To Have Faith Is Always to Expect the Joyous, the Happy, the Good
The Concept of Anxiety
“I am sitting and listening to the sounds within myself, to the joyous intimations of the music and the profound seriousness of the organ. Synthesizing them is a task not for a composer but for a human being, who in the absence of greater challenges in his life, limits himself to the simple task of wanting to understand himself.” This journal entry, in all its demanding modesty, is from the early autumn of 1843, shortly before Kierkegaard began to compose the draft of The Concept of Anxiety, in which it is precisely introspection, the investigation of the self, that is elevated to the status of the only legitimate psychological method. “Instead of the enormous task of understanding every human being,” the author wrote in a draft of the book’s preface, “he has chosen something that may well be labeled narrow-minded and foolish, namely understanding himself.” This point of view is retained in the final version of the preface, where the author describes himself as a “straggler who has seen nothing of the world and has only set out on an internal journey within his own consciousness.”
The draft, 125 pages in all, consists of nine small, inexpensive school notebooks, whose colorful covers of shiny paper form a striking contrast with their serious contents: The first notebook is brown, the second is yellow, the third orange, the fourth black, the fifth blue, the sixth violet, the seventh red-brown, and, like the fourth, the eighth notebook is also black. In addition to these is an unnumbered booklet with a violet cover, and last there is a booklet covered in black shiny paper and labeled “Vocalizations for / On the Concept of Anxiety.” In this, as in the other little notebooks, glued to the inside of the first page is a little label bearing the name of the place of purchase: “N. C. Møller / Bookbinder / No. 97 Ulfelds Place.”
In these notebooks Kierkegaard followed his usual custom when he wrote drafts: He folded the pages lengthwise (vertically) so that each page had a wide inner column for the main text and a narrow outer column for subsequent reflections and additions. He began work on the book in October 1843 and intensified his preoccupation with it in December, but then he suddenly began to have problems with the fourth chapter, and partway into the ninth notebook the text dissolves into hesitant little sketches, outlines, and key words. At this point he put the draft aside to focus on Two Edifying Discourses and Philosophical Fragments, which apparently made their way onto paper quite easily, so in April 1844 he could return to his unfinished manuscript. He edited it and, in mid-May 1844, wrote the fair copy in his own hand. During this editing phase he revised his text on several levels. For example, sidewise on a page in the seventh notebook he wrote: “Replace ‘triviality’ with ‘spiritlessness’ throughout.” At another point he had originally written the following with reference to the psychological observer: “Now what matters is quiet, silence, avoiding notice, so that one rests as quietly as a fleck of dust on a girl’s bosom,” but the fair copy chastely avoided this passage. The heavy paper on which the fair copy was written also seemed to demand greater self-control than had the cheap paper in the school notebooks. If we hold some of the early pages of the fair copy up to a light we can make out a circular watermark, bearing around its margin this authoritative Latin motto: PRO PATRIA EIUSQUE LIBERTATE—that is, “for the fatherland and its freedom”—a not entirely unironic sentiment, by the way, when we take into consideration the irrational forces that lurk within the book’s subject matter, anxiety. The fair copy had also included a twelvepage preface that Kierkegaard decided rather late in the process to eliminate from the work, and in the upper right-hand corner of the first page of the manuscript we can read the reason: “N.B. This is not to be used because it would distract attention from the matter at hand. Therefore I have written a little preface that is to be printed with the book.” The more appropriate preface is two pages long and contains so many deletions and additions that we must admire the typesetter for having coped with it successfully. The rejected preface was inserted as the seventh preface in the book Prefaces, where its unruliness is not the least bit distracting.
Kierkegaard in fact spent less than four months on the manuscript of The Concept of Anxiety, which even for him was so expeditious that in an afterword to the book (which he considered but never used) he openly acknowledged that “the present work has been composed rather quickly.” Despite its seemingly rather taut composition, it is also an extremely complex work, at some points close to unreadable, and absolutely one of the best places not to begin reading Kierkegaard.
A look at the draft confirms the claim that the book was “composed rather quickly.” For example, it is clear from the “Introduction” contained in the first notebook that the work was originally to have been entitled “On / The Concept of Anxiety. / A Pure and Simple Psychological Reflection with Respect to / the Dogmatic Problem of Original Sin. / by / S. Kierkegaard / M.A.” Thus Kierkegaard had intended to publish the work in his own name and to use his academic title, magister artium. Nor is the work without certain scholarly ambitions: It is composed in numbered sections, thirteen in all; these, in turn, are distributed among five chapters, each titled “Caput,” which is Latin for “chapter.” In addition to this is the little “On” in the title “On the Concept of Anxiety,” which remained in the manuscript during the transition from school notebook to fair copy and which leads us to think spontaneously of Kierkegaard’s university dissertation, On the Concept of Irony, to which a work on anxiety, which is just as ambiguous as irony, would form a sort of counterpart. At some point Kierkegaard changed the original title, however, and using a pencil he crossed out the little “On,” so that the title was now simply “The Concept of Anxiety.” On the same occasion he cut the title page in half, so that only the title and the subtitle remained, while “S. Kierkegaard / M.A.” disappeared and was replaced by the pseudonym “Vigilius Haufniensis.” Right at the edge, where the paper has been cut, a little “by” reveals that an intervention has taken place. In similar fashion, he crossed out the “S. K.” he had originally written under an epigram about Socrates and Hamann on the reverse side of the title page. Both changes were apparently made a few days before the manuscript was sent to the printer’s. The work proceeded rapidly, and evidence of haste can be detected in a couple of footnotes Kierkegaard failed to revise so as to take into account the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, who thus comes to speak with a strange directness about the lectures by Schelling that Kierkegaard had attended in Berlin in 1841 and 1842. No less striking, however, is the fact that the exuberant dedication to Poul Martin Møller remained in its original place—because it is very doubtful that Vigilius Haufniensis had ever known him! Thus, in its own dry, factual manner the manuscript constitutes an ironic commentary on the often quite speculative reflections of later generations concerning the problem of pseudonymity in Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard, however, does not seem ever to have bothered about the curious discrepancy between the work’s pseudonymous publication and its personal dedication, and immediately after the book appeared he made a journal entry in which he offered reassurances, both to himself and to posterity: “I always stand in an altogether poetic relation to my works; therefore I am pseudonymous. Whenever a book develops something, the appropriate individuality is delineated. Now Vigilius Haufniensis is delineating a number of these, but I have also placed a sketch of him in the book.” This “sketch” (behind which one more than glimpses features of Kierkegaard himself) is a refreshing portrait of the psychologist in the days before he donned his white laboratory coat and his professional reading glasses: “Just as the psychological observer ought to be nimbler than a tight-rope dancer in order to conform to people and imitate their postures and attitudes; just as his silence during the moment of confidentiality ought to be seductive and voluptuous, so that what is hidden can take pleasure in stealing forth and chatting with itself in the artificially constructed privacy and tranquillity—in like manner, he [the psychologist] ought also have in his soul the poetic originality that makes it possible for him to create something integral and systematic out of what is always present in the individual in a merely partial and disjointed fashion. When he has perfected himself at this, he will no longer have to take his examples from literary models or serve up half-dead reminiscences but will be able to bring his observations out of the water, completely fresh, still wriggling and displaying their full range of colors.”
The Concept of Anxiety is an ingeniously alarming work that brings together two disciplines, psychology and dogmatics. A journal entry from 1842 contains a provisional definition of the set of problems they face in common, defining anxiety (using a phrase that would later become so famous) as a “sympathetic antipathy,” that is, as an empathetic hostility or an ambivalence (another term we use today—a bit too frequently): “Now people have often enough treated the nature of original sin, and yet they have lacked a principal category, namely anxiety. And this is its essential determinant: Anxiety is in fact a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy. Anxiety is an alien power that seizes the individual, and yet one cannot break free of it, and one does not want to—because one fears. But what one fears is what one desires. Anxiety now renders the individual powerless, and the first sin always takes place in powerlessness.”
With his searching analyses of the significance of sexuality for such phenomena as hysteria and aggression, Kierkegaard was not merely Freudian long before Freud, he was also more Jungian than Jung himself, in the sense that Kierkegaard held fast to the theological self in the face of every sort of psychological determinant. That Kierkegaard was capable at all of writing the book at a time when modern psychology had scarcely entered puberty—“Psychology is what we need,” he declared programmatically—can only be explained by his formidable capacity for conflict-laden introspection, without which the analyses of such phenomena as demonic encapsulation and anxiety for the good would have been unthinkable.
Since, as is well known, identity problems can stem from the fact that deep down a person knows quite well who he is, it is perhaps not so strange that Kierkegaard was compelled to distance himself a bit from his own insights about himself by attributing them to the pen of a pseudonym: Vigilius Haufniensis, the watchful Copenhagener, who could thus serve as an excellent cover for another watchful Copenhagener by the name of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard.
Captivating Anxiety—Pages from a Seducer’s Textbook
While working on the draft of The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard experienced a thought-provoking hesitation, somewhere in the middle of the blue notebook. “In a sense, I have always been struck by the fact that the story of Eve runs directly counter to all subsequent analogy because it uses the term ‘to seduce,’ with reference to her, while in every other case ordinary linguistic usage has applied this term to the man.” Kierkegaard attempts to explain the situation by pointing out that in Genesis there is “a third power that seduces the woman,” namely the serpent, so it was more the serpent than Eve who seduced Adam.
So far so good, but then Kierkegaard admits that we are “still left with the serpent” and confesses openly that in fact he “cannot associate it with any definite idea.” In a way he has merely displaced the problem backwards, into a mythical animal whose power and significance he cannot elucidate.
In his manuscript Kierkegaard put a little cross at the point where he reflects on the seductive Eve, and the cross indicates the following footnote: “If a person has a psychological interest in observations regarding this, I refer him to ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ in Either/Or. On closer inspection it can be seen to be something quite other than a novel; it has quite different categories up its sleeve, and if a person knows how to use it, it can serve as an introduction to investigations that are very significant and not exactly superficial. The seducer’s secret is precisely that he knows that the woman has anxiety.”
