Soren Kierkegaard

cause he has a sort of wholesomeness that testifies in his favor,” and his
“words were therefore more humorous than lewd.” It is equally unclear
whether there was any lewd talk in April 1836, when Kierkegaard had a
conversation with Jørgen Jørgensen, a police officer, whose drunkenness
was clearly visible “at the corners of his mouth”: Across a sea of empty
bottles, Jørgensen had made the bitter, sentimental declaration that one
spends half of one’s life “living it, and the other half repenting it.” We get
the sense that the young theological student was more an observer than a
participant and that he himself did not have much to repent .We suspect
that while his father sat and repented the sins ofhisyouth, which he bitterly
regretted, the son, for his part, sat and regretted that he had not done any-
thing whatsoever worth repenting .Nor, for that matter, did the Danish
Golden Age (which handed out gold medals to the greatest tattletales) pro-
duce one single witness who mentioned the least bit that could evenhint
that Kierkegaard was debauched.
The naked truth seems to be that even though inTheConceptofAnxiety,
Kierkegaard has Vigilius Haufniensis provide us with a detailed examination
of the relationship between sexuality and history, Kierkegaard himself re-
mained silent about the role sexuality played in hisownhistory .Occasion-
ally, however, goaded on by the exhibitionism that often conceals itself
deep within modesty, Kierkegaard did yield to the temptation to insert little
keyholes in his texts, both published and unpublished, through which the
reader can peek and draw his or her own conclusions .Most often Kierke-
gaard introduced such visions with a hypothetical “were it the case that,”
or “if,” or “let us assume,” and then shifted into the third person in order
to augment further the distance from himself .Or he could encrypt his text
and insert a code, as is the case with a lengthy journal entry from 1837 in
which Kierkegaard looks back on an episode that had made a great impres-
sion on him: During his youthful infatuation with “the master thief,” he
had come to grief after mentioning in his father’s presence that such a thief
indeed wasted his powers, but that he “could certainly turn himself around.”
To this his father replied “with great seriousness” that there were “crimes
against which one could struggle only with the continuing help of God.”
His father also took the opportunity to wag his finger in moral admonition,
and the son was quick to understand the signal: “I rushed to my room and
looked at myself in the mirror (cf .Schlegel,CollectedWorks, vol .7, bottom
of p .15) .”
Embedded within the parentheses in the journal entry just cited is a code,
namely, a strikingly precise reference to the seventh volume of Friedrich
Schlegel’s collected works .The reference is to a fairy-tale novel, dating
from 1825, about Merlin the magician, who had become infatuated with a