ADandy on aPilgrimage
The Rich Young Man
Søren Aabye inherited more than his father’s “transfigured image.” When the estate was settled in March 1839, the merchant’s total assets were calculated to be 125,341 rixdollars, 2 marks, and 8 shillings. The two brothers each received outright one-quarter of the total, which amounted to the tidy sum of 31,335 rixdollars, 2 marks, and 2 shillings. In December 1838 the house at 2 Nytorv was sold at auction to the two brothers for 19,000 rixdollars. The rest of the assets were placed in bonds, stocks, and other commercial paper. Thus neither of the brothers had any need to concern himself about his future living arrangements or any other aspect of his economic situation. At an annual yield of four percent, they could easily live on the income from their assets, about 1,200 rixdollars a year.
While Peter Christian took over his father’s apartment in the house, Søren Aabye moved out and for the next couple of years shared an apartment at 11 Kultorvet with Peter Hansen, a university student from southern Jutland. The rich young man had no notion of settling down as a comfortable gentleman of independent means, however. He wanted to finish his theology degree, and when a friend commented that, now that his father had died, Søren Aabye no longer had to study for his examinations, he replied laconically: “No. Don’t you see, my friend, that now I can no longer put off the old man with talk.” And in his journal Kierkegaard seized on the metaphor of the river Guadalquivir, with which he loved to compare himself: “Now, for a year, for a mile in time, I will plunge underground like the river Guadalquivir. I will surely emerge again!” In the late summer of 1839, before he went underground in earnest, he bade a jocular farewell to his happy moments, his lucida intervalla, as he called them: “You, too, my lucida intervalla, I must relinquish you. And you, my thoughts, imprisoned inside my head—you can no longer be permitted to take strolls in the cool of the evening. But do not lose heart. Become better acquainted with one another, keep one another company, and once in a while I will certainly steal away to pay you a visit. Au revoir!” Signed: “S. K., formerly Dr. Exstaticus.”
There was not to be much time for visiting. Kierkegaard slogged his way though the theological disciplines and attended Professor Clausen’s lectures, which, however, true to form, he quickly abandoned. A couple of years earlier Kierkegaard had participated in some similar exercises, and to Clausen’s speechless indignation he had refused to write an essay on a required topic and instead had turned in an analysis of the wording of the essay question itself, which he found simply meaningless. Now he had the means to hire the tutors who provided the best private instruction, and an undated fragment from the period presents a bizarre impression of the situation: “I study Hebrew with one of them in the afternoon. I will hire another one for the morning and yet another one to take walks with me, thereby manufacturing knowledge of Hebrew within sealed machines, as Deichmann’s produces chocolates.” The study of Hebrew grammar gave rise to reflections about the hard-pressed status of the subject: “The trouble with me,” he wrote in mid-January 1839, “is that my life—the condition of my soul—always follows declensions in which not only the endings are different but the entire word is changed.” And later in the year he declared that he “felt like a letter that has been printed backwards in the line.” Kierkegaard had demanded that Andersen possess a “life view” that would serve as “Providence in the novel” and thus be ubiquitously “present in the work of art,” and now he himself could not even discern his own subject on the level of the sentence! It was not surprising that L. C. Müller, who served for a time as his tutor in Hebrew, bluntly asked: “But what in the world are we going to do with that Søren?”
The isolation was close to driving him mad, and he recalled Cornelius Nepos’s story of the general, besieged in a fortress with a large troop of cavalry, who had the horses whipped every day so that they would not become sick from so much standing still: “I, too, live in my room as though I were under siege. I don’t want to see anyone, and I am continually afraid that enemies will try to attack—that is, that someone will come by and call on me. I would rather not go out, so in order to avoid injury from such a sedentary life, I weep until I am worn out.” At one point in the early spring, still beset with this pain, he exclaimed: “All of existence makes me anxious, from the least little fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation.”
That he survived the ordeal was attributable not only to the fact that he could no longer put off the old man with talk, but also because a young girl had begun to become entwined in his thoughts in a quite promising fashion. Thus, in a journal entry, dated February 2, 1839, written in praise of this young lady (whose last name was just plain “Olsen,” but who, thank God, had an unusually poetic given name) we have a paean that has since been translated into virtually all the world’s major languages: “O, you, the mistress of my heart—‘Regina’—concealed in the most profound recesses of my breast, in my most luxuriant notion of life, in a place equidistant from Heaven and Hell—unknown divinity! O, I can really believe the poets who tell us that when we see the object of our love for the first time, we believe we have seen her long before; they tell us that all love, like all knowledge, is recollection—that even in the case of a single individual, love has its prophecies, its typical figures, its myths, its Old Testament. I see traces of your beauty everywhere, in every girl’s face, but I think I would have to possess every girl in order that, out of all their beauty, I might be able to compound yours. I would have to travel the entire globe to find the land I lack, but which, like the pole, is pointed to by the deepest secret of my whole being. And at the next instant you are so close to me, so present, and you fulfill my spirit so powerfully that I appear transfigured to myself and feel that it is well to remain right where I am. Thou blind god of Love! You, who see into concealment, will you reveal it to me? Will I find here in this world what I am seeking? Will I experience the conclusion of all the eccentric premises of my life? Will I enclose you in my arms? Or
are there further orders?