Kierkegaard later omitted this reference. We can only speculate about the reasons for his omission, but they cannot have been very good ones. For “The Seducer’s Diary” can be read perfectly well “as an introduction” to The Concept of Anxiety, inasmuch as that diary is also a story of creation and of the fall into sin: Johannes the Seducer shapes or forms Cordelia by means of a sophisticated psychological experiment in which, via artifically compressed stages, he has her pass through a rapid development from child to adult, from innocence to the fall into sin, in a fraction of the time nature itself would expend on it.
“The Seducer’s Diary” is thus no diary in the ordinary sense of the term. Indeed, at times the tone is so technical and the gaze so clinical that the diary, this supposedly personal journal, comes to resemble a scientific journal. Exactly how this report from the laboratory of desire has found its way to the public remains obscure, which is right in keeping with the erotic experimenter’s demonic character, but in the best fictional style the editor’s preface (by an unnamed man who turns out to be an acquaintance of Johannes) does lift the curtain a bit. The rather authoritative description provided by the unnamed editor makes it clear that Johannes was “altogether too spiritually defined to be a seducer in the ordinary sense,” which is why the editor is also unwilling to label him a “criminal.” And the editor goes on to say that “sometimes, however, he did assume a parastatic body, and then he was sheer sensuousness.” A parastatic body is a technical term used by the Gnostics of the early Church with reference to the body of Jesus; it was only an apparent body, they maintained, a corpus parastaticum. And this was also the situation with Johannes: He was a spirit who at times assumed an apparent sensuousness, but in the deepest sense this was foreign to his essence. His power consisted in the subjugation of that sensuousness. “Rage, you wild forces,” he declared quite characteristically, “stir, you powers of passion! Though the crashing of your waves flings its froth at the skies, you will still not be able to tower above my head.”
The collegial reference to “The Seducer’s Diary” that Kierkegaard later deleted, right from under Vigilius Haufniensis’s nose, was motivated by an interest in psychology—“he knows that the woman has anxiety”—but the reference could also have been motivated by something else. Both, indeed, are markedly optical in their dealings with the world. They are visual beings, and Johannes loses himself so completely in the sight of Cordelia that the actual Cordelia disappears from his field of vision, which is why she comes close to being merely a name for the aesthetics of voyeurism that saturates the pages of the diary. “She does not see that I am looking at her, she feels it, feels it throughout her entire body. Her eyes close, and it is night, but within her it is broad daylight.” This is the rather formidable description of the activity that Johannes elsewhere calls “a spiritual undressing.”
Thus, too, it is vision that sets the entire plot in motion. When Johannes takes a stroll out on Langelinie on April 9, he suddenly eyes Cordelia, whose femininity dazzles him so completely that he is unable to remember how she looked: “Have I gone blind? Has the inner eye of my soul lost its power? I have seen her, but so completely has her image now disappeared for me that it is as though I had seen a heavenly vision. In vain do I summon forth all the power of my soul to conjure up that image.” He therefore initiates a thorough search that lasts more than a month, and on May 15 he sees her again, noting in his diary: “Thank you, dear chance, accept my thanks! Straight she was and proud; mysterious and rich in thoughts she was, like a spruce, one shoot, one thought, which from deep within the earth shoots up toward heaven, unexplained, inexplicable to itself, a whole with no parts…. She was a mystery that mysteriously possessed its own solution.” A mere week later he manages to gain access to the house where Cordelia lives, and on June 2 he ascertains that she possesses “imagination, soul, passion, in short everything substantial, but not in subjectively reflected form.” This is as it ought to be: In the deeper sense Cordelia has no history. She lives in immediate unity with her natural self; her love reveals itself sporadically, mostly in the form of vague longing.
Therefore Johannes has merely to encourage the qualities specific to Cordelia, and the seduction has already begun. In the diary this is made clear by the following sentence, the various clauses of which can be retrospectively understood as representing the strategic phases in the seduction: “First, her femininity is neutralized, not directly but indirectly, by prosaic common sense and ridicule as well as by what is absolutely neutral: spirit. She almost loses her sense of femininity, but in this state she cannot keep to herself; she throws herself into my arms, not as though I were a lover—no, still quite neutrally. Then femininity awakens. It is coaxed to its highest point of elasticity. She is induced to offend against some principle that is respected in the everyday world; she goes beyond it. Her femininity attains almost supernatural heights. She belongs to me with a passion as great as the world.”
That this strategy has any chance of success is not because the diary is a grandiose piece of prose fiction (in which, of course, anything may happen); on the contrary, it is because Johannes is capable of making maximal use of Cordelia’s anxiety. His professionalism in this respect is reflected most clearly in his sense for “the interesting”—a concept that, characteristically enough, the reader encounters even before Johannes has encountered Cordelia at all. Throughout the entire book the concept of the interesting plays a supporting role in a great variety of contexts, ranging from the very general to the extremely specific, but the essential psychological characteristic they share is their connection with the anxiety-provoking maneuvers that Johannes uses to gain ever-increasing control over the range of emotions and the libidinous energies deep within Cordelia’s body. Thus, as a brief introduction to the above-cited passage in which he sets forth the strategic phases of seduction, Johannes writes: “Therefore, the strategic principle, the law governing all movement in this campaign, is always to involve her in an interesting situation. The interesting is thus the field on which the battle will be waged; the potential of the interesting must be discharged.” And, after he has gone through the phases of his strategy one by one, all the while using his seductively sure touch, he takes stock of the situation in a display of sublime self-satisfaction: “In my relationship with Cordelia have I always been faithful to my pact? My pact, that is, with the aesthetic, for this is what gives me strength, always to have the Idea on my side…. Has the interesting always been preserved? Yes, I dare say so freely and openly in this secret conversation.”
Producing the interesting situation requires combining intimacy and distance, practicing the art of controlled self-abandonment, so that one never allows oneself to be carried away, but always merely notes the passions murmuring just under the surface, all the while observing them as they leave their mark on the woman one is confronting. In the interesting situation, theoretical incompatibles such as nature and intellect are brought together, producing a hybrid form which in its tension-filled union of opposites is pretty near the closest one can come to a visualized paradox. And at one point, revealing a peculiar lasciviousness, Johannes is able to demonstrate that it is now possible to “produce [in Cordelia] the indescribable, captivating anxiety that makes her beauty interesting.”
If the maneuver is to succeed, however, a markedly indirect method must be employed. Indeed, various sorts of evidence—including the recurrent depictions in Johannes’s diary of extremely detailed and well-drawn erotic situations—confirm that it is the indirect or the ambiguous that is the very formula of the situation. In one of these depictions we see him on the way down Østergade when a “little miss” suddenly decides to rush right into his field of vision, which gives rise to the following monologue: “If one cocks one’s head a bit to the side it might be possible to penetrate under the veil or the lace. Beware, a gaze from below such as this is more dangerous than a straight-ahead gaze…. Undaunted, she walks on, fearless and flawless. But beware, here comes someone: Lower the veil, don’t let yourself be sullied by his profane gaze. You have no idea—for a long time, it might perhaps be impossible for you to forget the repulsive anxiety with which it affected you.”
As the observer of another observer who is observing the “little miss,” Johannes finds himself in a position from which he can offer expert commentary on the choreography of the interesting situation: The girl only just barely escapes from being subjected to a dangerous gaze of the sort that comes “from below,” a gaze that normally—Johannes knows this—causes “repulsive anxiety,” because it peeks in, as it were, on dormant desire. On the other hand, just prior to this, Johannes himself was actively implicated when he (very appropriately) found himself at a “public exhibit of fancy goods,” where he spied on a flashy young woman whom he is firmly determined to meet again: “My sidelong glance is not so easily forgotten.” And why not? Because the sidelong glance contains an ambiguity that corresponds to the ambivalence or the “sympathetic antipathy” that typifies all anxiety. One wants to and yet does not want to.
Johannes will use some of these specialized techniques in order to maneuver Cordelia to where he wants her. And his first strategic move is thus quite special. For he opens the campaign by conjuring up an awkward suitor in the person of Edvard, the son of a merchant named Baxter, whose sole task it is to induce in Cordelia a veritable disgust for the more conventional forms of love. When ordinary Edvard and calculating Johannes take up their positions in the cozy parlor with the tea urn simmering away quietly, the roles are assigned as follows: Edvard, in his desperate attempt to enchant Cordelia, plays his part down to the most trivial detail, and Johannes, meanwhile, converses knowledgeably with Cordelia’s aunt about market prices and butter production. But at regular intervals during these discourses on rural economics Johannes lets fall a remark that “permitted a hint of something from a quite different world to flicker on the distant horizon,” thus causing Cordelia to understand that the tenacity with which he was diverting the aunt is in fact false. “Sometimes I push things to the point that I make Cordelia smile at the aunt—entirely covertly,” he optimistically notes in his diary. “This is the first false lesson: We must teach her to smile ironically. But this smile applies to me almost as much as to the aunt, because she simply does not know what to think of me…. Then, when she has smiled at her aunt, she becomes indignant with herself; then I reverse my course and look at her entirely seriously while continuing to converse with her aunt—then she smiles at me, at the situation.”
While Cordelia is smiling at her aunt, the reader can smile at Edvard, who cuts an increasingly pitiable figure that approaches caricature, as Johannes notes in his diary: “Poor Edvard! What a shame that he isn’t named Fritz.” Johannes explains that he is thinking of Fritz in The Bride, a popular operetta with music by Auber and words by Scribe. The piece features a man by the name of Fritz, a Tyrolean by birth, an upholsterer, and a corporal in the civil militia, who like Edvard must relinquish to someone else the woman he loves. The comparison might seem farfetched, which it is, but it has a straightforward and malicious logic: Fritz is not that Fritz, but a completely different Fritz—namely Regine’s new fiancé, Fritz Schlegel!
