CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 5
‘one for her and one for me’: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 3: Notebooks 1–15, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 438: NB15, 6 (August to November 1849).
‘a forgotten remoteness in a rural parsonage’: see S. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 157 (journal entry, 1847).
He has remained here as a tenant: Kierkegaard and his brother Peter Christian Kierkegaard inherited the house, 2 Nytorv, when their father died in 1838, and in 1843 Kierkegaard bought his brother’s share.
‘which had tempted me in a quite curious way’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 5: Journals NB6–NB10, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 144: NB7, 114 (1848). In 1849 Kierkegaard reflected in his journal that ‘My home has been my consolation, having a pleasant home has been my greatest earthly encouragement’: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 6: Journals NB11–NB14, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 234: NB12, 143 (July to September 1849).
‘the whole movement would not touch kings at all’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 5: Journals NB6–NB10, p. 230: NB9, 42 (1849).
‘miserable to be a genius in a market town’: ibid, p. 228: NB9, 41 (1849)
on the morning of 21 March 1848, thousands gathered: this summary of Denmark’s peaceful (and lasting) ‘revolution’ is drawn from the longer accounts in Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 64–8, and Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce Kirmmse (Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 493–5.
‘the new ministry needs a war in order to stay in power’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 4: Journals NB–NB5, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 348: NB4, 123 (1848).
‘Out there everything is agitated’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 4: Journals NB–NB5, pp. 347–8: NB4, 118 (27 March, 1848).
There are paper, pens and ink in every room: See Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff and Johnny Kondrup, Written Images: Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals, Notebooks, Booklets, Sheets, Scraps, and Slips of Paper, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 159–72; Encounters with Kierkegaard, ed. Bruce Kirmmse, trans. Bruce Kirmmse and Virginia Laursen (Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 112: here Tycho Spang recalls Kierkegaard’s ‘large elegant apartment with a series of furnished rooms which in winter were heated and illuminated, and in which he did a good deal of pacing back and forth. As best I can remember, in each room there was ink, pen, and paper, which he used during his wanderings to fix an idea by means of a few quick words or a symbol.’
‘There is so much talk about wasting a life’: S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 26–7.
‘Is despair an excellence or a defect?’: ibid, pp. 14–15.
‘Just as a physician might say’: ibid, p. 22.
‘The greatest hazard of all, losing the self’: ibid, pp. 32–4.
‘Imagine a house’: ibid, p. 43.
‘Very often the person in despair probably has a dim idea of his own state’: ibid, p. 48.
‘I love my native land’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 5: Journals NB6–NB10, p. 101: NB7, 41 (1848).
‘That enormous productivity, so intense that it seems to me as if it must move stones’: ibid, p. 95: NB7, 31 (1848).
‘She was especially gratified when she could get them peacefully into bed’: Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 153.
‘a spoiled and naughty boy’: ibid, p. 228. This remark was reportedly made by a cousin of Hans Brøchner, who was a friend of Kierkegaard from his student days.
‘I never had the joy of being a child’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 5: Journals NB6–NB10, p. 211: NB9, 8 (January or February 1849).
‘His build was powerful’: see Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 151: this is from Henriette Lund’s account of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard. See also descriptions by Peter Brun (ibid, p. 6) and Frederik Welding (ibid, p. 7).
‘Oh, how frightful it is when for a moment I think of the dark background of my life’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 5: Journals NB6–NB10, p. 166: NB8, 36 (November or December 1848).
tended the parish churchyard (kirkegaard): See Thorkild Andersen, ‘Kierkegaard – Slægten og Sædding’, Hardsyssels Aarbog, 27 (1933), p. 26; cited in English in Christopher B. Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness (Ashgate, 2011), pp. 47–8.
By the close of the eighteenth century he had made a substantial fortune: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 1: Journals AA–DD, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 533.
That was how Kierkegaard always knew his father: see Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 3 – from Frederik Hammerich’s (b. 1809) autobiography Et Levnedsløb, vol. I (Forlagsbureaet i Kjøbenhavn, 1882), pp. 58–9.
‘very intriguing to hear the old man debate with the sons’: see Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 137 – from the account of Eline Heramb Boisen, who visited the Kierkegaard household several times in the winter of 1833–4.