Have you gone on ahead of me? You, my longing, are you, transfigured, beckoning to me from another world? O, I will cast off everything in order to become light enough to follow you.”
There is a breathless delight in these words, but there is also a melancholy sense of leave-taking, as though there were in fact further orders and Regine would never become anything but the ephemeral material from which great art is created. Thus it is entirely in keeping with the displacement that has already taken place—pushing aside the actual, concrete girl in favor of the poetically charged object—that in the original version the name “Regine” was not included in the entry at all; it was only added later on, and even then it was in the latinized and rather impersonal form, “Regina.”
After this ode to the unknown divinity, the journal entries dash off in every possible direction. On that same day, that is, February 2, 1839, Kierkegaard wrote two additional journal entries, but neither of them had any immediate connection with Regine. One entry is a poetic fragment about a female reader who misunderstands a text, while the other celebrates the incomparable feeling one has when one has “managed to get the idea breathed into the body of the concept” and can now sit and observe how the idea begins to swell, “not convulsively, but virginally.” When something takes shape in this manner, it is the intellectual’s delight, but it is the delight of the artist and the writer as well. Kierkegaard granted that it was certainly true that one must occasionally sequester an idea in a “maiden’s bower” until a worthy bridegroom has been found for it, “but for goodness’ sake, a maiden’s bower is no nun’s cloister.”
That is true enough. And by the same token, erotic passion is not necessarily predestined to end in a marriage but can discharge itself in a quite different manner—for example, as literature.
The Translator
On July 21, 1839, the external world of Copenhagen suddenly broke in upon Kierkegaard’s solitary confinement: “Now I can understand why H. Hertz was so eager to talk with me, now that I am reading his latest handiwork with its political whimsies and outbursts. It’s just a shame that he left out the Translator’s satirical whimsies.” Kierkegaard had left off memorizing lists of popes in order to read Hertz’s Moods and Situations: Scenes and Sketches from a Stay in Copenhagen, which had appeared a short time before. And like so many others who have had the dubious honor of appearing in a roman à clef, Kierkegaard did not think his character was drawn satisfactorily; he missed his own satirical whimsy, but he did recognize himself in the character Hertz called the Translator. “The Translator bears this title because he is a living dictionary for other people,” Hertz explains in one of his notebooks. Kierkegaard may also have been able to recognize other characters in the book, for example, Thomsen, who is Hertz himself. And then there is a certain Amadis, a sensitive spirit, full of the oddities and shortcomings of romanticism; this is Hans Christian Andersen, who at one point gets into an argument with the Translator about whether a genius needs warmth to be able to prosper—a clear allusion to Kierkegaard’s still-living book about Andersen.
Hertz began collecting material for the book as early as the 1820s, began writing the book in 1831, and two years later he gave a reading of portions of the manuscript at the Student Association. Thus he had been working with the material for some time before he met Kierkegaard. They first encountered each other sometime in 1836 at the Student Association, where the theological student lay stretched comfortably on a sofa and addressed Hertz in a confidential tone, as though they had known one another for ages. “After that we met often, though only on the street, in public places, et cetera, and I was very taken with his cheerful, intelligent conversation,” Hertz relates. From October 1835 until October 1837 Hertz lived at 17 Nytorv, on the same stairway as Poul Martin Møller, who probably helped Hertz sketch his psychological and intellectual profile of Kierkegaard. Hertz also followed Kierkegaard’s literary efforts and approvingly read his articles on the liberal press, which was also a principal topic in his Moods and Situations. On September 6, 1838, when Hertz had spent the morning with Heiberg, the conversation turned to Kierkegaard’s recently published work From the Papers of One Still Living, which, with its untraditional and occasionally stilted style, presumably provided a source of amusement for the two literary comrades. Indeed, after the encounter Hertz wrote in his diary “the Mesopotamian language is a strange language,” a sentence taken from Holberg’s play Ulysses of Ithacia, which surely had provided a little comic relief when Hertz and Heiberg had considered Kierkegaard’s debut book. Hertz, who was worried about the penchant for Germanisms that characterized the language of younger Danish writers, saw Kierkegaard as an exponent of this unfortunate development: “Those who have picked up the German philosophy are completely incapable of practicing it in Danish. Their text teems with words of which no Dane knows the meaning. Kierkegaard’s essay on Andersen shows what language we can expect from this philosophy.” Hertz also believed that he could discern Kierkegaard’s stylistic prototype in the odd German Hamann, but during a stroll on March 18, 1839, when he told Kierkegaard that he suspected Hamann’s influence, the answer was a clear “No.” “I have not read anything by him,” Kierkegaard supposedly answered. If Hertz’s memory of the event is correct, then it was an odd reply, or rather, it was a downright lie, because it was precisely this Hamann whom Kierkegaard had been citing and commenting on in his journals since September 10, 1836, sometimes, in fact, in considerable detail. Indeed, one long journal entry from that year, entitled “Something about Hamann,” can actually be read as a first sketch of what would become the introductory portion of From the Papers of One Still Living.
