Soren Kierkegaard

down the street. In vain you make an effort to walk forward with a modicum
of dignity (for it is simply impossible to walk and meditate—the meditation
itself would dissolve into nothing but dashes)—and then, when you also
bear in mind that you are the object of such peculiarly small-town curiosity.”
The streets bore unmistakable traces of the presence of cows. If, when he
had tended herds in Sædding as a young boy, Kierkegaard’s father had per-
haps warmed his frozen toes in a steaming cow patty, his son was now having
great difficulties maneuvering around the cows’ calling cards. The son had
also rid his speech of any echoes of the Jutland dialect, and when as a boy
H. F. Rørdam encountered Kierkegaard, seventeen years his senior, at his
grandmother’s house, it was a meeting that he found “not exactly pleasant,”
because the strange gentleman “made fun of my Jutland dialect.”
But the occasion for all this “small-town curiosity” was not merely the
idler from Copenhagen who surveyed the humble circumstances of the
place as though he had just stepped out of Holberg’s playErasmus Montanus.
There was the additional circumstance that the newly crowned King Chris-
tian VIII had recently set out on a tour of the provinces and that, together
with Queen Caroline Amalie, he had arrived at Aarhus almost simultane-
ously with Kierkegaard. The entire city was therefore beside itself with sheer
Jutlandic excitement, pulling out all the stops to give the monarch a proper
reception, even to the point of erecting a triumphal arch. While the people
were out watching the civic guard parade and a twenty-seven gun salute
was being fired, Kierkegaard remained at the inn in the company of his
pocket-sized notebook, in which he captured his mood: “I am so listless and
devoid of joy that not only do I have nothing that fills my soul, I cannot
even conceive of anything that could possibly satisfy it—alas, not even the
bliss of Heaven.” And a bit later, in this same minor key: “My total mental
and spiritual incapacity at present is frightful precisely because it is connected
with a consuming longing, with a spiritual concupiscence which, however,
is so amorphous that I don’t even know what it is that I lack.”
But the next day he pulled himself together and set out on an excursion
to the peninsula of Mols, where he inspected Kalø Castle and refreshed his
memory of the story of Marsk Stig, the heroic regicide. From there he went
on to Knebel, where Emil Boesen’s older brother, Carl Ulrik Boesen,
served as parish pastor, residing there with his wife Achthonia Frederikke.
The following day the journey proceeded to Randers, and thence eight
kilometers down Guden Stream to the country village of Albæk and the
Støvringga ̊rd Monastery, which basked in particularly beautiful evening
light. Then on to Viborg for a stay of a couple of days. The king had arrived
twenty-four hours later than originally planned, and the citizens of Viborg,
who had waited up all night like the wise virgins of the Bible, were therefore