Emerging from her status as her aunt’s sweet niece and as the adored object of her boring adorer, Cordelia gradually becomes aware of an indefinable unrest within her own being. With the assistance of Edvard, the erotic is still only adumbrated negatively as a longing without an object or as a silhouette of no particular subject. And Johannes, furthermore, serves only as an external occasion: “She herself must be developed within herself…. She must owe nothing to me…. Regardless of the fact that I indeed intend for her to sink into my embrace as if by natural necessity, that I strive to bring things to the point when she will gravitate toward me, it is nonetheless also important that she fall not as a heavy object but rather in the manner in which spirit gravitates toward spirit…. She must be neither my physical appendage nor my moral obligation. Only the play of freedom itself must rule us.”
Soon after this, Johannes finds it opportune to make his entrée as a suitor, even if, of course, “the whole business is only a pretense.” The lover of strategy continues: “I have practiced various dance steps in order to determine the best direction from which to make my approach,” for Cordelia must “be fixated” at the decisive “moment.” Even the scenery must therefore not be too erotic, because it “could easily come to foreshadow what is to happen later”; nor ought the scenery be too “serious” or too “hearty,” much less “witty and ironic.” It is best for it to be “as insignificant as possible, so that after she has said yes, she will be incapable of discovering the least bit of what might be concealed within this relationship…. It is unthinkable that she should say yes because she loves me, because she doesn’t love me at all.” It is preferable that the courtship be an “event” about which Cordelia might subsequently—and thus too late—say: “God knows how it really came about.” Scarcely has this reflection been concluded before Johannes mentally runs through the course of events: “The girl doesn’t know whether she should say yes or no. The aunt says yes. The girl also says yes. I take the girl. She takes me—and now the story begins.”
And indeed it does: With the engagement, Cordelia has been installed in a bourgeois framework that Johannes must induce her to defy so that conventional forms can be exploded by a formless and dangerous desire of which Johannes is the object. While the pitiable Edvard rages, quite rightly, against the intrigue of which he has been the victim, Johannes is standoffish in his devotion, almost demonstratively unemotional in his relations with Cordelia—“flexible, supple, impersonal”—and his behavior causes a new erotic metamorphosis that he quickly detects: “I experience with her the birth of her love. I myself am almost invisibly present when I sit visibly at her side. As when a dance that is really supposed to be danced by two people is only danced by one—that is how I relate to her. I am indeed the other dancer, but invisible.”
As an inducement for Cordelia to view engagement as an imperfect form, Johannes brings her to his uncle’s house, where engaged couples assemble en masse and sit kissing each other tastelessly: “Incessantly, all evening long, one hears a sound like that of someone walking about with a flyswatter—it is the lovers kissing.” As a parallel development, Johannes launches “the first war with Cordelia” during which he makes himself the object of her longing but simultaneously takes care to elude her, so that the erotic energy can accumulate in her until he emerges as the liberator and redeemer of the thwarted desire. He sets about intensifying this passion by sending little notes with smoldering hot contents, and immediately afterwards he freezes it with icy indifference: “When she has received an epistle, when its sweet venom has entered her bloodstream, then a word is sufficient to cause love to burst forth. At the next instant, irony and frostiness cause her some misgivings, though not so much as to keep her from continuing to feel her victory, which she feels even more when she receives the next epistle.” There is reason to suppose that the seducer’s creator knows what he is talking about.
Even while continually intensifying the erotic imagery in these letters—which are supposed to induce Cordelia to “discover the infinite and to experience that this [the infinite] is what lies closest to a person”—Johannes persists in compelling her to attend the vulgar osculatory get-togethers at his uncle’s house, as exercises in indignation: “So when she becomes familiar with this tumult, I will add the erotic; then she will be what I want and desire. Then my service, my work, is completed. Then I will take in all my sails; then I will sit by her side. It is with her sails that we will journey onward. And truly, when this girl has become erotically intoxicated, I will have enough to do in sitting at the helm to moderate the speed, so that nothing happens too soon or in an unseemly manner. Once in a while I make a little hole in the sail, and the next instant we are once again surging forward.”
The time has come to initiate the “war of conquest,” in which Cordelia and Johannes exchange roles. Johannes provides a technical explanation: “Now when the reversal has taken place and I begin seriously retreating, then she will use every means in order truly to captivate me. She has no other means for this than the erotic itself, but this will now reveal itself on a completely new scale…. Then her passion will become definite, energetic, conclusive, dialectical; her kiss will be total, her embrace non-hiatal.” Not long after this, Cordelia appears, radiant with “energy as if she were a Valkyrie,” and Johannes follows his psychological experiment carefully, making the following sober notation: “She must not be held too long at this pinnacle, where only anxiety and unrest can keep her on her feet.” For Cordelia is in fact in the immediate vicinity of the abyss into which she must plunge as soon as her diffuse erotic state focuses itself sexually.
On September 16 Cordelia dissolves the engagement and travels alone to the country. Johannes maintains a feeble epistolary communication with her. When she leaves her rural retreat some time later, she is escorted by his trusted servant to a desolate house north of Copenhagen. The locale is termed “the destination.” Only the physical act remains.
As a reflective seducer it is incumbent on Johannes to undergo a regressive metamorphosis in order to become yearning, sexual desire. And it is toward the conclusion of this process that he pens his next-to-last entry which with its erotic imagery reveals the mythical form he now inhabits: “In this nocturnal hour I do not see ghosts, I do not see what has been, but what is to come, in the bosom of the lake, in the kiss of the dew, in the fog that spreads over the earth, concealing its fruitful embrace. Everything is a metaphor. I myself am a myth about myself, for is it not as a myth that I hasten to this tryst? Who I am is of no importance. Everything finite and temporal is forgotten, only the eternal remains, the power of love, its longing, its bliss.”
We hear nothing about how things go on the night of love itself, so we may think what we please. The editor of the diary does tell us, however, that is obviously a well-read woman who understands how to express herself symbolically. Her words about embracing a cloud allude to the Greek myth about King Ixion who had been invited to the table of the gods, but who became so excited that he attempted to violate his hostess, Hera. Tactfully, Zeus, the host, delivered Ixion from this embarrassing situation by creating a cloud that was indistinguishable from Hera, and Ixion had intercourse with this cloud. Thus Cordelia did not involve herself with an actual body; rather it was a cloud, a parastatic body.
The next day, September 25, Johannes has left his mysterious hideout and is back in Copenhagen, where he concludes his diary in the persona of a reflective seducer: “Why cannot such a night last longer? … I do not wish to be reminded of my relationship with her, she has lost her fragrance…. I will not say farewell to her. Nothing disgusts me more than women’s tears and women’s pleas, which change everything but do not really mean anything. I have loved her, but from now on she cannot engage my soul. If I were a god, then I would do for her what Neptune did for a nymph—I would transform her into a man.”
The last lines contain two striking—and apparently unfulfillable—wishes. And yet. Johannes has in fact not accomplished much besides showing that if he is not exactly able to create Cordelia, as could a god, then he is at any rate capable of shaping her. And if one reexamines Cordelia’s actual share in the seduction story, there is perhaps a bit more of a man in her than Johannes has imagined.
The Seduction’s Diary
“Her development was my handiwork.” Thus writes Johannes a few hours before the night of love, and though the remark might seem a bit of casual cynicism, it nonetheless contains a great truth, both aesthetic and psychological: aesthetic insofar as the work, the diary itself, takes shape at the same tempo as Cordelia’s genesis as a woman; psychological insofar as Johannes, according to his own repeated assurances, is primarily engaged in cultivating and developing the latent libidinous capacities that are a part of Cordelia’s nature: “I keep a strict and self-denying eye on myself, so that everything within her, the entire divine wealth of her nature, is permitted to develop.” It is less clear to what extent this invocation of natural necessity also permits Johannes to hope that he himself will be subjected to a less stringent moral judgment, because he is and remains the paradigmatic example of how an appreciation of beauty, of how rhetoric and insight into human nature, ought not to be employed. His diary is—among other things—a demonic bildungsroman.
If, despite all this, Johannes cannot simply be written off as a terrible and admonitory example of vile behavior, it is because he has been assigned a major role in a typology of the erotic. This can be best understood if we backtrack from “The Seducer’s Diary” through the first volume of Either/Or, stopping at “The Immediate Stages of the Erotic, or the Musical Erotic,” in which Aesthete A not only pays rapturous homage to Mozart, with whom “he is in love like a young girl,” but also provides an original interpretation of the desire that assumes form in the characters of the page Cherubino, Papageno, and Don Giovanni in three Mozart operas, The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni.
The most detailed treatment is of course reserved for Don Giovanni, who is “absolutely defined as desire,” but whose musical personification is devoid of speech, and therefore he is not a seducer in the more tactical sense: “He desires. This desire, in turn, has a seductive effect. To that extent he seduces.” But still only “to that extent.” Nor, for the same reason, does he understand that what drives him into all this hectic promiscuity is not unalloyed desire; rather, in the profoundest sense, it is anxiety that propels him: “There is an anxiety in him, but this anxiety is his energy.” It is via this energetic anxiety that he is connected to all the other characters in the opera: “His passion sets in motion the passions of the others. His passion resounds everywhere. It resounds in and lends support to the gravity of the Commendatore, the rage of Elvira, the hatred of Anna, the pomposity of Ottavio, the anxiety of Zerlina, the indignation of Masetto, the confusion of Leporello.”
Among all these figures, however, there are two who are situated outside Don Giovanni’s charmed circle and have been made outsiders by Don Giovanni’s power. The one figure is the Commendatore, whom Don Giovanni has killed and has thus transformed into “spirit”; the other figure is Elvira, whom Don Giovanni has seduced, thereby providing her with a new self-understanding: “As soon as she is seduced, she is lifted up into a higher sphere; there is a consciousness in her that Don Giovanni does not possess.”
So above all, language and consciousness constitute the difference between Don Giovanni and Johannes. “The immediate Don Giovanni must seduce 1,003; the reflective one need seduce only one,” Aesthete A explains, and he continues instructively: “In this case it is a matter of indifference how many he has seduced; what engages him is the artistry, the painstaking meticulousness, the profound cunning with which he seduces.”