Like the style, the man, too, was puzzling, and Hertz continues: “What a peculiar Kirkegaard! [Danish: Kirkegaard, Hertz’s common misspelling of Kierkegaard, means graveyard or churchyard] To judge from various clues, it would appear that the trumpets have been sounded for the resurrection from the grave—but if that is the case, the dead have not yet recovered their bones, but are lying there quarreling over them. Because the confusion is great. (The Mesopotamian language is a strange language.)” Hertz here alludes to the hour at which the trumpet of doom will resound over the graveyard and the scattered bones will be reassembled—just like that oddity Kierkegaard, who had not yet found his own legs but was forever disappearing into eccentric dialectic and sheer witticisms.
On August 8, 1839, Hertz ran into Kierkegaard, who, he says, expressed satisfaction with the critique of the liberal press he had found in Moods and Situations but who also had objections and would have done much of it quite differently. Hertz concluded his diary entry with the remark, “His egoism.” That same day Kierkegaard wrote in his journal: “If my witticisms are affected as some people indeed maintain, well, theirs cannot be accused of that, because theirs are defective.” Of course, this is in itself an affected little witticism, but Kierkegaard wanted to go on the counteroffensive, and on a loose slip of paper, dated the same day, he noted: “If only I could soon be done with my university examinations so that I could again become a quodlibetarius.” A quodlibetarius is a person who does just exactly what he wants. And then Kierkegaard repeats a line he had used against Andersen: “Like a thunderstorm, the genius goes against the wind.”
Kierkegaard, however, never did issue a rejoinder to Hertz, while Hertz had plans of using Kierkegaard as a model in other literary contexts. Thus, in one of his sketchbooks from the latter part of 1844, Hertz writes: “When Kg. talks with young people at the Student Association, he is to speak very slowly and ask them at every moment whether they have understood him.” Nothing ever came of this or of a similar idea, and Hertz was less and less capable of understanding Kierkegaard, who seemed to him little more than a “writer of serialized novels” who “let his pen run on about all manner of things,” turning “molehills” into “mountains.” Hertz was not taken with the perpetual use of pseudonyms and found Kierkegaard’s works much too large, calling them uncrackable “nuts” with “relatively small kernels.” Hertz could not understand why Emil Aarestrup spoke warmly of Either/Or, but he nonetheless accepted from Kierkegaard a dedicated copy of that work in 1849, when it appeared in its second printing, just as he also received a copy of On My Work as an Author in 1851. The two men occasionally met by chance in the inns of northern Zealand, and Hertz subsequently remembered how Kierkegaard would arrive in the coach “with the extra post, climbing out of the carriage into the pouring rain, which he liked,” bringing with him a brace of partridges or snipe, one for the innkeeper, the other for himself. As fate would have it, in late July 1851 the two men chanced to stay at Hvidberg’s Inn in Hørsholm during an eclipse of the sun. They did not talk to each other, for while Hertz was preoccupied with the unusual astronomical event, Kierkegaard dined in his room in peace and quiet.
“My Reading for the Examinations Is the Longest Parenthesis”
During the summer of 1839 Peter Christian had traveled around the country, stopping at the village of Sædding to call on his father’s sister Else. In mid-September Else wrote Peter Christian a touching letter in which she thanked him and told him how moved she was to have been visited by such an important man; as a thank you she had a messenger deliver “6 milde cheeses.” In the latter part of March 1840 she again wrote to the brothers Kierkegaard: “Mssrs. Dear Nephews: Wee have intended to write a long time ago, but because of aksidental and presssing sir cumstances, this has been put offe but I see from yorr dear letter that yorr jorney was enjoyyabel and pleazant and that you returned to your dear familly and friends in Copenhagen safely. I have been very weak all winter and my husband was bedridden a grate part of the time. The words of Our Lord Jesus were not wrong when he himself says, ‘See I am with you always.’ … And there was verry much I would have liked to talk with you about but the time wass so short both for you and for me. But is it not posssuble that your dear brother would give us the pleazure of travvelling heer to our home, not for the graand mannner in which we livve, but out of Christian lovve, so that we can talk with one an other as friends and rell atives. A loving greeting to you and all of your dear familly and frends. We ask you if yu would not have the kindness to answer us with a couple of words when yoo have a chance. We ask you that yoo do not scorn this poor ledder because it is poor and very badd.”
