I’m just starting to work through Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, fearfully and tremblingly myself. It’s a strange book, but it is worth working for. In thinking I am laborious. I will continue to attempt to be thorough, rather than quick. I intend to miss as little of value as possible.
In those old days it was different: then, faith was a task for one’s entire life because people assumed that the capacity to have faith was not acquired either in days or weeks. When the old man, tried and tested, approached his end, had fought the good fight and kept the faith, then his heart was youthful enough not to have forgotten that anxiety and trembling which had disciplined the youth, which the man certainly mastered, but which no person ever entirely outgrows—unless, that is, one were to succeed, the sooner the better, in going further. So, the point at which those venerable figures arrived— that is where everyone in our times begins, in order to go further. (Fear and Trembling (Kirmmse, trans.) pp. 5 & 6.)
And another:
Even if one were able to restate the entire content of faith in conceptual form, it does not follow that one has grasped faith, grasped how one entered into it or how it entered into oneself. (Fear and Trembling (Kirmmse, trans.) p. 6)
And finally, for now, from page 10:
The man was not a thinker, he felt no need to go beyond faith; it seemed to him that the most splendid thing was to be remembered as its father, an enviable destiny to possess, even if no one knew of it.