If we now return to the “The Seducer’s Diary” it is possible to sketch the following: The situation in which Cordelia finds herself after the night of love with Johannes corresponds to Elvira’s situation after Don Giovanni’s antics. Both women are left with pain, shame, and anger, but also with a new self-understanding that in Cordelia’s case becomes a love-hatred which she expresses violently in the three letters she writes to Johannes after the relationship has been concluded, but which the editor of the diary places prior to the actual story of the seduction. Thus with respect to her self-understanding, Cordelia resembles Elvira after Elvira’s seduction, but with respect to the intensity of desire before her own seduction, Cordelia resembles—and here is the fatal point—Don Giovanni!
Thus, of all the attributes that are employed in connection with Don Giovanni there is not a single one that is not applicable to Cordelia. “He desires. This desire, in turn, has a seductive effect. To that extent he seduces”: These statements were made with reference to Don Giovanni, but if we replace “he” with “she” the result is a nearly perfect description of Cordelia. Like Don Giovanni, Cordelia is the representative of an unfathomable, prereflective, seductive power that emanates from nature itself, the incarnation of her sex. And it is also she who, thanks to her nature, her grace, and her beauty, has control over the elemental abyss of seduction; it is her energetic anxiety that keeps the tale moving forward. Like Don Giovanni in the opera, she “resounds” everywhere in the diary; her “development” is the “anxiety” that literally propels “the work.” From her very first appearance out on Langelinie, Cordelia was what Johannes never became: seductive.
But can Cordelia, in the role of the seductive, be combined with Johannes in the role of the seducer? Here, either/or must be replaced by both/and. It is in fact erroneous to wish to isolate and confine the active initiative to just one of the sexes. The seduction itself is a complex play or a field of events in which intentions and tactics are undeniably real but are not nearly so determinative as Johannes would like to imagine. Properly understood, it is Johannes himself who is possessed by the seduction, and consequently he is controlled by a more-than-subjective power; in reality, Johannes is merely the more-or-less instrumental executor of that power’s will to self-realization. This is also the explanation of the perfection with which the seduction proceeds; everything takes place absolutely flawlessly, as only happens in myth or in a “dramaturgy without a subject”. The modesty that Johannes repeatedly reveals when he calls Cordelia his teacher, his dance partner, and his mirror is thus shown to be something more than just coy rhetoric. Johannes is not in fact the master of his own work—his diary is haunted by an alien power and therefore ought to have been titled “The Seduction’s Diary.”
Johannes himself perhaps had some sense of this. For indeed, the diary presents some quite clear instances of the reversibility of the traditional codes of activity for the sexes. For example, anticipating the point when, in accordance with his psychological calculations, Cordelia will break off the engagement, Johannes writes: “She herself became the temptress who seduces me into transgressing the boundaries of the universal.” Here his mere choice of words inevitably invites us to consider whether the reversibility of roles may in fact have started long before Johannes imagines. Nor is it without significance that the editor of the diary remarks in his preface that Johannes’s “history with Cordelia was so involved that it was possible for him to appear as the one seduced.”
Now, as we well know, the story was also “involved” with another story, Kierkegaard’s own. And though it would be absurd to try to determine how much Kierkegaard there is in Johannes, the amount of Regine in Cordelia, or, for that matter, the extent of Fritz in Edvard, a parallel biographical reading is psychologically inevitable, and it becomes simply imperative when, with Regine in mind, Kierkegaard writes that “ ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ was written for her sake, in order to repulse her.”
Thus Kierkegaard himself was the first to attribute a biographical character to the diary. Or perhaps there was one person who preceded him. Perhaps, in fact, J. L. Heiberg was on a similar biographical tack when he reviewed Either/Or and took particular aim at “The Seducer’s Diary.” In this connection he was of course not satisfied to be merely disgusted, nauseated, and revolted. He also reflected on the intention that the author must have had in writing such a diary. Heiberg thus harbored no doubts that a person could be “like this seducer,” but he was very astonished “that an author could be the sort of individual capable of taking pleasure in imagining himself to be such a character.” Here Heiberg was passing a moral judgment, no doubt about that, but his singling out the author behind the seducer was striking, and it involved a good deal more than just indignant moralizing. Doesn’t Heiberg’s moral judgment also contain a bit of uneasy speculation to the effect that Kierkegaard had had quite private motives in writing a work such as “The Seducer’s Diary?”—that is, that Kierkegaard had sought refuge in a character such as Johannes in order to be able, in the form of fiction, to distance himself from the humiliating fact that in reality a woman had for once succeeded in seducing a man? In short: Is Heiberg insinuating that Kierkegaard had to write “The Seducer’s Diary” to get his readers to believe that it had been he who had done the seducing, while in reality it had been Regine?
In any case there was a hidden and obscure connection between Heiberg’s judgment and Kierkegaard’s subsequent hesitation when, in the middle of his manuscript for The Concept of Anxiety, he began to speculate about why—“directly counter to all subsequent analogy”—it had been Eve who seduced Adam. On August 26, 1849, when he reminisced about his days with Regine and speculated about the “power she really possesses,” he wrote plainly: “Truly, when Providence gave the man strength and the woman weakness, whom did He make the stronger? This is what is terrible when one gets involved with a woman: Because of her weakness she submits, and then—then a person struggles with himself, with his own power.”
Here the interplay between power and powerlessness is presented in its reciprocal inscrutability and comes close to being assigned an independent existence. But a person struggles not only with his “own power,” he also struggles with what the manuscript of The Concept of Anxiety called the “third power,” indicating the alien power that first seduced Eve and then caused her to seduce Adam.
In his journal entry Kierkegaard was therefore quite close to an explanation of the real function of the serpent in the myth. Indeed, he had even personally experienced the explanation: The serpent is the emblem of the actual play of seduction; it represents seduction as an independent and alien power that chooses its agents and possesses them.
Adam and Eve. Johannes and Cordelia. And probably many others.
Oh, to Write a Preface
A person reading the June 17, 1844, issue of Adresseavisen would learn that a certain Vigilius Haufniensis was offering The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Indicative Consideration of the Dogmatic Problem of Inherited Sin, 192 pages, for an even rixdollar. In the same issue was advertised another newly published work with a slightly cryptic title, Prefaces, though fortunately it was provided with a subtitle that was rather more enlightening to the consumer: Light Reading for Various Classes as Time and Occasion Permit. It was written by Nicolaus Notabene, totaled 112 pages, and cost fifty-six shillings.
Although this wasn’t enough to ruin a person financially, the limit of one’s book budget for June 1844 had perhaps been reached, because three days earlier, on June 13, 1844, a gentleman by the name of Johannes Climacus had offered for sale his Philosophical Fragments or A Fragment of Philosophy, 164 pages, for a price of eighty shillings, which taken by itself was a manageable expense—unless five days before that one had spent three marks and forty-eight shillings on Søren Kierkegaard’s Three Edifying Discourses, 70 pages, or had spent two marks and thirty-two shillings on the same man’s Two Edifying Discourses, 60 pages, which had appeared earlier in the year, on March 5. In economic respects, as in others, there were significant costs associated with being “that single individual.”
In addition to its own preface, Prefaces contains eight numbered pieces that are presented as prefaces to grandly conceived but never written books or as detailed prospectuses for subscriptions to learned journals that also never appeared, because Nicolaus Notabene’s wife, though in other ways quite lovable, was opposed to every sort of publishing activity: “To be an author when one is a married man, she says, is open infidelity.” Nicolaus Notabene meekly confides in his reader that within several months of his wedding he had gradually become “accustomed to the ways of married life,” but that he was suddenly overcome with an irresistable “desire” to write and therefore began taking notes and making other preparations. His wife, however, soon became suspicious and threatened to confiscate everything he wrote and put it to better use—for example, as a backing for her embroidery or as curling papers for her hair. She rebuffed all sound reason as mere foolery. Nicolaus Notabene had, however, succeeded in writing his “introductory paragraph” which in hopes of reconciliation he wanted to read to his skeptical wife, who to his sheer amazement accepted the suggestion and delighted him by listening and laughing: “I thought all had been won. She came over to the table where I was sitting, put her arm intimately around my neck, and asked me to read a passage over again. I begin to read, holding the manuscript high enough so that she could follow along with her eyes. Excellent. I was beside myself, but not yet quite beyond the passage in question when the manuscript suddenly burst into flames. Without my having noticed it, she had slid one of the candles under the manuscript. The flames got the upper hand and nothing could be saved, my introductory paragraph went up in flames—to universal rejoicing, since my wife rejoiced for both of us.” After this Nicolaus Notabene received permission to write—prefaces, but nothing more. That was that.
The tale is a whimsical presentation of Kierkegaard’s own conflict between the institution of marriage and the instinct of poetry, but his love of the preface as a genre began very early. On May 17, 1839, he had written of the “indescribable joy of abandoning all objective thinking” in order, instead, “properly to lose myself in the lyrical underbrush of the preface” within whose depths he would devote himself to “secret whispering with the reader.” And this was what happened five years later in Prefaces, where the preface whispers in this lyrical manner: “A preface is a mood. Writing a preface is like whetting a scythe; like tuning a guitar; like talking with a child; like spitting out of the window…. Writing a preface is like ringing a man’s doorbell to play a prank on him; like going past a young girl’s window and looking at the cobblestones. It is like striking at the wind with one’s walking stick; like doffing one’s hat even though there is no one to greet. Writing a preface is like having done something that entitles one to demand a certain amount of attention; like asking a lady for a dance, but not making a move; like pressing one’s left leg to the horse, pulling the reins to the right, and hearing the steed say ‘psst’ and telling the whole world to get lost. It is like joining in, without being the least bit inconvenienced by having joined in; like standing on Valby Hill and looking at the wild geese…. Writing a preface is like having arrived, standing in a cozy parlor, greeting the person one has longed for, sitting in an easy chair, filling a pipe, lighting it—and having so infinitely much to talk about with each other. Writing a preface is like being aware that one is in the process of falling in love. The soul has a sweet restlessness; the mystery is posed; everything that happens hints at its solution. Writing a preface is like bending aside a branch of a jasmine bower and seeing her sitting in concealment: my beloved. This, yes this, is what it is like to write a preface! And what is he like, the person who writes it? He mixes with people like a dunce in the winter and a fool in the summer. He is hello and good-bye in one person, always happy and carefree, contented with himself, really a frivolous good-for-nothing, indeed, an immoral person because he does not go to the stock exchange to make money, he merely strolls through the building. He does not address annual meetings because the air is too close. He does not propose toasts at any society because this requires several days’ advance notice. He does not run errands on behalf of the System. He does not pay down the national debt; indeed, he does not even get seriously concerned about it. He passes through life like a cobbler’s boy whistling in the street, even though the person who needs his boots is standing and waiting—he’ll just have to wait as long as there is a single sliding hill left or the least sight worth seeing. This, yes this, is what the person who writes prefaces is like.”