One can only guess what went across the faces of the two quick-witted nephews when they read these clumsy lines, but neither of them seems to have replied to the appeal. They were, among other things, too busy. Peter Christian spent the autumn tutoring and getting a new theological journal off the ground, while Søren Aabye continued to read for his examinations with titanic bravado. On June 2, 1840, when he submitted his petition to sit for the examinations, he explained in Latin that his interest in theology had long been waning in favor of his philosophical studies: “I freely acknowledge that under such circumstances I would never have been able to bring myself to continue in a direction I had long since abandoned, had it not been for my father’s death, by which I felt myself in a certain sense bound by a promise.”
The petition was granted and on July 3 he began his examinations, which in accordance with the custom of the times required an almost superhuman demonstration of ready knowledge. Professor Scharling started out, posing questions about the history of dogma, including a required recitation of the Augsburg Confession. Professor Engelstoft continued, now in Latin, questioning Kierkegaard on the Old Testament; the first problem posed was a translation of Genesis 9:16–29 (the story of Noah), followed by questions concerning the concept of covenant, with particular attention to Abraham, all of which went swimmingly. As the examinations continued, now in Danish, the candidate was examined on ethical problems, particularly with respect to Kant and to Fichte’s argument for the foundation of morals. Finally it was the turn of Professor Hohlenberg, who questioned the candidate, first in Latin, then in Danish, on the New Testament. From the standpoint of Romans 1:1–13, he asked about the epistle’s theological and historical background and consequences: What was the occasion for Paul’s journey to Rome? Did the Roman Christians consist of former pagans or of Jews? Which Romans are mentioned in the letter? What are the contents of the first seven verses? Why is the opening of this letter different from the openings of Paul’s other letters? Had Paul previously been in Ephesus? What was the relation of the bishop of Rome and the Roman congregation to the rest of the Christian world? What did Tertullian and Irenaeus have to say about it? What is the significance of the apostolic tradition? Which bishops enjoyed special respect? What does the title of patriarch signify? Was the bishop of Rome subordinate to the emperor? And so on, and so on, until it was over and Kierkegaard could rise from the examination table as a theology graduate with the grade of laudabilis. Of the sixty-three candidates for the theological degree that semester, Kierkegaard turned in the fourth best performance on the written examination, surpassed only by Christens, Wad, and Warburg, whose answers, according to the examiners, “contained a greater measure of specifically theological material.” On the other hand, Kierkegaard’s answers testified to “far greater maturity and development of thought than any of the others.” “Praise and thanks be to God,” Peter Christian wrote in his diary when he learned of the happy event. And after months of silence Søren Aabye made a metaphorical comment in his journal: “I am always accused of using lengthy parenthetical phrases. Studying for my examinations is the longest parenthesis I have ever experienced.”
Sometime after Kierkegaard’s examinations, Peter Stilling, a university student, sought out a man named Brøchner, who had served as Kierkegaard’s tutor. Stilling reckoned that he could complete his philosophy studies in a year and a half. After all, Stilling said, Kierkegaard had not taken any more time than that. “Ah, yes,” said old Brøchner, who did not exactly excel in courtesy, “don’t fool yourself! Søren Kierkegaard was something else; he could do everything!”
A Dandy on a Pilgrimage
The long parentheses were over, and Aunt Else’s invitation presented a welcome opportunity to combine diversion with a pilgrimage to Sædding. So the twenty-seven-year-old theology graduate departed from Copenhagen early on the morning of Saturday, July 18, 1840. Ordinarily, the Kalundborg–Aarhus route was served by the steamboat Dania, but there had been a change in the vessel employed, so the next morning they boarded an old, flat-bottomed tub, a so-called smack, which originally had been used for transporting cattle, and whose sluggishness and shabby condition made it the object of much complaint. The smack was owned by a merchant named Sass, who was certainly going to get an earful about this wretched transportation—Kierkegaard noted the address: “282 Nyhavn, on the Charlottenborg side.”
Sunday afternoon the smack put in at Aarhus harbor in Jutland, and Kierkegaard presumably went to one of the town’s inns, where, preferring solitude, he retreated to his room with his pocket-sized green leather notebook which he proceeded to fill up with his impressions of and reflections upon this first big journey of his life. The topic was ready to hand: “The smack. It is terrible how tedious conversation generally is when you have to be together with other people for such a long time. It’s just like when toothless old folks have to turn food over in their mouths again and again—in this case, an individual remark was repeated so often that it finally had to be spit out. There were four pastors in the group, and even though the crossing lasted eight or nine hours (for me, an eternity), the experienced passengers nevertheless found this to be unusually expeditious, which gave the pastors occasion to remark, one after the other, first, that skippers usually did not like to have pastors on board, because it made for head winds, and second, that the truth of this saying had now been disproven.”
