1838
“There Is an Indescribable Joy”
Toward the end of 1837 Kierkegaard sat reading one of the folk songs with
which he relaxed. He was strangely withdrawn into himself, feeling almost
like an ancient ruin. It was a quietly touching song about a girl who sat
waiting for her sweetheart on a Saturday evening, weeping “so bitterly.”
Suddenly a scene opened before his eyes, he saw the Jutland heath, its un-
speakable solitude, and a solitary lark way up in the air: “Then one genera-
tion after another rose before me, and all the girls sang for me, and wept so
bitterly, and sank into their graves again. And I myself wept with them.”
Fourteen days later, when he paid off the final 26 rixdollars of his enor-
mous debt of 1,262 rixdollars, Kierkegaard wrote in his father’s account
book: “And since father has helped me out of this embarrassment I hereby
attest to my thankfulness to him.” That word, “embarrassment,” practically
cries out to the heavens, for if there was any way in which his father had
helped him, it had been to help him notout of,butintoevery sort of “embar-
rassment.” Nor, for that matter, is one exactly overwhelmed by the authen-
ticity of the gratitude expressed in the latter part of the sentence. For the
next three months there are only very brief journal entries, written on loose
sheets of paper. There are just short of twenty such entries for January, eight
for February, plus five without dates, so a person reading the journal jumps
almost directly from December 30, 1837, to a point in mid-April 1838:
“April. Once again a long time has passed in which I have not been able to
pull myself together to do the least thing. Now I must make another little
attempt. Poul Møller is dead.” Kierkegaard was probably as close to depres-
sion as he had ever been, and in February, Peter Christian realized how bad
things were: “Søren has recently become more and more sickly, vacillating,
and dejected. And my conversations with him, which I generally have to
initiate, do not produce any perceptible difference.” Several weeks later,
however, Peter Christian wrote in a more hopeful vein: “Søren, praise God,
is now beginning to come closer, not only to individual Christians (Lind-
berg, for example) but also to Christianity.” In her memoirs, Lindberg’s
daughter Elise reports that Kierkegaard, together with a number of young126