From THE MOMENT (1855)

On experiencing life as a tourist.

“While one is comfortably riding along in the train, one reads in the [traveler’s] guidebook, ‘Here is the frightful Wolf Ravine, where one plunges 70,000 fathoms down under the earth’. While one is sitting and smoking a cigar in the cozy dining car, one reads in the guidebook, ‘Here is the hideout of a robber band that attacks and beats up travelers’—here it is, here it was, since now (how amusing to imagine how it was), now it is not the Wolf Ravine but a railroad, and not a robber band but a cozy dining car.”

Kierkegaard lived in an era of rapidly evolving technology, and he recognized that the form of modern life was shaping its content. As people become increasingly accustomed to lives of amusement and ease, it becomes harder and harder for them to passionately relate to matters of existential risk. People are technologically conditioned, as it were, to prioritize contentment and safety; there is a sense that all dangers can be conquered and rendered manageable. In this passage, Kierkegaard is making a comparison to how modern Christians often read the Bible: what was once encountered with “fear and trembling” is now seen as a curiosity—just like a tourist languorously views sites that once inspired awe, fascination, and mystery.