11 How to be Anxious
11
How to be Anxious
‘I am still very exhausted, but I have almost reached my goal,’ he writes in his journal in November 1848, as he completes The Point of View for My Work as an Author. ‘Recently I have been only a writer. My mind and spirit are strong enough, but regrettably all too strong for my body. In one sense it is my mind and spirit that help me to endure such poor health; in another sense it is my mind and spirit that overwhelm my body.’ His ideas are so abundant that he could write incessantly day and night, though if he did this he would soon collapse. ‘After becoming an author, I actually have never once experienced what I hear others lament over – the lack of thoughts, or that they would not present themselves. If that were to happen to me, I very likely would almost be happy that at last I had a day off.’
He is concluding The Point of View for My Work as an Author with a chapter on ‘Governance’s Part in my Authorship’. There he describes how he has ‘continuously needed God’s assistance day after day, year after year’, in order to write. When he starts to work he feels agitation, restless passion, ‘a poet impatience’ in his soul; he picks up his pen, but cannot move it. Then he seems to hear a voice telling him, like a teacher speaking to a boy, to write his assignment: ‘Then I become completely calm; then there is time to write every letter, almost meticulously, with my slower pen. Then I can do it, then I dare not do anything else, then I write each word, each line, almost unaware of the next word and the next line. Then, when I read it through later, I find an entirely different satisfaction in it. Even though some glowing expressions did perhaps elude me, what has been produced is something else – it is not the work of the poet passion or of the thinker passion, but of devotion to God, and for me a divine worship.’
With this account of his authorship, Kierkegaard is setting himself decisively, defiantly apart from the world, showing his disdain for worldly success. He has come to believe that ‘the world, if it is not evil, is mediocre.’ Nevertheless, the lure of this world is powerful, and as a writer he has had to struggle to avoid falling into ‘the untruth that, as it always does, would have secured for me money, honour, esteem, approval, etc., the untruth that what I had to say was “the demand of the times”, that it was submitted to the lenient judgement of a highly esteemed public, moreover, that it was owing to the approval and support and acclamation of my contemporaries that it prospered’. No, he has channelled his efforts into expressing the truth that his entire life makes indubitable for him: ‘that there is a God’. He has sought to understand ‘what it means to be a human being’ by inquiring philosophically, spiritually, religiously into ‘this humanness’ belonging to every single individual. Yet this lonely, narrow path has cut through the middle of his city, kept him in full view of the crowds.
After his break with Regine, he had wanted to retreat. If he was destined to be a strange, solitary figure standing on the edge of the world, perhaps it would be better to slip over the horizon and disappear from view. Just as he imagines that Jesus was tempted to go out into the desert, to become a hermit, so withdrawing to a remote place in the countryside is his own continual temptation. ‘It was my plan as soon as Either/Or was published to seek a call in a rural parish and sorrow over my sins. I could not suppress my creativity, I followed it – naturally it moved into the religious.’
For these seven years since leaving Regine, it has been his self-imposed ‘penance’ to remain in Copenhagen and, by being an author, work as a Christian missionary in the heart of Danish Christendom. Having been cast out of the ethical sphere through his own failings, he has come to see the world as a place of suffering and sacrifice – and he has resolved to live in this world, exposed to the public eye. Though his thoughts have often returned to the idea of retreat, in the end he has always renewed this resolution and stayed in Copenhagen: ‘I understood that my task was to do penance by serving the truth in such a way that it virtually became burdensome, humanly speaking, a thankless labour of sacrificing everything.’ He knows that God does not want people to punish themselves, that there is no merit in it – but he has felt ‘such a driving need’ for penance that he could not do otherwise, and hopes this will be forgiven. And for all its difficulty, there is joy to be found on this path: following it seems the only way to be truthful, faithful, obedient to his deepest self, who is seen and known only by God. Now, as this turbulent year draws near its close, he is adamant that ‘this is how I serve Christianity – in all my wretchedness happy in the thought of the indescribable good God has done for me, far beyond my expectations’.