The chatter on the water convinced Kierkegaard that the hotly debated call for abolition of the rule that restricted a person’s ecclesiastical activities to his parish of residence would in fact be a dubious gain, because even though, on board the smack, one could choose whatever pastor one wanted, one still had to listen to the same preaching. Kierkegaard’s description is a bit fanciful, but the presence of pastors on board was not a mere fantasy. An inspection of the passenger list, published in the July 22, 1840, issue of the Randers Amtsavis og Avertissementstidende, in fact shows that in addition to “theological graduate Søren Kierkegaard,” the smack transported four pastors from Kalundbord to Aarhus.
Kierkegaard remained in Aarhus for a couple of days, but apart from the cathedral and its organ there were not many sights to see. Nor could one go for a stroll, as one could in Copenhagen—the paving was simply not up to it. And then there was the local population, who stared and gaped in the rudest way whenever they saw a stranger: “Life in these provincial towns is just as wretched, ridiculous, and tasteless as the way in which they walk down the street. In vain you make an effort to walk forward with a modicum of dignity (for it is simply impossible to walk and meditate—the meditation itself would dissolve into nothing but dashes)—and then, when you also bear in mind that you are the object of such peculiarly small-town curiosity.” The streets bore unmistakable traces of the presence of cows. If, when he had tended herds in Sædding as a young boy, Kierkegaard’s father had perhaps warmed his frozen toes in a steaming cow patty, his son was now having great difficulties maneuvering around the cows’ calling cards. The son had also rid his speech of any echoes of the Jutland dialect, and when as a boy H. F. Rørdam encountered Kierkegaard, seventeen years his senior, at his grandmother’s house, it was a meeting that he found “not exactly pleasant,” because the strange gentleman “made fun of my Jutland dialect.”
But the occasion for all this “small-town curiosity” was not merely the idler from Copenhagen who surveyed the humble circumstances of the place as though he had just stepped out of Holberg’s play Erasmus Montanus. There was the additional circumstance that the newly crowned King Christian VIII had recently set out on a tour of the provinces and that, together with Queen Caroline Amalie, he had arrived at Aarhus almost simultaneously with Kierkegaard. The entire city was therefore beside itself with sheer Jutlandic excitement, pulling out all the stops to give the monarch a proper reception, even to the point of erecting a triumphal arch. While the people were out watching the civic guard parade and a twenty-seven gun salute was being fired, Kierkegaard remained at the inn in the company of his pocket-sized notebook, in which he captured his mood: “I am so listless and devoid of joy that not only do I have nothing that fills my soul, I cannot even conceive of anything that could possibly satisfy it—alas, not even the bliss of Heaven.” And a bit later, in this same minor key: “My total mental and spiritual incapacity at present is frightful precisely because it is connected with a consuming longing, with a spiritual concupiscence which, however, is so amorphous that I don’t even know what it is that I lack.”
But the next day he pulled himself together and set out on an excursion to the peninsula of Mols, where he inspected Kalø Castle and refreshed his memory of the story of Marsk Stig, the heroic regicide. From there he went on to Knebel, where Emil Boesen’s older brother, Carl Ulrik Boesen, served as parish pastor, residing there with his wife Achthonia Frederikke. The following day the journey proceeded to Randers, and thence eight kilometers down Guden Stream to the country village of Albæk and the Støvringgård Monastery, which basked in particularly beautiful evening light. Then on to Viborg for a stay of a couple of days. The king had arrived twenty-four hours later than originally planned, and the citizens of Viborg, who had waited up all night like the wise virgins of the Bible, were therefore a bit bleary-eyed, but in Viborg, as in every provincial town, people insisted that nowhere had the king been so delighted with his visit as right there.
From Viborg he went by carriage to Hald, where an old man lay out on the heather, impressing Kierkegaard with his utter insouciance. Kierkegaard joined company with him as far as Non Mill, and when they passed Koldbæk, which was said to have the most delicious water in the entire district, the old fellow lay down on his belly and drank happily from the brook. “And this is the life we are brought up to disdain!” he wrote in his notebook, full of romantic indignation. The parting was painful, however. When Kierkegaard had wanted to give the man a few small coins as thanks for his company, the old man made as if to kiss him on the hand, thus assuming a posture of servility that disturbed Kierkegaard’s impression of the stout-hearted common man. “I would have preferred more bold confidence,” Kierkegaard explained.