Kierkegaard’s view of the world as a battlefield: on ‘martial music’, see S. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, ed. and trans. Henrik Rosenmeier (Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 124 – letter to Emil Boesen, 16 January 1842; S. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part 1, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 349.
‘When I can’t sleep, I lie down and talk with my boys’: see Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 6. This account comes second- or third-hand from Peter Munthe Brun (b. 1813).
he did the family’s daily shopping himself: ibid, p. 3 – from Frederik Hammerich’s autobiography.
His own nature was free-spirited: see Letters and Documents, pp. 4–5 – Kierkegaard’s school report, written by his headmaster Michael Nielsen.
‘He did not reveal his character in the way that young people usually do’: see Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 7 – from a letter written by Frederik Welding (b. 1811) to H. P. Barfod in 1869. On the clothes Kierkegaard wore as a boy, see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks Volume 5: Journals NB6–NB10, p. 344: NB10, 153 (spring 1849).
‘to cloak this life with an outward existence of joie de vivre’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 5: Journals NB6–NB10, p. 259: NB9, 78 (1849); p. 166: NB8, 36 (winter 1848); pp. 368–9: NB10, 191 (spring 1849).
‘He made my childhood an unparalleled torture’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 4: Journals NB–NB5, pp. 401–2: NB5, 68 (May to July 1848).
‘I acquired such an anxiety about Christianity’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 5: Journals NB6–NB10, p. 166: NB8, 36 (winter 1848); p. 259: NB9, 78 (1849); pp. 368–9: NB10, 191 (spring 1849).
‘But under his “rustic cloak” manner he concealed an ardent imagination’: S. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments / Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 120f. In this passage from Johannes Climacus, the Danish phrase en enkelt Gang – here translated ‘once in a while’ – can also mean ‘on one occasion’. The virtual excursion with his father almost certainly occurred in Kierkegaard’s childhood at least once, since he refers to an imagined trip to Frederiksberg in an 1844 letter to his brother Peter Christian’s wife Henriette: see Letters and Documents, p. 174: ‘Often in my childhood I was not permitted by my father to walk out to Frederiksberg, but I walked hand in hand with him up and down the floor – to Frederiksberg.’ In an 1847 letter to Peter Christian, Kierkegaard wrote that ‘a curious thing about Father was that what he had most of, what one least expected, was imagination, albeit a melancholy imagination … However little I otherwise agreed with Father, in a few singular ideas we had an essential point of contact, and in such conversations Father was always almost impressed with me, for I could depict an idea with a lively imagination and pursue it with a daring consistency’: see Letters and Documents, p. 211.
The Mysterious Family: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 2: Journals EE–KK, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 174: JJ 147 (1843). For an intriguing philosophical and psychological exposition of Kierkegaard’s journal entry on ‘The Mysterious Family’, see George Pattison, ‘The Mysterious Family or Why Kierkegaard Never Wrote a Play: An Old Question Revisited’, in Kierkegaard and the Nineteenth Century Religious Crisis in Europe, ed. Roman Králik, Abrahim H. Khan, Peter Sajda, Jamie Turnbull and Andrew J. Burgess (Acta Kierkegaardiana, vol. 4, 2009), pp. 187–201.
‘A guilt must rest upon the entire family’: Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers: Autobiographical, 1829–48, eds. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk (Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 141: Pap. II A 805, 806 (1838).
we first learn to love: Kierkegaard’s niece Henriette Lund once saw for herself how highly Kierkegaard esteemed the ability to love: ‘One day, when I met Uncle Søren in my early youth, he teased me by being unwilling to admit my right to have an opinion about some subject or other that was currently popular. In the ensuing debate, in which I attempted to demonstrate my dignity and maturity, there was just one argument that instantly overpowered him. I said “Yes, because I have learned to appreciate love.” With a changed expression, and with a serious tone of voice, he replied: “That is another matter. Then you are right. I realize now that you really are grown up!” I still remember it. It was as if he had taken off his hat and bowed to me with enormous respect’: Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 170 – from Henriette Lund, Eringringer Fra Hjemmet (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1909).