himself. Kierkegaard complains of a "primitive melancholy ... a huge dowry of distress." He writes, "My whole past life was in any case so altogether cloaked in the darkest melancholy, and in the most profoundly brooding of misery's fogs, that it is no wonder I was as I was." And then: "How terrible to have to buy each day, each hour -- and the price varies so!" And again: "The sad thing with me is that the crumb of joy and reassurance I slowly distill in the painstakingly dyspeptic process of my thought-life I use up straightaway in just one despairing step."...more here