These words echo what he wrote about Abraham five years ago, in Fear and Trembling. Abraham received great gifts from God, contrary to all his expectations, but he became a ‘knight of faith’ – resumed his place in the world as a father, husband and householder – only after the most agonizing ordeal which required him to relinquish everything. Then, Kierkegaard contrasted this religious movement with the mere ‘resignation’ of someone who withdraws to a monastery, or remains in the world but never expects to feel at home there. He felt that the faith of Abraham was beyond his reach – and yet if all things were possible for God, as the Gospels taught, he had to believe that God could grant him fulfilment and peace. In truth, during the years since then his daily life has oscillated between retreat – not to a monastery or a rural parish, but to quiet hours of devotional reading and prayer, and to tranquil days in the woodlands of north Zealand – and blistering immersion in the world.
* * *
During the summer of 1843, soon after he finished writing Fear and Trembling, he heard that Regine was engaged to Johan Frederik Schlegel, a government official, formerly her music tutor, who had admired her since her youth. ‘I showed the girl my confidence in her by believing all the great things it pleased her to tell me concerning herself,’ he wrote scathingly in his journal, adding that ‘it is in fact curious – that a girl can be so great in her own eyes; that she honoured me with her love (or rather, with being engaged) – that it should shake me like this.’ Later he covered these lines with dense loops of ink to make them unreadable. But he left unaltered a cooler entry, in which he imagined a chance encounter with Regine: ‘An individual with a sense of humour meets a girl who had once assured him that she would die if he left her. When he now meets her she is engaged.’ He makes the girl ‘speechless with rage’ by offering her a few coins – ‘to show my appreciation’, he tells her.
He returned to his draft of Repetition, and changed the ending. Instead of killing himself in despair of becoming a suitable husband, the book’s young hero learns that his beloved is engaged to someone else; this unexpected news liberates him from his crisis of identity, and he thanks God for granting him his freedom – here, at last, is the ‘repetition’ he has longed for. Once again his future lies open before him; he has another chance to choose his path in life.
Repetition
Repetition and Fear and Trembling were published on the same day – under different pseudonyms, of course – in October 1843, along with Three Upbuilding Discourses by S. Kierkegaard. Four Upbuilding Discourses followed in December 1843, and Two Upbuilding Discourses in March 1844. Like Kierkegaard’s first collection of discourses, which introduced the category of ‘the single individual’, these slim volumes were dedicated to his father. And despite Regine’s changed situation, he gave them similar prefaces alluding to her, the ‘single individual’ whom he called ‘my reader’. From a practical point of view, the possibility of marrying her had slipped into the past, but this possibility remained a fact of his soul; it continued to shape his understanding of himself. Becoming an author was inseparable from leaving Regine, yet through his writing he expressed his continuing faithfulness to her – in a sense that perhaps he alone could understand.
Now an established author, he lived submerged in writing. His work gave the rhythm to his days and nights: back and forth between his apartment on Nørregade and the streets of Copenhagen, back and forth between creative exhilaration and physical exhaustion. While he was at home his blackened windows were kept closed to shut out the sun; when he went out, his servants opened the windows to freshen the air, laid a fire in the stove, and made sure the room was the right temperature – for he was as exacting as his father in household matters, and would check the thermometer when he returned. He employed Israel Levin, an accomplished linguist, as a secretary and proofreader. Levin sometimes spent whole days at his home, helping him to work through the corrections to his manuscripts – ‘an enormous amount of work’. On these days they dined together on strong soup, fish, melon and fine sherry, followed by ruinous coffee served in silver pots, which Kierkegaard drank with cream and nearly a cupful of sugar. ‘It amused him every day to see the sugar melt. This really delighted him,’ observed Levin, but ‘the coffee was so extremely strong that he destroyed himself with it.’
This intensive work was relieved by walks with friends almost every day: often with Peter Johannes Spang, pastor at the Church of the Holy Spirit, or with Hans Brøchner, a young philosopher who admired Kierkegaard immensely and found him ‘very kind’. They walked through the city, along the lakes, up on the ramparts, or out to Frederiksberg. When he wanted companionship at home he invited Emil Boesen to dine with him, but received few other visitors. For a while he took up horse riding to improve his digestion – but Kierkegaard ‘did not cut a particularly good figure on a horse’, for he sat stiffly and looked as though he were constantly recalling the riding master’s instructions. Occasionally he hired a carriage in the morning, and ordered the coachman to drive as fast as possible to the countryside, where he walked through the forest and then had lunch at an inn and talked volubly with the locals, before speeding back to Copenhagen and beginning work again, refreshed by his ‘air bath’.