The moor was not only the moor, it was also a mythic bit of nature, and for Kierkegaard it was animated by the memory of poor Michael, who had minded his sheep and had one day climbed a little hill to curse a distant, uncaring God. Traveling down narrow lanes and over wheel ruts, the one-time shepherd’s well-to-do son rolled by in his coach, noting things at a distance: “The moors must be particularly suited for the development of mighty spirits. Here everything lies naked and exposed to God, and here they do not have the many diversions, the many crannies and recesses, in which consciousness may hide away and from which earnestness so often has a difficult time rounding up one’s scattered thoughts. Here consciousness must close in upon itself in firm and precise fashion. Here on the moor you may truly say: ‘Whither shall I flee from Thy presence?’ ”
Kierkegaard put this to the test and set out on a solitary walk about which he would later file a report: “Walking on the moor … I lost my way. Far away a dark mass loomed up, tossing one way and the other in constant unrest. I thought it was a forest. I was quite amazed since I knew that there was no forest in the area other than the one I had left behind me. Alone on the burning moor, surrounded on all sides by absolute sameness except for the tossing sea right in front of me, I became positively seasick and desperate because despite all my efforts at walking I could not manage to get any closer to the forest. Nor did I ever get there, because when I reached the Viborg Road it still appeared to be there, except that now, standing on the white road, I could see that it was heather-covered hills on the other side of Viborg Lake. On the moor, precisely because one has such extensive vistas, one has absolutely no scale of measure. One walks and walks. Objects do not change, because there actually is no ob-ject [Latin: object, ‘thrown (ject) against (ob)’] (for to be an object always requires the existence of an other by virtue of which it is an ob-ject, but the eye cannot be that other: The eye is the combining faculty).”
So the moor presumably did seem to foster the development of mighty spirits, but among the descendants of these spirits it seemed to develop something quite different: Kierkegaard lost his sense of direction, confused forests with the sea, and became seasick and desperate; the infinite plain burned under his feet; and all the while objects retreated from him the more he tried to approach them. The natural world, which until then had received its mythic importance from the memory of his father, suddenly reversed itself and imploded into the wanderer, producing the dizzying emptiness whose name is anxiety. There was nothing, no thing, no object; the eye was unable to combine. Not even the myth could manage any longer to secure the moor as the ground under the father’s story. It, too, had burst, allowing the increasingly directionless young man to plummet through himself, past all fixed points, out into nothing.
From the district around Viborg the journey continued to the town of Holstebro, “the Jerusalem of hosiers,” where the name Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard was quite well remembered. In other respects, however, there was not much that awakened remembrances of things past; on the contrary, the opposite was the case. At Holstebro there was a sort of trapshooting contest in which a person was supposed to hit a little birdy, something everyone continued to find enormously amusing even though it had amused them for the better part of a day. Kierkegaard was compelled to resume his status as tourist, and noted satirically: “I want to convey my best wishes to the honored inhabitants of Holstebro, in the hope that this singular amusement might last for a minimum of eight days. The birdy, too, seems to be a pretty tough character, for although its wing was shot off—at any rate the prize for having done so was awarded to the lucky winner—it remained sitting there. The town judge was there in all his august presence, making microscopic observations with the assistance of a spotting scope. The only thing lacking was that the town had no official newspaper in which to publish the results.” The estrangement continued. Driving past the church in the village of Idum, the coachman asserted that the pastor was named Giedde. Kierkegaard knew the man, but when he descended from the carriage to meet him, he was received coolly: The pastor was named not Giedde, but Gjeding—but in the Jutland dialect no one can tell the difference!
The journey continued in a southerly direction toward Ringkøbing. In this district, oddly enough, young girls went around wearing “men’s hats.” Kierkegaard met one of them and hoped that she would remove it for him so that he could do the same, but she was coy and kept it on. Ringkøbing was the last stop before the journey’s mythic destination, Sædding. Never had he been so close to his family’s point of origin: “I sit here quite alone—it is true that I have often been equally alone, but I was not so conscious of it—counting the hours until I see Sædding. I cannot recall there ever having been any change in my father, and now I will see the places where as a poor boy he tended sheep, places for which I have felt homesickness on account of his descriptions. What if I now were to fall ill and be buried in Sædding Cemetery! Strange thought. His last wish for me is fulfilled. Could this really be the whole of my earthly destiny? In the name of God! Yet, compared with what I owe him, the task was not so little.” Kierkegaard had considered the possibility of preaching—for his first time ever—in Sædding, and he saw to his amazement that the text for the day—just now, when he found himself in the poorest parish on the moors of Jutland—was the passage in the Gospel of Mark about the feeding of the five thousand in the wilderness. A mysterious coincidence, but the idea of giving a sermon remained an idea only.
From Ringkøbing his carriage traveled the last part of the journey, past the village of Lem and the marsh down near Løvdrup. Beyond, on the hazy horizon, he could make out a low, unsteepled, granite church. He drove into Sædding, where his Aunt Else came to her door to welcome the second of her distinguished nephews from Copenhagen. When he entered the lowceilinged rooms he could verify by both sight and scent that what Else had said about her living conditions being poor had not been false modesty, but the sorry truth. The destination for this journey of many, many miles, and the object of equally many revered and cherished imaginings, turned out to be a pigsty in which an old woman, cloaked in rags, had taken up residence!