And this, yes this, is the way that Kierkegaard writes when he presents aesthetically the immediacy he has much greater difficulty coming to theologically. A person does not need to be anything other or greater than his own little faltering preface—in the confidence that at some point in eternity God will surely bring order out of the individual’s divided and piecemeal tale and write an emphatic postscript.
Prefaces is not, however, dominated by lyrical whispering, which in fact ceases after the first of the eight pieces and is replaced by a very prosaic sort of emotion that at some points seems to employ a megaphone. This can be seen, for example, in the seventh preface (which, as mentioned, had originally been written for The Concept of Anxiety) and in the fourth preface, which contains charmingly malicious satire directed at the literary marketing gimmickry of the day, including a number of self-promoting hacks, not least Heiberg and his never-completed version of Hegel’s absolute “System.” It is more than implied that Heiberg’s annual journal Urania from 1844 (in which Repetition had in fact been the subject of a critical review!) had only been published in order to meet the demand of the eager buying public during the Christmas season, a public which, if it was capable of nothing else, was at least able to take delight in the volume’s fancy trappings, its front and back covers bound with glazed white paper, its borders richly ornamented with a gilded pattern. Here Nicolaus Notabene undergoes a metamorphosis so malicious that the reader is utterly unable to recognize the unobtrusive married man encountered in the book’s first preface: “As is well known, the month of December is the beginning of the literary New Year’s rush among the writing class of business people. A good number of extremely elegant and beautifully produced books destined for children and Christmas trees, but particularly useful as tasteful gifts, jostle past one another in the Adresseavisen and other newspapers…. By the great god of China, I would not have thought it possible—is that Prof. Heiberg on the bandwagon this year? Yes, indeed, it is Prof. Heiberg. Yes, when one is decked out like that one can certainly exhibit oneself to the astonished multitude…. I wonder what ‘one’ would now say about this book? My dear reader, if you haven’t learned about it through some other means, our literary telegraph agent Prof. Heiberg will certainly be good enough to serve once again as a municipal officer and tally all the ballots, just as he did earlier with Either/Or.” Among other things, the wounded vanity with which these last sentences throb makes it clear that Nicolaus Notabene has forgotten for a moment that he was not the author of Either/Or. But we know that in the little community of pseudonymous authors this sort of forgetfulness runs in the family: Indeed, Vigilius Haufniensis, too, had forgotten that he had never heard Schelling lecture in Berlin or known Poul Martin Møller personally.
The second of the book’s prefaces, in particular, provides a masterly sketch of the hectic publishing and reviewing scene in provincial Copenhagen. Nicolaus Notabene needles the reviewers of the day who supply the public with random aesthetic assessments of the countless books that no one ever manages to read and of which they have only second-hand, thirdhand, et cetera, knowledge. Kierkegaard cannot of course be said to have stationed himself entirely on neutral territory at the Copenhagen book fair, and to some extent the criticism was also directed at Kierkegaard himself, who not only had accounted for the lion’s share of the spring book season but had also had his books reviewed and praised to the skies. In the July 30, 1844, issue of Ny Portefeuille, for example, under the the heading of “Theater, Music, Literature, and Art,” there was an eight-page review of Prefaces, which was singled out for its “excellent and penetrating language, which disdains to use these expressions of philosophical bombast, disdains to lard its speech with Hegelian terminology.” Nicolaus Notabene is not a “sullen polemicist who is dissatisfied with everything”; on the contrary, he possesses a “sparkling wit” and is praised for the “lightness with which language practically dances when subjected to his dialectical treatment.” The reviewer, who signs himself “3–7,” is quite concerned about Nicolaus Notabene’s purported marital crisis, and in a display of dialectical politeness he therefore worries aloud that by subjecting these clandestinely written little texts to excessively rapturous praise he might worsen the situation. Consequently he is aware of his difficult position as a reviewer, inasmuch as Nicolaus Notabene “does not like reviewers at all; indeed, he has such a powerful distaste for the entire race [of reviewers] that—to use his own typical expression—to submit to being reviewed is just as unpleasant as ‘letting a barber fumble about my face with his clammy fingers.’ ” Therefore, instead of writing a review, 3–7 chooses to devote an entire column to citing and paraphrasing “the humorous presentation” contained in the second preface, after which he proceeds to discuss “the author’s view of Prof. Heiberg and his activities.” Now, 3–7, who has suddenly taken on quite a moral tone, would prefer to have passed by this critique in silence. Not only is Heiberg a “brilliant and productive intellect,” but on his own initiative, having conducted a brief poll, 3–7 has also learned that a person who wallows in these harshly critical remarks on Heiberg to this extent never gets around to reading such writings as The Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments, and Søren Kierkegaard’s Edifying Discourses.
Thus 3–7 smelled a rat, and so, quite clearly, did the anonymous reviewer in Den Frisindede, who linked Prefaces to “the very sensational work Either/Or.” They knew very well that Prefaces had been written by Kierkgaard, so Kierkegaard could have spared himself the clandestine communication he had thought the matter required: When the manuscripts of his pseudonymous writings were to be conveyed from his lodgings to the printer’s, the generous assistance of J. F. Giødwad was employed. Thus on May 18, 1844, Giødwad had the task of delivering to the printer The Concept of Anxiety and Prefaces, both of which were classified as pseudonymous material, while two days later Kierkegaard himself turned up with Three Edifying Discourses and Philosophical Fragments, on the title pages of which his own name appeared. A person can no more disown the unique and recognizable features of his style than he can his handwriting, and in the letter he had written Boesen from Berlin, Kierkegaard had indeed referred to his writings as “healthy, happy, thriving, cheerful, blessed children, easily born, yet all bearing the birthmark of my personality.” If later literary labors delivered somewhat more melancholic beings into the world, they, too, always bore that mark, sometimes so unmistakably that not even the most inventive of pseudonymous draperies could conceal it. For the style is the man, and the man, after all, was Kierkegaard.
Moreover, a number of Kierkegaard’s literary colleagues found the contradiction between his disowning of his writings, on the one hand, and the recognizability of his style, on the other, quite amusing. Among these colleagues was Henrik Hertz, who in one of his notebooks has Kierkegaard speak the following lines in his own defense: “I stand quite apart from my writings, with the exception of the 1,118 edifying discourses…. Just listen! And then he quotes a passage by each of his personae, texts that are all similar in type, in language, et cetera.” The discussion of Four Edifying Discourses, that appeared in the January 1, 1844, issue of Intelligensblade under the heading “Ecclesiastical Polemics,” was much more respectful. It had been written by Jakob Peter Mynster, who signed himself “Kts,” having constructed his anonymous symbol by using the middle letters of his three names. “I have been very moved,” the bishop wrote, “by the fact that Mag. S. Kierkegaard always dedicates his edifying discourses to the memory of his deceased father. For I, too, knew that estimable man. He was a citizen pure and simple, he went about his business in life quietly and unpretentiously; he had never immersed himself in any philosophical bath. How can it be, then, that whenever his extremely cultivated son writes his edifying discourses his thoughts always come back to that man who so long ago was laid to rest? Anyone who has read the delightful discourse—or let us simply call it a sermon—‘The Lord Gave, the Lord Taketh Away, Blessed Be the Name of the Lord’ will understand why. As I myself did, the son saw his father at times of bitter loss; he saw him fold his hands and bow his venerable head. He heard his lips speak those words, but he also saw his entire being pronounce them in such a fashion that he came to feel what he so beautifully explains about Job…. And what the son learned from his aged father in the house of sorrow he committed to paper in a sermon that will speak to and refresh every heart that can feel, even though it does not immerse the reader in any philosophical bath, even though it contains nothing other than what anyone could ‘say to himself at home on his sofa’—though certainly not ‘just as well.’ It is not in order to minimize my gratitude for this sermon, but out of concern for the matter itself that I raise this question: Do the three subsequent discourses have the same effect? And if they don’t, isn’t it in part because here the ‘philosophical bath’ is too visible?” Mynster’s biographical remarks brought joy to Kierkegaard, who would recall this “little expression of his recognition” quite a few years later.
The Concept of Anxiety was not reviewed at all, but Frederik Beck, who had also reviewed On the Concept of Irony, dealt with Philosophical Fragments in a German theological journal where, to Kierkegaard’s regret, he committed the blunder of permitting “the contents to appear in didactic fashion,” thereby forfeiting the “elasticity of irony” that had been a part of the work’s experimental character. J. F. Hagen permitted himself to do something similar when, in mid-May 1846, writing under the symbol “80,” he reviewed the work in the Theological Journal, producing an eight-page review where he gave due retrospective consideration to Fear and Trembling, which he had reviewed in the same journal in the latter part of February 1844. On the final page of his otherwise uncritical discussion, Hagen pointed out that the distance between what was human and what was Christian had perhaps gradually become so pronounced that any possibility for a person to connect himself to Christianity seemed to be threatened. “It is one of the usual shilling reviews that is written ‘in very good language,’ with periods and commas in the right places,” Kierkegaard grumbled in his commentary on the review. Kierkegaard viewed the conclusion of Hagen’s review as typical of the pernicious Hegelian craving for “mediation,” which he saw as well-nigh the most insufferable of things: “An author who really understands himself is better served by not being read at all, or by having five readers who really read him, than—thanks to the approval of a good-natured reviewer—having the all-too-widespread confusion about mediation broadcast even further via his own book, which had been written precisely in order to fight against mediation.” The catastrophe and the irony was thus complete: “Thanks to the clumsiness of an approving reviewer, the book has been annihilated, recalled, dismissed.” Having said this, Kierkegaard went on to argue more coolly that his Philosophical Fragments was actually not at all suited to be discussed in a newspaper because newspapers are of course written for people through whom everything merely runs: “To newspapers may be left the task of writing for the busy sort of people, who only have time to read during the moment they are on the toilet, and who thus have at best a bit of leisure only once in a while, when they have diarrhea.”