Early in 1844 he was finishing The Concept of Anxiety, beginning Philosophical Fragments, planning a humorous book called Prefaces, and drafting another collection of religious discourses. Yet he remained unsure of his vocation, and ambivalent about being an author. It seemed virtually impossible to publish his works without being assailed by unending worries about how they would be received; his pride bristled at these anxieties over esteem, success, status, to which he longed to be indifferent – if only he could confine his profound sensitivity to profound things! He was still contemplating retreat to a rural parish, and in February 1844 he preached a qualifying sermon at the Church of the Trinity, where he had been confirmed by Bishop Mynster in his youth. This made him eligible for an appointment in the Danish State Church. The text for that sermon was from the second chapter of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the same text that had inspired the title of Fear and Trembling. Christian wisdom, Paul explains here, is not ‘human wisdom’, not ‘a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age’, but ‘God’s wisdom, secret and hidden’. In drawing this contrast between divine wisdom and the false wisdom of the world, Paul argued that serving God and pursuing worldly things – including esteem, success, status – are two diverging paths through life: an either/or.
This New Testament view of the world as a place of untruth and corruption that leads people away from God echoes distinctly, if now more faintly, through centuries of Christian history. During 1844 Kierkegaard’s devotional reading included True Christianity by Johann Arndt, the Lutheran theologian whose literary work sowed the seeds of pietism, and then nourished its growth. In the first years of the seventeenth century Arndt published new editions of medieval books, including Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ and the sermons of Johannes Tauler. True Christianity, his own guide to the holy life, went through more than a hundred editions between 1605 and 1740. Inspired by the mystical insights and ascetic practices of his Catholic forebears, who had themselves studied, lived and elaborated St Paul’s theology within their monasteries, Arndt urged generations of Protestant Christians to purify their souls by practising self-denial and ‘dying to the world’. In True Christianity Kierkegaard found a spiritual teaching which deepened his own ambivalence towards the world. ‘A Christian is truly in the world but not of the world,’ he read in this old devotional book. ‘He lives indeed in the world but he does not love it. The world’s pomp, honour, pretence, glory, lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, pride of life, is for a Christian a dead thing, a shadow to which he pays no attention.’
True Christianity
Above the woman holding a dagger is the motto ‘I kill myself daily’
What would Johann Arndt, or his medieval sources – or even Paul himself – have made of Kierkegaard’s world? Within his lifetime Copenhagen has acquired the features of urban life that have already, he reads in the press, transformed the capitals of France and England, cities he likens to Sodom and Gomorrah. The nineteenth-century metropolis does not just gratify the perennial desires of the flesh, but offers a new and distinctly modern temptation: to put oneself on display, and to become a spectator of the lives of others. Copenhagen is becoming more and more like a machine that constantly produces images of itself. Its newspapers present ephemeral patchworks of city life, hastily tacking together snatches of gossip from different corners of the town – every edition new and enticing, but stale and boring a few days later. Heiberg’s Danish vaudevilles have accustomed theatre audiences to enjoy satirical plays about themselves. The grander shops on Østergade, where the sewerage gutters are boarded over, have introduced Copenhageners to the modern art of window-dressing: like the attire of fashionable young ladies, their displays change frequently to draw the attention of passers-by. Along Østergade parade there are ‘a variety of black silk capes or mantillas, white bonnets, trimmed with flowers and feathers’ amid the carts, sailors and tradeswomen.
By 1844 these everyday spectacles had been joined by something more exotic: Tivoli-Vauxhall, an amusement park named after similar ventures in Paris and London. It was opened in the summer of 1843 by newspaper-owner Georg Carstensen, and hundreds of thousands of people poured through its gates during the first full season in 1844. Carstensen’s Tivoli is a world within a world, bringing cosmopolitan culture to the inhabitants of a market town: visitors can shop in an oriental-style bazaar and marvel at the latest recreational technologies – a panorama (displaying a tableau from the Tivoli in Hamburg), a diorama, fireworks, a steam-powered carousel, a daguerreotype studio, mechanical waxworks enacting scenes from the life of Christ – alongside more traditional entertainments like peep shows, pantomimes and concerts. Here bourgeois families enjoy pursuits formerly reserved for aristocratic young men: they can be tourists, theatre-goers, restaurant diners. Tivoli offers Copenhageners not only new images of the world, but also new images of themselves – even if they cannot afford to have their daguerreotype taken.