Even though he was in Sædding Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday (August 2–4), except for one or two entries, the pocket notebook in which he generally noted things very diligently is almost entirely silent about his stay at Else’s. And, true to form, when he did write something down, it was to capture the natural setting: “Standing outside the doorway of the little place in the last light of evening, in the aroma that hay always gives off; the foreground is furnished by the sheep drifting home; dark clouds, broken through here and there by bright beams of light, the sort of clouds that precede a windstorm; the moor looms up in the background—if only I could truly remember the impression of this evening.” The other journal entry is more laconic, less lyrical, and looks something like a parable that Kierkegaard neither wanted—nor dared—to push to its conclusion: “They say that here in Sædding parish there is a house in which, during the time of the plague, there lived a man who survived everyone else and buried them. He dug deep furrows in the heather and buried the bodies in long rows.” Isn’t this something of the saga of his father, who had had to bury two wives, five children, and a daughter-in-law before he himself was granted peace? Despondency stole upon the traveler, and he cited the Greek painter Apelles in his pocket notebook: “As they say, nulla dies sine linea, I can say of this journey nulla dies sine lacryma.” Not a day without a line. Not a day without a tear.
When it was time for Kierkegaard to leave Sædding, the local schoolteacher, Jens Jensen Kirkeby, had arranged a grand farewell ceremony in order to express his thanks for the establishment of the endowment that the wealthy hosier had given to the local school some years earlier: “The schoolteacher in Sædding held a very solemn farewell address for me in which he assured me that he could see from my father’s gift that my father must have been a friend of enlightenment, and that I could rest assured that he would work for it in the parish of Sædding.” What Kierkegaard does not tell us is related by Hans Brøchner: Kirkeby, who evidently was a poetic soul, had written a song in honor of Kierkegaard and had rehearsed it with the schoolchildren, who were supposed to take up their positions behind the schoolteacher on the day of Kierkegaard’s departure. When Kierkegaard came rolling up in his carriage, he ordered the coachman to stop, nodded in friendly fashion to the schoolteacher, from whose hands he took the song as if to study it more carefully. At that instant he gave the coachman the order to leave, and the entire arrangement fell to pieces. The schoolteacher had not memorized his song and thus did not know where to start, and the children were literally speechless over the scene. Kierkegaard, meanwhile, disappeared in his carriage, waving vigorously to the bewildered chorus of children, enormously amused at the schoolteacher’s bewilderment. Adieu Sædding!
On the way back to Aarhus, Kierkegaard spent the night at the inn in the village of Them. The place was filled to the bursting point with counts and barons. The contrast was utterly overwhelming, and Kierkegaard had to write about it in his notebook: “After having stayed three days with my poor aunt, almost like Ulysses’ comrades when they were the guests of Circe, the first place I came to afterwards was so overflowing with counts and barons that it was frightful.” It was, however, not so frightful as to have kept him from spending both that evening and the following morning with Count Ahlefeldt, who was kind enough to invite him to his estate on the island of Langeland. On the day he left, Kierkegaard had the additional pleasure of seeing once more “my old, noble friend Rosenørn.”
On Wednesday, August 5, Kierkegaard was in Aarhus for the second and final time in his life. While approaching it from the west he had seen some animals in the distance and had asked his coachman what sort of creatures were walking around and grazing out there, to which his coachman had replied gravely: “They are all the cows of Aarhus.” Another episode was quite serious, for all its comic trappings: “On the way to Aarhus I saw a very amusing sight. Two cows harnessed together cantered past us. One was frisking about with a smart swing to her tail; the other was, as it seemed, more prosaic and in sheer distress at having to participate in these same movements.—Aren’t most marriages organized in this manner?” The resignation incorporated in this little allegory did not augur particularly well, and it alludes darkly to an earlier journal entry in which Kierkegaard complained about having overreached himself in relation to the ideal: “This is why I give birth to monsters, and this is why reality does not measure up to my burning desires—and may God grant that this will not also be true of love, because there, too, I am seized by an obscure anxiety about having confused the ideal with the actual. God forbid! This has not happened yet.—But this anxiety, which makes me so eager to know the future before it arrives—and yet I fear it!”
Early on the morning of August 6, Kierkegaard sailed from Aarhus to Kalundborg, this time, thank God, with the supermodern, well-equipped steamship Christian VIII, so the crossing took only six hours. He had been away from Copenhagen a bit more than three weeks. From the stern of the boat he could see Aarhus disappear, and shortly afterward the mountains of Mols and the hills of Trehøje sank into the sea. Sædding was someplace far away and could gradually begin to regain its mythic power.
On Saturday, August 8, Kierkegaard was back in Copenhagen where he belonged, and now he could run free as the quodlibetarius he had so much wanted to be.
Precisely a month later he committed the luckiest mistake of his life.
