Soren Kierkegaard

Kalundborg–Aarhus route was served by the steamboatDania, but there
had been a change in the vessel employed, so the next morning they
boarded an old, flat-bottomed tub, a so-called smack, which originally had
been used for transporting cattle, and whose sluggishness and shabby condi-
tion made it the object of much complaint. The smack was owned by a
merchant named Sass, who was certainly going to get an earful about this
wretched transportation—Kierkegaard noted the address: “282 Nyhavn, on
the Charlottenborg side.”
Sunday afternoon the smack put in at Aarhus harbor in Jutland, and
Kierkegaard presumably went to one of the town’s inns, where, preferring
solitude, he retreated to his room with his pocket-sized green leather
notebook which he proceeded to fill up with his impressions of and reflec-
tions upon this first big journey of his life. The topic was ready to hand:
“The smack. It is terrible how tedious conversation generally is when
you have to be together with other people for such a long time. It’s just
like when toothless old folks have to turn food over in their mouths again
and again—in this case, an individual remark was repeated so often that it
finally had to be spit out. There were four pastors in the group, and even
though the crossing lasted eight or nine hours (for me, an eternity), the
experienced passengers nevertheless found this to be unusually expeditious,
which gave the pastors occasion to remark, one after the other, first, that
skippers usually did not like to have pastors on board, because it made
for head winds, and second, that the truth of this saying had now been
disproven.”
The chatter on the water convinced Kierkegaard that the hotly debated
call for abolition of the rule that restricted a person’s ecclesiastical activities
to his parish of residence would in fact be a dubious gain, because even
though, on board the smack, one could choose whatever pastor one wanted,
one still had to listen to the same preaching. Kierkegaard’s description is a
bit fanciful, but the presence of pastors on board was not a mere fantasy.
An inspection of the passenger list, published in the July 22, 1840, issue of
theRanders Amtsavis og Avertissementstidende, in fact shows that in addition
to “theological graduate Søren Kierkegaard,” the smack transported four
pastors from Kalundbord to Aarhus.
Kierkegaard remained in Aarhus for a couple of days, but apart from the
cathedral and its organ there were not many sights to see. Nor could one
go for a stroll, as one could in Copenhagen—the paving was simply not up
to it. And then there was the local population, who stared and gaped in the
rudest way whenever they saw a stranger: “Life in these provincial towns is
just as wretched, ridiculous, and tasteless as the way in which they walk