Like Heiberg, who has long scorned Carstensen as a purveyor of low-brow entertainment, Kierkegaard disdains the attractions on offer at Tivoli. But he does not need to visit the new amusement park to join in the culture of spectatorship that is pervading his city: sitting in one of the modern cafés on Strøget feels rather like being exhibited in a shop window, or in a diorama. And for someone as self-conscious as Kierkegaard, walking through town is always a public performance. Now, as he completes The Point of View for My Work as an Author, he recalls how he played the role of flâneur on the streets of Copenhagen in the early days of his authorship; his books have been advertised and reviewed in the press to catch the eye of readers for whom perusing a journal is a little like window shopping. And ever since his literary debut in Copenhagen’s Flying Post in 1834, he has continued to publish occasional newspaper articles; some of his contemporaries regard him as ‘nothing other than a very talented and well-read feuilleton writer’. Even when he writes his journals, he knows he is exhibiting his inner life to posterity. So he has found himself confronted daily with the question of how to be seen: Who should he be in this new-fashioned, glass-fronted world? Which mask should he wear, what image should he display? And what images will other people make of him?
Perhaps these questions are particularly urgent for Kierkegaard because of his intensely reflective character, because Either/Or made him a local celebrity, and because since his father’s death his choices have been remarkably unconstrained by circumstance: he does not need to earn a living, and he does not have to be a son, a husband, or a father. But the city itself seems to pose such questions to its inhabitants: he has discovered that living in a modern metropolis intensifies an experience of anxiety that he recognizes as universally human. Ever since Adam, he believes, human beings have felt anxious – and now, caught in the city’s myriad reflections, their anxieties multiply as they become uneasy spectators of their own lives.
‘No Grand Inquisitor has such dreadful torments in readiness as anxiety has,’ he wrote in 1844 in The Concept of Anxiety, ‘and no secret agent knows as cunningly as anxiety how to attack his suspect in his weakest moment or to make alluring the trap in which he will be caught, and no discerning judge knows how to interrogate and examine the accused as does anxiety, which never lets the accused escape, neither through amusement, nor by noise, nor during work, neither by day nor by night.’
Like The Concept of Irony, The Concept of Anxiety was an intricate and demanding academic treatise. It engaged with recent German philosophy, including the Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz’s philosophical psychology and the fragmentary works of Johann Georg Hamann, admirer of Socrates and critic of the Enlightenment. But Kierkegaard also drew on his own life-experience, which he contrasted with the ‘scientific’ method frequently extolled by contemporary philosophers and theologians. ‘And this is the wonderful thing about life,’ he wrote, ‘that every human being who gives attention to himself knows what no science knows, since he knows who he himself is.’
Anxiety arises within a person when he becomes conscious of his freedom. This is why Hamann called anxiety a ‘holy hypochondria’: it is a spiritual awareness unknown to animals, which are merely physical creatures. But human beings are not angels, either. We live in the world anchored by gravity, feet on the ground, rooted in actuality – our mortal bodies, our circumstances, the facts of our lives. And yet we breathe the air of possibility, and the force of gravity is seldom so strong that we cannot lift a foot into this air and take a step, one way or another. We all long to claim our freedom, and when actuality becomes a swamp we gasp desperately for air. Yet this same freedom, with its dizzying proliferation of possibilities, fills us with anxiety the moment we experience it. An open future is, like the nothingness of death, an unknown abyss. Glancing down, afraid of falling, we anxiously grasp and cling onto anything solid we can find – possessions, money, food, drink, other people – in an effort to steady ourselves. Thus we live, clutching at things in the world, whether or not it is for our good, or theirs. But we can learn to be anxious only by letting go, and finding out what happens when we fall. ‘This is an adventure that every human being must go through – to learn to be anxious so that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety, or by succumbing in anxiety. For whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.’
Kierkegaard connected this psychological analysis of anxiety with the Christian doctrine of original sin, which awkwardly holds together inherited sinfulness and individual responsibility. Augustine, still the orthodox voice on this question, taught that after Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden they transmitted their sinfulness – and its consequent suffering and mortality – biologically to the whole human race. Kierkegaard disagrees with that explanation: he interprets the biblical story of Adam’s lapse into sin as dramatizing a fall that happens again and again throughout each person’s life, every time a moment of freedom arises. Nevertheless, he shares Augustine’s view that human beings are constitutionally restless: never completely at ease in the world, and able to find real rest only in God. People sin, thought Augustine, when they seek relief or satisfaction in something other than God – in some finite thing, some sensual distraction, some transitory experience. Although his language was sometimes moralizing, Augustine regarded sin more as spiritual disorientation than as moral failure.
