The Point of View of My Work as an Author (subtitle: A Direct Communication, Report to History) is an autobiographical account of the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard's use of his pseudonyms.
Walter Lowrie, a Kierkegaardian translator and scholar, called this an autobiography "so unique that it has no parallel in the whole literature of the world.
And here for the first time comes in the category ‘that individual whom with joy and gratitude I call my reader’, a stereotyped formula which was repeated in the Preface to every collection of Edifying Discourses.
Got at the same time a frightful insight into what an illusion Christendom is, and (a little later, to be sure) an insight also into what a situation the simpler classes suffered themselves to be seduced by paltry-newspaper writers, whose struggle or fight for equality (since it is in the service of a lie) cannot lead to any other result but to prompt the privileged classes in self-defence to stand proudly aloof from the common man, and to make the common man insolent in his forwardness.
For He has been my one confidant, and only in reliance upon His cognizance have I dared to venture what I have ventured, and to endure what I have endured, and have found bliss in the experience of being literally alone in the whole vast world, alone because wherever I was, whether in the presence of all or in the presence of a familiar friend, I was always clad in the costume of my deceit; so that I was then as much alone as in the darkness of the night; alone, not in the forests of America with their terrors and perils, but alone in the company of the most terrible possibilities, which transform even the most frightful actuality into a refreshment and relief; alone, almost with human speech against me; alone with torments which have taught me more than one new annotation to the text about the thorn in the flesh.Benjamin Nelson wrote the Preface to Lowrie's 1962 translation of Kierkegaard's Point of View.
Both dates recall publications which revolutionized the worlds of thought and experience: the former, the Origin of Species, by a retiring British botanist, Charles Darwin; the latter, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Kierkegaard’s fellow auditor — along with Bakunin, Herzen, Feuerbach and other notable figures — of Schelling’s Berlin lectures in 1841.