During the spring of 1844, the ink practically leapt from Kierkegaard’s pen, but in addition to his writing, he took his examination in homiletics, the art of preaching, delivering a trial sermon in Trinity Church on Saturday, February 24, and receiving the grade laudabilis. During that month he had also composed most of a twenty-odd-page polemical piece directed primarily at J. L. Heiberg. Entitled “Postscript to Either/Or,” the piece gave that book the intelligent review it had not received at the time it was published. In addition to all this there were countless journal entries in which scattered storms of new ideas were brewing. The exterior circumstances of Kierkegaard’s life were also slightly altered: On October 16, 1844 he moved back from 38 Nørregade to 2 Nytorv, where for the next three years he occupied half of the second floor of the house, the side closest to the city hall and courthouse. “When he was going to move,” Hans Brøchner relates with a touch of envy, “he drove out in the morning, and in the evening proceeded to his new rooms, where everything had been put in perfect order by the servant—even the library was in order.”
But not everything went according to plan. Since January 1844, Kierkegaard had been working hard on the various manuscripts from which Stages on Life’s Way emerged, and on August 27 he presented a “report” on the work in progress: “ ‘In vino veritas’ is not working out. I constantly rewrite its various parts, but it does not satisfy me…. The Fashion Designer is a very good character, but the question is whether all this sort of thing isn’t keeping me from attending to more important matters. In any case, it must be written quickly. If such a moment does not come, then I won’t do it at all. Recently the productivity has taken a wrong turn and has continually made me write about what I want to produce.” The summer heat outside also helped make Kierkegaard sluggish or, as he labeled his condition, “indolent.”
During that same year, Kierkegaard had also engaged Israel Levin, who was not merely to serve as a copyist in the manner of his “little secretary Mr. Christensen,” but was also to take dictation. That was no small task, however, as Levin later recounted, because when Kierkegaard warmed to his subject and began to enliven his verbal torrent with “strange gestures,” it was almost impossible to keep up with him even though the paper lay ready, cut to size, with the pages numbered. Levin also experienced the opposite sort of thing, however—times when words simply would not behave as the magister wanted them to. “This depiction of situations and the pointedness of phrasing,” Levin relates, “cost an enormous amount of labor. What with all the corrections, and yet more corrections, we almost never finished ‘The Discourse of the Fashion Designer.’ I became extremely useful to him, just by helping him to get beyond the most insignificant of the items upon which he foundered.”
Levin most definitely had what it took to serve as a satirical assistant of this sort, for he was well-known as a misogynist, a curmudgeon, and a drinker, but was also a literary scholar, a writer, and a translator, and he had edited and published his editions of a number of writers, including Ludvig Holberg and Johan Herman Wessel. For a number of years he was practically a fixture at the Student Association, where Johannes Fibiger paints an extraordinarily inelegant portrait of him: “The world of university students included a writer well-known to several generations, Israel Levin, a small, stoutly built, long-armed, flat-footed character with a large head and intelligent features, the very type of his oppressed race. As perpetual students often do, he tended to seek the company of the youngest students, and with his tireless eloquence and his experiences of life (which only too often tended toward what was not exactly noble and sometimes, in fact, toward the cynical) he was rather entertaining.”
They made quite a pretty pair, those two, the genius and the secretary, who at any rate shared certain physical prerequisites that enabled them to work together. Moreover, Kierkegaard knew very well with whom he was dealing: “Deservedly or undeservedly, Levin is doubtless neither well regarded nor respected by most people, and he is certainly due for a comeuppance. If he obtruded some foolish bit of praise upon me, I would remain silent. Why? Because his praise could only damage me, bring me into ill repute, place me in an unfavorable light. On the other hand, if I protested against him it could be to my advantage, it could earn me the favor of the many people who would be delighted to see Cand. Levin put through the mill.”
It was, however, hardly this calculated self-respect, but rather ordinary bashfulness, that prompted Kierkegaard to decline in February 1845, when Levin invited him and one hundred and thirty other people to contribute handwriting samples. Levin planned to publish an Album of the Handwriting of Contemporary Danish Men and Women, for Handwriting Instruction in the Schools. Kierkegaard had to evade the request: “My good Levin! It simply cannot be done. I am too old to write in an exercise book for my own sake. And even considering that my handwriting might serve as an exercise for young readers, I would not want to write a draft for the sake of the draft—such writing of drafts [Danish: Kladderie] could easily become daft [Danish: Kludderie, ‘a mess’].” Kierkegaard apparently sensed that his refusal might be interpreted as a sign of vanity, for a bit later, when he sent Levin an honorarium in “compensation for your work and time,” he wrote on the outside of the envelope, “To Mr. Cand. Levin / by my hand,” and in the message itself he decreed: “All immortalization of the handwriting is strictly forbidden.” This was a private and humorous little apology, and on January 17, 1846, Levin’s album was published; it later found its way to Kierkegaard’s bookshelf—though without a dedication from the author!
From the many notes that survive we can see that Levin generally came to Kierkegaard’s in the morning, at half past ten or half past eleven, or in the afternoon, at a quarter past or half past three. He served as Kierkegaard’s secretary from 1844 until 1850 and was involved in the work on Stages on Life’s Way as well as with the proofreading of Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, and to some extent also Practice in Christianity. The situation on one “Tuesday morning” of uncertain date gives us an impression of the hectic circumstances under which book production took place: “Dear Sir! They are waiting at the printer’s. I am standing here at the printer’s—waiting. I am leaving here and waiting—and I expect that you will make haste. Your stylistic exactitude prevents me from worrying about overhastiness. So haste is of the essence—every day is precious to me. Yours respectfully / S. Kierkegaard.” Not even when he was busy could Kierkegaard refrain from dialectics.
During the busy and work-filled years from 1844 to 1846, Levin could become almost a regular part of the household: “At times I spent up to eight hours a day with him. Once I ate at his house every day for five weeks. Merely providing nourishment for his hungry spirit was also a source of unending bother. Every day we had soup, frightfully strong, then fish and a piece of melon, accompanied by a glass of fine sherry; then the coffee was brought in: two silver pots, two cream pitchers and a bag of sugar which was filled up every day.” This was different from lounging about at the Student Association, drinking oneself into oblivion and talking oneself hoarse! But then came one of the moments Levin hated. No sooner was the coffee brought in than Kierkegaard went over and opened up a cupboard “in which he had at least fifty sets of cups and saucers, but only one of each sort.” Levin thought the cups revealed signs of a strange mania for collecting things, and he was similarly unable to understand why Kierkegaard had assembled such an “astounding number of walking sticks” which merely stood out in the entryway, taking up space. “Well, which cup and saucer do you want today?” Kierkegaard asked, standing in front of the cupboard. Levin could not have cared less and merely pointed wearily into the mass of china, but this sort of arbitrariness was not tolerated—Kierkegaard wanted an explanation. So Levin had to search his soul in order to justify his choice.
But this was not the end of the bizarre scene. Kierkegaard had his own quite peculiar way of having coffee: Delightedly he seized hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled up above the rim. Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid. The process was scarcely finished before the syrupy stimulant disappeared into the magister’s stomach, where it mingled with the sherry to produce additional energy that percolated up into his seething and bubbling brain—which in any case had already been so productive all day that in the half-light Levin could still notice the tingling and throbbing in the overworked fingers when they grasped the slender handle of the cup.
Just under the facade of the servility that he was compelled to adopt when dealing with the well-to-do Kierkegaard (whose daily cup-and-saucer exercises he had to endure), Levin trembled with profound irritation at the psychological idiosyncrasies of his genius employer. This included Kierkegaard’s pyrophobia, his hysterical fear of fire and of things related to fire. If Kierkegaard lit a candle or a cigar, he was very careful to put the matchstick in the wood stove. So when Levin once tossed a match into a spittoon, there was an immediate reaction. “Are you mad?” Kierkegaard shouted. “You might set the whole house on fire!” Whereupon Kierkegaard got down on all fours, picked up the offending matchstick, called for water, placed the little splinter of wood in the middle of the spittoon, and drowned it to the best of his abilities, so much so that water ran onto the floor. “It took more than a quarter of an hour,” Levin recalled, “before Kierkegaard was calm enough that he stopped shaking and the sweat disappeared from his forehead.” Similarly, when he blew out a candle he did so with peculiar care and at a safe distance, because he believed that the smoke from the smoldering candle was dangerous to inhale and could injure his delicate chest.
This disproportionate nervousness was bad enough, but when ferocious demons and dark spirits took hold of Kierkegaard, things could really become quite terrifying. “His imagination was so lively that it was as if he saw the images right before his eyes. It was as though he lived in a spirit world,” Levin fearfully related, recalling with a shudder how Kierkegaard could “evoke the most frightful things with an explicitness that was terrifying.” Levin, who was not delicate in other respects, had nearly been nauseated when Kierkegaard described a Greek pedophile, bringing to his description “a meticulousness that was indecent and demonic…. His soul burned with desire, even though his body was calm. With respect to his writings, it was his intention that only lewd thoughts but not daring expressions were to be avoided.”
