The knight

"We, conscious of the justness of that confusion of tongues [at Babel], recognize the fragmentary as a characteristic of all human striving in its truth and realize that it is precisely this that distinguishes it from the infinite coherence of Nature, that an individual's wealth consists precisely in his power of fragmentary extravagance, and that the producer's enjoyment is also that of the receiver, not the laborious and meticulous execution, nor the protracted apprehension of this execution, but rather the production and enjoyment of that gleaming transience for which the producer contains something more than the completed effort, since it is the appearance of the Idea, and which for the recipient too, contains a surplus, seeing that its fulguration awakens his own productivity--since all this, I say, is contrary to our Society's penchant (and since, indeed, even the period just read could well be regarded as a disquiting attack upon the interjectory style in which the idea breaks out but without breaking through, a style which in our Society is accorded official status), then, having called attention to the fact hat my conduct still cannot be called rebellious, seeing that the bond holding this period together is so loose that the intermediary clauses stand out in a sufficiently aphoristic and arbitrary manner, I shall merely call to mind that my style has made an attempt to appear what it is not--revolutionary."

--Soren Kierkegaard, Either Or: A Fragment of Life. trans. Alistair Hannay. New York: Penguin, 1992.

This is Kierkegaard speaking under the aesthete pseudonym "A" in "Ancient Tragedy's Reflection in The Modern;"