Kierkegaard developed this idea in The Concept of Anxiety. Although pietism taught him from his earliest years to attend to his own sinfulness, he does not, like most pietists, preach the cultivation of moral purity. Instead he tries to confront his anxieties with clear-sighted courage, to let them move through him and experience all their power and subtlety. He sees anxiety as a blessing as well as a curse, a privilege as well as an affliction, a mark of spiritual nobility; after all, Jesus prayed anxiously in the garden at Gethsemane before he faced his death, and Socrates, condemned to die by drinking hemlock, raised his poisoned cup as if toasting his own anxiety. ‘The more profoundly a human being is in anxiety, the greater he is’, for anxiety ‘consumes all finite ends and discovers their deceptiveness’. When a human being ‘passes through the anxiety of the possible’ – an indeterminate horror of existence that finds no worldly foothold, since it senses an infinite nothingness beneath every step – he will be ‘educated to have no anxiety, not because he can escape the terrible things of life but because these always become weak by comparison with those of possibility’. Kierkegaard imagined such a man saying, as a patient might say to his surgeon when a painful operation is about to begin: Now I am ready. ‘Then anxiety enters into his soul and searches out everything and anxiously torments everything finite and petty out of him.’
‘One should certainly not be in anxiety about men and about finitudes,’ he declared in 1844. Nevertheless, he is frequently troubled by such things. Slights or criticisms lodge painfully in his heart for days, weeks, months, like thorns in his flesh; events that seem insignificant to others take on magnificent proportions in the mirror of his egotism. Without a wife to confide in at the end of each day, he pours his injuries and indignations onto the pages of his journal. But paper is less absorbent than a sympathetic listener, and ink more tenacious than a voice: once written down, his cares stare starkly back at him, fixed into refrains that echo through his mind. His close friends, like Emil Boesen and Hans Brøchner, understand this: ‘With K. it frequently happened that when he reflected on some minor matter, he could make it into a little piece of world history. His sense of reality did not always keep pace with his expertise at reflection, and so he came to view facts oddly displaced or transformed to abnormal dimensions.’
Early in 1844, while Kierkegaard was at work on The Concept of Anxiety, Brøchner played a character called Søren Kirk in Gjenboerne, a comedy performed at the Student Association. The playwright, Jens Christian Hostrup, did not intend this as a personal attack – Søren Kirk was a young theology student intoxicated by Part I of Either/Or, and he parodied the sort of philosophical pretensions which the book itself satirized – but Kierkegaard was deeply distressed by Gjenboerne. With Brøchner and Hostrup, of course, he pretended not to care about it.
By the summer of 1844 he had finished three books and a new collection of discourses. While preparing the final manuscripts of The Concept of Anxiety and Philosophical Fragments, he deleted his own name from the title pages and gave each book a pseudonym. For the treatise on anxiety he chose Vigilius Haufniensis, ‘the watchman of Copenhagen’: a wakeful, observant figure in a city of slumbering spirits. He had conceived Philosophical Fragments as the first in a series of pamphlets, but in the end he presented it as a self-contained book by Johannes Climacus, the young hero of the satire on Hegelian philosophy he had left unfinished two years earlier. This pseudonym had echoes of Either/Or’s Victor Eremita, for the original Johannes Climacus was a seventh-century monk who left his monastery on Sinai to live as a hermit.
The third book was Prefaces, a satire on Copenhagen’s literary industry. Its pseudonymous author was Nicolas Notabene, a married man whose wife considers writing books to be a kind of infidelity. ‘You are in a cocoon of thoughtfulness from morning til night,’ Mrs Notabene complains: ‘at the dinner table you sit and stare into space like a ghost.’ As a compromise, she allows Nicolas to write only the prefaces to his books, and this volume was a collection of eight such prefaces. More than one of these vented Kierkegaard’s fresh annoyance at Heiberg, who at the end of 1843 had published a decorative yearbook, designed to be purchased as a smart New Year gift, which included a brief critical review of Repetition. ‘What a pleasure it is indeed to have written a book!’ Nicolas Notabene’s first preface begins – ‘a book that does not owe its origin to an inexplicable inner need and is therefore ignorant of whether it fits into the world, indeed, is bashful and ashamed like an ambivalent witness to a secret love affair – no, a book that is the fruit of a marriage of convenience between publisher and public.’ Affecting a high-minded vacuity, he ridicules Heiberg’s interest in astronomy; he also attacks low-brow journalism, comparing the writing in newspapers to a wastewater drain, ‘for it would indeed be too bad if the public’s gossip were to go to waste’. He writes prefaces to a scholarly book, to a collection of sermons, to the first issue of a new philosophical journal. Another preface lampoons Copenhagen’s new Temperance and Abstinence Union: in January 1844 Kierkegaard had read with scorn an article in The Fatherland publicizing the Union’s ‘lofty endeavour to restore lost souls to society and the family, to God and to virtue’.