Kierkegaard spoke, and Levin listened with amazement. He was confronted with a person whose linguistic gifts were almost beyond comprehension, but who forgot that other people also have eyes to see with. Just a single look at this lopsided runt with his too-high shoulders and his skinny legs would be enough to convince anyone that the contrite confessions about a “prodigal youth” and other debauchery that he mixed into his verbal lava flows were nothing but empty fantasies or mere peccadilloes, motivated only by his shame at not really having anything to be ashamed about! But when Kierkegaard then began to congratulate Levin on his “good fortune,” as a Jew, in being “free of Christ,” which meant that he could therefore “enjoy life and make himself comfortable,” Levin had had enough, more than enough. He excused himself, found his coat from among Kierkegaard’s many walking sticks, and went back to his little apartment on Farvergade.
Despite the fact that he saw Kierkegaard on a daily basis, Levin’s inability to tell us more about the man behind the man has annoyed and surprised some people, who have complained about Levin’s “benighted and pedantic shallowness.” And it is true that Levin would have done posterity a favor by setting aside a bit more than the four hours he spent in the middle of December 1869 conversing with August Wolff, a first lieutenant of artillery who was ardently interested in Kierkegaard and who subsequently wrote down the principal contents of Levin’s crotchety monologues. At the time, Levin was dissatisfied because H. P. Barfod had not contacted him in connection with the publication of Kierkegaard’s posthumous papers. “He has a chronic sense of having been pushed aside, overlooked, used, and then kicked away,” Wolff wrote to Barfod after calling on Levin, whom he had attempted to persuade to write Kierkegaard’s “Life.” Levin objected that over the years he had “slaved enough for others without recognition,” and in any case he was not eager to “deal with this semi-inscrutable person.” Nonetheless, Wolff finally succeeded in getting Levin to promise that he would write something about Kierkegaard at a later date, which, however, he never got around to doing, perhaps because he had no wish to go down in history as Kierkegaard’s secretary.
But he did anyway. At his death, Levin left a collection of 150,000 note cards, the preliminary work for a dictionary; these cards constituted an important part of the foundation of the twenty-six-volume Dictionary of the Danish Language, in which the frequent citations of Kierkegaard are thus on a solid historical foundation.
“Come Over and See Me for a Bit”
For long periods of time Kierkegaard’s extreme industriousness isolated him from his surroundings, but since he had no friends there was no one to miss him—except Emil Boesen. A little stack of undated notes and short letters from the mid-1840s send their own quiet message about the relationship between the genuinely connected though very heterogeneous friends. It had been a long time since they had sat up in Emil’s little garret room in Philosopher’s Alley or had taken twilight walks outside the city and fantasized about the future that was now already beginning to fade behind them, but they might still meet for a dinner that Kierkegaard would order from someplace in town and have sent up to his rooms. There is an almost endearing tone in this little note: “Dear Emil! Come over and see me for a bit this afternoon. Come soon. Yours, S. Kierkegaard.” At times they might also dine at Boesen’s, but it would still be Kierkegaard who served as the cheerful host: “Dear! Will you dine with me this evening? I have already ordered the food. If so, I will come over to your place at 6:00 or 6:30 P.M. Will you be in at that hour?” If proofreading with Levin or other work prevented Kierkegaard from dining with Boesen, he might instead send his servant Anders over with a bottle of wine from no less than Dominico Capozzi on Kongens Nytorv, purveyor of victuals to the royal court, and enclose a note in which he asked Boesen to drink a toast to the health of them both. Kierkegaard’s concern for Boesen could also be seen in his vigilance for possible clerical appointments, perhaps as prison chaplain at the “House of Punishment, Rasping, and Betterment” on Christianshavn, or maybe as the parish chaplain in Fredensborg: “This is something for you, hic Rhodus, hic salta” [Latin: “Here is Rhodes, jump here” (expression used in calling a bluff)].
All the same, the intervals between their heart-to-heart conversations became longer and longer. Kierkegaard was too busy and he became forgetful—one day he only remembered his “promise” when he was seated in a carriage a good number of miles from Copenhagen and “the sun’s rays penetrated to my brain.” From a letter that was most likely written in the winter of 1844, it can be seen that the friendship had lost some of its old dependability: “Dear! How are you? Are you alive? Yes, I know that…. I have visited you in spirit, but I visit no one in body, and it is only in your case that it pains me that I do not do so.” This is followed by a short postscript: “I just cannot bring myself to believe that a spring will follow this winter. Today I have again bought myself a lily of the valley in order at least to awaken the thought of such a possibility.” This is a sensitive and well-to-do man who buys himself lilies of the valley when they are out of season, but he loved the flower—in her day, of course, he had given Regine “a bottle of lily of the valley,” so now his apartment not only was filled with the fragrance of spring, it was also strongly scented with the memory of his mad love affair.
During these years Boesen was laboring away on The Development of a Religious Life, Sketched in Letters from Cornelius, published by Z. With its pseudonymous author and its mysterious publisher, the work was indebted to Kierkegaard, whose appraisal of the work Boesen of course wanted to hear. “When you left here today it seemed to me that you were out of sorts,” Kierkegaard wrote in an undated letter in which he offered to help him “with advice, ideas, assistance, and the like,” and then went on to protest that Boesen must not let himself “be disturbed by my monologues when I speak with you.” Encouraged, Boesen arrived on a subsequent occasion with his manuscript under his arm, but when he came in there was an unfamiliar man in Kierkegaard’s apartment and Boesen crept away crestfallen. “Perhaps you had intended to read something aloud to me,” Kierkegaard wrote shortly afterwards, explaining to Boesen that if he had only waited, “then the man who was visiting me would have left and I would have had some time.” Now, on the other hand, this would be difficult to arrange, he continued, because Levin was to arrive at a quarter past three and would “remain as long as possible.” Kierkegaard was furthermore not merely “enormously swamped” with his work, he was also “ill,” so Boesen would have to excuse him. To compensate for his rebuff he added: “Now travel and enjoy yourself and forget the whole world, including me, for a while, and then come home again; then we will certainly have time and occasion.” This was surely written with the best of intentions, but there is nothing to indicate that Kierkegaard ever did have the time to listen to the development of a religious life in letters from Cornelius; he received the book when it was published in 1845, but he never mentions it in his journals.
Nor was there much time to visit Peter Christian, who had married Sophie Henriette Glahn on June 12, 1841, and since September 1842 had served as parish pastor for Pedersborg and Kindertofte down near Sorø in central Zealand. The surviving bills for carriage service indicate that up until September 1847 Søren Aabye traveled down there a couple of times a year, typically staying for two or three days. He loved speed—“I take delight in racing the wind”—and he needed rural diversion, air, light. His niece Henriette Lund, who spent her summer vacation with the pastoral couple, would later recall how he could suddenly come driving into the courtyard, descend from his carriage and quickly set everything in motion: “Sunday morning broke with a cloudless sky, and the dinner table was set in the open on one of the little hills in the garden. I still remember with what animation Uncle Søren spoke and the many funny stories and remarks with which he obliged us. But in the evening, when we lay down in the grass by the little lake, this brilliant merriment was cut off as if by a single stroke. He only stared straight ahead in deep silence, dreaming. And not until the moon, like a half-erased death mask, looked down on us from the dull June sky, did he again break the silence.”
“In one sense you really don’t know much about my life, its intentions and aims,” Søren Aabye wrote on Wednesday, May 19, 1847, in a letter to Peter Christian (nineteen of which survive), but well up into the 1840s the relationship between the two nonetheless remained more than just tolerable and their discourse was even characterized by a certain frankness and intimacy. In early May 1844, when the younger brother had arrived in Roskilde and had purchased a “short-trip ticket” to Sorø, he suddenly became so fatigued that he gave up his visit, drove home, and dove into bed. “I regard going to bed as one of the most splendid inventions,” he later wrote Peter Christian, “to say ‘Good day’ to the whole world—or ‘Good night.’ ” So if Aristotle was right in defining the human being as a social animal, then, Kierkegaard reasoned, he himself must be a veritable “nonhuman.” In his letter he recalled that this species also includes an elderly, well-to-do councillor over on Stormgade who liked to stand by an open window or door, smoking his evening pipe. When the night watchman would walk past and shout “Ten o’clock,” the councillor had the habit of calling him over to learn what he had just shouted. “Ten,” answered the night watchman, whereupon the councillor confided in him that he would now go to bed, so if anyone asked for him the night watchman should just tell that person to “lick m— a——.” The last bit of the councillor’s reply was not entirely spelled out because it was a bit rude, for it means: “Lick my arse.”
To Have Faith Is Always to Expect the Joyous, the Happy, the Good
It was not exactly stories of this sort with which Søren Aabye diverted his sister-in-law Sophie Henriette. Jette, as she was called, was a delicate and refined woman with an endearing gentleness of soul, but she was also weak and spent long periods confined to her bed. Her condition was greatly worsened in March 1842, when after four months’ bed rest she gave birth to the couple’s only son, Paskal Michael Poul Egede Kierkegaard—a rather burdensome nomenclature, but for everyday use they made do with Poul. “I very much cherish my position in life as an uncle,” the younger brother wrote in a letter dated May 16, 1844 and addressed to Peter Christian, who was asked to greet Poul from “Uncle Søren.” A heartier salutation is contained in the postscript to a letter dated February 18, 1845, where Søren Aabye states with reference to his nephew, who was not quite three years old, that he “in the final analysis will better secure the immortality of the family name than the esteem in which people may hold you or the sum total of my writings.” This was affectionately thought and expressed, but reality would certainly turn out quite differently.
