Roger Kimball on Kierkegaard

As a way of easing my way back into Kierkegaard's writings I've been reading this essay by Kimball from the New Criterion. It's extremely good, as is everything else by him, and he selects a number of quotations that really go to the heart of the matter. Consider the following:

"In one way or another, the explosive idea that “subjectivity is truth” is the guiding theme in Kierkegaard’s thought. In an early journal entry—written in 1835, eleven years before the Concluding Unscientific Postscript was published—the twenty-two-year-old Kierkegaard decided that

What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. . . . [T]he crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, and to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. Of what use would it be to me to discover a so-called objective truth, to work through the philosophical systems so that I could, if asked, make critical judgments about them, could point out the fallacies in each system; of what use would it be to me to be able to develop a theory of the state, . . . and constructing a world I did not live in but merely held up for others to see; of what use would it be to me to be able to formulate the meaning of Christianity . . . if it had no deeper meaning for me and for my life?

“Interpretive knowledge,” he concludes, is all well and good but “it must come alive in me and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all.”

Not included in the electronic version of the article is this quotation about 'the present age':

"A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything dow; but a revolutionary age, that is at the same time reflective and passionless, transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialectics: it leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.

As a description of decadence, that is hard to beat."