Understand existentialism

I recently purchased Basic Writings in Existentialism (or something like that) by Murano. I’m reading Kierkegard now, and I have to say, the guy’s a nutjob. I honestly don’t see how anyone can think that the passages I’m reading (from Fear and Trembling, currently) follow logically from one thought to another. It’s absurd logic. I have to read it out loud (to my dog) just to get through the chapters. I hope it gets better.

Until I reached high school, my big thrill of the week was when my mom would drive me to our little county library. I would check out the maximum number of books my mom would allow (i.e. how many she could afford to pay late fees on, since I rarely got them turned in on time) and I’d spend the rest of the week holed-up in my room as much as possible, reading my latest stash. And one week I found this book at the library with the word existential in the title. It sounded so smart. I just wanted to be able to work the word into a sentence, honestly. But I felt a vague moral obligation to be able to at least use it basically correctly. I don’t think I got very far in figuring out what “basically correct” would be for the use of existential. And I haven’t progressed much in the past 20 years. It’s probably about time. And I still think it sounds pretty smart. It has lots of snarky-comment potential, don’t you think?