The same sort of concern can be seen in the four letters to Jette, all undated and all signed “Your S. Kierkegaard.” From the first letter, written sometime in 1844, it is clear that the two did not really know each other and that they had not seen each other very often during the period when Jette and Peter Christian had lived in Copenhagen. The second letter, written in 1847, accompanied a copy of Works of Love that the author was giving his sister-in-law, adding the comment that he hoped that the book would not “conflict with my brother’s notion of what constitutes beneficial or harmful reading matter.” Søren Aabye had originally intended to keep this particular copy of the book for himself, which explained why the volume not only was “beautifully produced” but also had already been read, so Jette did not actually have to trouble herself with the book and could be content with treating it as she would “any other art object.” The third letter arrived shortly thereafter and may date from September of that year. We learn that Søren Aabye had “spoken a number of times” with Peter Christian when the latter had been in Copenhagen, where he explained that Jette “continues to be confined to bed” and presumably implied that his wife’s illness was more psychic than somatic. In any event, the younger brother’s letter discusses the lack of patience so often displayed by those involved, including the physician, when an illness is not of the simple and straightforward variety: “It isn’t fever, nor is it a broken arm, nor an injury from a fall—what is it, then?” Thus to be ill, mentally ill, actually requires that one have the “patience to bear the impatience of sympathy.” It is an upside-down world, but the consolation offered is not of this world either: When a person really suffers, he or she receives a “real opportunity to realize the truth that the God of patience is truly the One who can absolutely and unconditionally persist in caring for a person with eternal and unchanging sympathy.”
The fourth and final letter, written in December 1847, plays a variation on this theme of consolation. The illness is still spoken of as if it were somatic, but it is clear that the author of the letter has understood its psychic character: “Now you are once again confined to bed…. There is something intimately connected with physical illness—a quiet, profoundly painful, and slowly consuming worry, which, in its suffering, turns first over onto this side in the thought of having been forgotten by others (‘who probably never give one a thought’), then over onto the other side, fearing that whatever one has to say or write will not be good enough. Oh, let that care begone.” Kierkegaard recommended that Jette seek diversion to the extent it was possible, but he knew very well that this was easier said than done. It can be done, however, if only one really wants to do so: “People generally believe that the tendency of a person’s thoughts is determined by external circumstances…. But this is not so. That which determines the tendency of a person’s thoughts is essentially to be found within the person’s own self. For example, unhappiness is always the most likely state for the person who has a tendency toward melancholia. Why? Because melancholia lies within him. In this hypothetical case there is an equal or perhaps greater possibility of the opposite state, but the person breaks off arbitrarily, already having sufficient evidence to conclude that something unhappy will happen to him. But what does it mean to ‘have faith,’ then? To have faith is always to expect the joyous, the happy, the good. But isn’t this an extraordinary and blessed diversion! Oh, what more does a person need, then? … What is required is the resilience, every time things go wrong, immediately to begin over again with a tranquil spirit, saying: Yes, yes, it will surely work out the next time.”
Similar letters were also sent to his cousin, Hans Peter, who was completely crippled but intellectually intact. Hans Peter read his increasingly famous cousin’s writings with particular enthusiasm, and he was greatly moved by the confessional discourse in Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits that speaks of a person whose physical weakness has prevented him from being active in the external world, but who was nonetheless still bound by the duties and obligations that apply to everyone. Kierkegaard, who of course was otherwise well-known for keeping visitors “a flight of stairs away,” had given Hans Peter special permission to visit him at a particular hour of the day. Henriette Lund once asked Hans Peter what it was they really conversed about. “Mostly about things pertaining to the Kingdom of God,” replied Hans Peter, who paused briefly, then continued, “He is so unspeakably loving and understands me so well, but I am really afraid to make use of his arm when he offers it to me to help me into my carriage.” They made a somewhat sorry pair, these two Kierkegaard cousins, with all their lopsided frailty, when they attempted to force their bodies to do what they really couldn’t do.
On the occasions when Hans Peter called on Kierkegaard in vain, he could be certain that before long Kierkegaard’s servant Anders would show up with a written apology from “His Philosophical Majesty,” as Hans Peter called him. He usually saved these little notes, one of which provides an entirely dialectical but nonetheless quite unambiguous commentary on Repetition: “I’m sorry that your visit yesterday was in vain…. But don’t give up on me because of it…. Believe in repetition—but no, for I have of course proven that there is no repetition. But then entertain a doubt about repetition and come back again, for of course in this case repetition would mean that your visit would be in vain a second time. And there is no repetition (cf. Repetition)—so in all human probability you will find me in next time.”
A New Year’s letter from 1848 makes it clear, however, that dialectics could also give way to a simple, intimate, and consoling voice: “Happy New Year! I never go around making congratulatory New Year’s visits. And only rarely, as an exception, do I write congratulatory letters—but then, you are among the exceptions.” Kierkegaard went on to say that if he were to give Hans Peter a “piece of advice about life” or to commend a “rule for living,” he would say: “Above all, never forget the duty of loving yourself. Do not let the fact that you have in a way been set apart from life, that you have been hindered from taking an active part in it, and that in the eyes of a dim-witted and busy world, you are superfluous—above all, do not let this deprive you of your notion of yourself, as if, in the eyes of all-knowing Governance, your life, if it is lived in inwardness, did not have just as much significance and worth as every other person’s.”
“He gave consolation,” Hans Brøchner writes, “not by covering up sorrow, but by first making one genuinely aware of it, by bringing it to complete clarity. Then he reminded that while there is a duty to mourn, there is also a duty not to let oneself be crushed by sorrow.” This is the sort of unvarnished attitude toward grief that we encounter in his letter of more than ten pages to J.L.A. Kolderup-Rosenvinge, who had lost his two-year-old granddaughter Barbara in the spring of 1849. Kierkegaard offers consolation and does so in a radical manner: “The difference in years makes the grief more profound. It is always harder for grandparents to lose a grandchild than for parents to lose a child.” Kierkegaard distinguishes between immediate pain and reflected grief, and he develops his point further: “The grandfather grieves in a completely different manner from that of the young mother. While her youth and her hopes about life help her to bear the loss more easily, and indeed, often by degrees to forget it (this loss, which was inherently less burdensome for her than for the grandfather), the grandfather, meanwhile has forgotten nothing; for him the loss resonated immediately in memory, repeating an earlier loss.” Kierkegaard also touches upon the frightful possibility that in the midst of one’s grief one might begin to find fault with someone else because he or she did not grieve deeply enough, in this case, that “she, the mother, did not grieve as deeply—as the grandfather.”
In his letters to Henriette Lund—the daughter of his deceased (and favorite) sister, Petrea Severine, and Henrik Ferdinand Lund—Kierkegaard shows that he is a true master of delight by bringing delight. It is true that the birthday letters, which Henriette ought to have received on November 15, arrived without exception at least a couple of days late, sometimes many weeks late—something the dialectically talented uncle was often game enough to make the theme of the letter itself. He was very fond of this little niece—and she of him. For his twenty-ninth birthday she thus sent him a primitive ink drawing of some fruit, which she accompanied with the chagrined remark that he must please not show the drawing to anyone—“because it is so embarrassing.” But later the same year, when Henriette turned thirteen, Kierkegaard paid her back with an almost demonstratively bad drawing of a flower that had its petals sticking out all around, a thick stem, and a single leaf. He assured her that he had labored on the flower for more than eight days and had sat up all night to finish it. On the right-hand side of the paper the artist (whose pseudonymous propensities cannot be denied) wrote meticulously: “A birthday flower respectfully planted by Mr. X.” Henriette had hardly had time to get annoyed at this impertinent treatment before Kierkegaard’s servant Anders once again stood in the parlor to present the bewildered birthday girl with a package containing the posthumously published writings of Poul Martin Møller!
The next year Kierkegaard was late as usual, but Henriette was not left empty-handed. With his belated birthday greeting Kierkegaard included some perfume and a wish that had its own scent of eternity: “Keep well, dear Jette. Be happy, ‘always happy.’ That is the only advice that can be given against whatever possible sorrows you might have. If it pleases you, rest assured of the unchanging, heartfelt devotion with which I remain / Your entirely devoted Uncle / S. K.” In subsequent years, the letters and packages continued to arrive with not inconsiderable delays, but in November 1846 Kierkegaard set a personal record by being only one day late, and this put him in such high spirits that he wrote “cup coffee” instead of “coffee cup,” this latter being the present that accompanied his letter. That had been the plan, at any rate, but in his haste he had forgotten to send along the cup and therefore had to pull out all the stops and dash off yet another letter in which he excused himself for his unfortunate oversight, sending his servant yet again, this time with the cup.
Henriette did not write down her memoirs until 1876; by then she was forty-seven years old and Kierkegaard had been dead for twenty-one years. They cannot be called objective, but they are presented with great liveliness, and her devotion to Uncle Søren is touching—even if she could never entirely forgive him for having called her “Madame Spectacles” because of her habit of staring straight ahead, lost in thought. In her memoirs she reports on a little evening dinner party to which she and a female cousin had been invited: “As we came in, Uncle Søren presented my girl cousin and me each with a bouquet of lilies of the valley, quite a rarity for the season, and then he gave each of us beautiful presents. We were hardly finished admiring the various things, before ‘Anders,’ Uncle Søren’s faithful servant, the well-known bringer of many a pleasant surprise both at Christmas and on birthdays, informed us that the carriage was at the door. ‘Oh, then we must be off!,’ cried Uncle Søren. ‘Where?’ Ah, no one was told before we stopped at the various, prearranged points of interest, where we were shown the lesser-known sights of the city. Strangely enough, the only thing I remember from this trip is a seal, whose melancholy, human-like eyes made a deep impression on me. After our return we played lotto; the prizes consisted of various items, mostly books. Then supper arrived: open-faced sandwiches, a marzipan cake covered with the most magnificent flowers, and champagne. Uncle Søren was the attentive, untiring host, and Anders equally diligent as the waiter.”
Henriette had not yet been confirmed, so her parents found the event inappropriate, indeed extravagant, especially the champagne. Henriette could recall that after she had returned that evening, her parents had spoken about “spoiling children,” just as there had been a couple of tart remarks about “that preposterous person.” The dazed Henriette, on the other hand, was simply so happy that she never forgot it.
Kierkegaard did not treat his cousin Augusta with anything like this gallantry. Augusta was very much taken with her new apartment, and she repeatedly asked her cousin to come and see it. Finally, Søren Aabye made the effort, and when he came back he said: “Now I have seen Augusta’s apartment. It was small, but ugly.”