1. The Kierkegaard family home at 2 Nytorv was four stories high, with a high-ceilinged cellar. While he was a university student, and again when he returned to the family home in the years 1841–48, Kierkegaard occupied the apartment on the second floor, next to the entrance to the city hall–courthouse building. The place was torn down in 1908 to make room for the gigantic Handelsbank building at the corner of Nytorv and Frederiksberggade, adjacent to what is now known as Strøget, Copenhagen’s famous pedestrian street.
2. Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard. “In his old age, an old man who was himself enormously melancholic had a son who inherited the whole of his melancholia,” the son wrote in his journal in 1846. As an eleven-year-old boy, Michael Pedersen left a poverty-stricken existence on the moors of Jutland and moved to Copenhagen, where he quickly learned how to make money as a merchant of woolen goods, and he subsequently established himself as a businessman, an investor, and a speculator in real estate. At about the age of forty he withdrew from the business world to dedicate himself to more intellectual pursuits. Seeking support in the biblical story of Job, his tortured imaginative faculty conjured up the notion that God would punish him by causing his children to die before they reached the age of thirty-four. Only two of his seven children survived him.
3. Ane Kierkegaard. Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard’s first wife died after two years of marriage. A year later he impregnated his domestic servant, Ane Sørensdatter Lund, whom he then married in haste. Almost nothing is known about her. Søren Aabye never mentioned her, and Peter Christian mentioned her very rarely. According to what little information is available, she was a pleasant, chubby little lady with a steady and cheerful temperament. She could not write, and someone had to guide her hand when she signed official documents.
4. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kierkegaard never had himself photographed—or daguerreotyped, as it was called in those days. Copenhagen was introduced to the technology in the early 1840s, when a Viennese portrait painter opened a shop on Bredgade where, upon payment of eight rixdollars, a person could be immortalized in fifteen seconds. Niels Christian Kierkegaard, who had studied at the Academy of Art, was a distant cousin of Søren Aabye and thus had opportunity to make this drawing of his relative, who would later become so famous. The lines in this profile drawing from January 1838 are very full of feeling. There is a certain dreamy quality, but also something aristocratic, about this youth who has clearly struck a pose.
5. With its neoclassical bourgeois homes and its fine town houses, the square constituted by Nytorv and Gammeltorv was an especially exclusive address. This was where the merchant Kierkegaard and his family settled in 1809.
6. Death mask of Poul Martin Møller. “In the kingdom of thought, man may be grouped with the ruminant animals,” he noted in one of his “random thoughts,” and this was particularly true of Møller himself. Indeed, he worked extraordinarily slowly, constantly rewriting, and often involuntarily ending up with fragments. As a professor of philosophy he became increasingly skeptical of Hegel, emphasizing instead the vital philosophical importance of the idea of personality. Møller’s analyses of affectation sharpened Kierkegaard’s sense for the many forms that self-deception and dissimulation can assume. Apart from his father, Møller was the only person to whom Kierkegaard officially dedicated any of his works, specifically The Concept of Anxiety, in which Møller is praised as “the happy lover of Greek culture.”
7. Frederik Christian Sibbern. “He was, inherently and in his innermost being, a very inwardly complicated sort of person…. I don’t know whether he had a genuinely Christian disposition and temperament, although he certainly must have had something of that sort,” the eighty-four-year-old Sibbern wrote about Kierkegaard, whom he had come to know in the early 1830s in his capacity as a professor of philosophy. Sibbern was on the committee that evaluated Kierkegaard’s magister dissertation On the Concept of Irony. During the period of Kierkegaard’s engagement, Sibbern occasionally rode along in the carriage when the young couple drove out to the Deer Park, but he never expressed himself on the subject of their relationship even though—by his own admission—he could “tell about things that only a very few people know, apart from myself.” He is shown here without his wig, of which he owned many, and which—owing in part to vanity and in part to philosophical absentmindedness—he would sometimes wear one on top of another.
8. A morning on Store Kannikestræde, where some of the university students from Borch’s College are wearing top hats in honor of the photographer. The college had been hit during the bombardment by the English in 1807, and it was not reconstructed until 1825 in accordance with plans drawn up by Peder Malling. Eler’s and Regensen Colleges are farther down the street. In the background can be seen the Round Tower with its “astronomical observatory,” from which a number of people, including Johan Ludvig Heiberg, peered outward at the universe in order to become—as Kierkegaard had it—”star crazy.” Opposite Borch’s College is the poet Peter Faber’s house, which today is the home of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre.
9. Emil Boesen. Kierkegaard’s only confidant, a “trusty friend,” as he called him. They knew each other from their boyhood years, when they attended the meetings of the Moravian Congregation of Brethren with their parents. During his first stay in Berlin, Kierkegaard sent his friend frank letters about his break with Regine as well as about the intoxicating genesis of works such as Either/Or and Repetition.