Over the course of a few days in June 1844, Nicolas Notabene, Vigilius Haufniensis, Johannes Climacus and S. Kierkegaard – author of Three Upbuilding Discourses – were sent into the world. Emissaries of Kierkegaard’s inner life, these four authors were as artful in deceit as they were lyrical in their exposition of his soul. Each one bore some aspect of their creator. But they were his ‘ideality’, magnificently indifferent to the world: none of them had to walk the streets, or listen to the opinions of other people. They did not feel any secret longing for success, or leaden aches of disappointment; they need not endure countless trivial humiliations; they never entered the storms of self-pity, or wrestled with rage when things did not go their way. They did not worry about how they looked. Even ‘S. Kierkegaard’ was a disembodied being who dwelt in the cloistered ambiance of old devotional books: humble and serene, he meditated on scripture, contemplated himself, and wrote with assured clarity about the human heart and its yearning for God. ‘To be an author in Denmark is almost as troublesome as having to live in public view, just about as problematic as concealing oneself on a plate,’ Nicolas Notabene wrote in Prefaces. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms did not conceal his identity, but they helped to mask his desire for recognition.
After those June books came out, he decided to stop writing upbuilding discourses. Instead he would write discourses for imagined occasions: weddings, funerals, confession, communion. First, though, he completed a final collection of Four Upbuilding Discourses, which he published at the end of August. These discourses were especially profound, compassionate and severe; they echoed Arndt’s True Christianity in their emphasis on suffering and human frailty. Arndt insisted that ‘without misery God does not appear to man, and without the knowledge of his misery man does not find God’s grace.’ In his discourse ‘To Need God is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection’, Kierkegaard acknowledged that a deep spiritual need ‘makes life more difficult’, but explained that a person becomes conscious of God through the ‘piecemeal experience’ of his own anxiety, confusion, despair – and ‘in this difficulty his life also acquires ever deeper and deeper meaning’. As he comes to feel his need of God, the suffering person learns more and more ‘to die to the world, to esteem less and less the external, what life gives and takes, what he himself is permitted to achieve in the external world, but to be all the more concerned about the internal, about an understanding with God’.
* * *
Reading Arndt has clarified and deepened the conviction already expressed in Fear and Trembling: that joy lies on the far side of suffering, that struggle must precede consolation, that ‘only the one who was in anxiety finds rest.’ Kierkegaard believes, now as then, that experiences of suffering and doubt are a crucial training in becoming fully human. And he communicates his own intimate acquaintance with suffering not only in his writing, but also in his friendships – for his is not the only anguished soul in Copenhagen, and he is sensitive to others who are in distress. When he knows that Emil Boesen is overwrought, he writes offering his sympathy, observing that ‘you gather everything together all at once and surround yourself with it, and then you succumb beneath its weight. But existence demands to be understood bit by bit.’
Last year, 1847, he wrote long letters to his brother’s wife Henriette, who suffers from severe depression. ‘See to it that you love yourself,’ he urged his sister-in-law. ‘When one is suffering and unable to do much for others, it is easy to fall prey to the melancholy thought that one is superfluous in this world, as others perhaps sometimes give one to understand. Then one must remember that before God every person is equally important, without reservation equally important; indeed, if there were any distinction, then one who suffers the most must be the closest object of God’s care.’ After his friend Pastor Spang died, he frequently visited his widow to comfort her in her grief. ‘He understood as few do,’ Hans Brøchner will recall, ‘and he comforted not by covering up sorrow but by first making one genuinely aware of it, by bringing it to complete clarity.’ Kierkegaard’s work of soul-searching, exploring his own anxiety and suffering, has deepened his understanding of being human, giving his philosophy a power to affect others. He lives this philosophy inwardly, often painfully, and expresses it in his relationships to those closest to him.