Soren Kierkegaard

very gifted intellectually. Both were witty, especially the father. Certainly
everyone who knew their home and who paid a visit there found it very
entertaining. In general they only debated between themselves, and they
entertained each other as two good minds, without being father and son.
On one rare occasion, when the father looked at the son and saw that he
was very troubled, he stood quietly before him and said, ‘Poor child, you
live in quiet despair.’... Beyond this they never spoke of the matter. But
the father and the son were two of the most melancholic people who ever
lived in the memory of man....Andthefather believed that he had caused
the son’s melancholia, and the son believed that he had caused the father’s
melancholia. Therefore they never spoke of it with each other.” In the final
version Kierkegaard added: “A son is just like a mirror in which the father
sees himself, and for the son the father is in turn a mirror in which he sees
himself in the future.”
With this piece, the figure of the father is introduced in its full dimen-
sions. And even though no one can guarantee the portrait’s biographical
origin, it would take something close to violent intervention to induce a
reader to think otherwise. Similar themes are pursued further in the fourth
of the inserted pieces, “A Possibility,” which at twelve pages is the longest
of them. It is about a bookkeeper in Christianshavn who is known by every-
one for the regularity with which he walks up and down the same section
of sidewalk every morning between eleven and twelve o’clock. Even
though he is supposedly mad, he is very well liked, among other reasons
because he spends his fortune on charitable works, especially for children.
At an early age the bookkeeper had become an apprentice to one of the
wealthiest merchants in the city, who valued his quiet, punctual character
and the diligence he always exhibited. He devoted his scanty free time to
reading, to the acquisition of foreign languages, and to developing his un-
usual talent for drawing. As the years passed he became more and more
detached from the world, something he himself hardly noticed, even if he
occasionally had the painful sense that his youth had passed him by without
his ever having had the joy of being young. Then he became acquainted
with a couple of shop clerks who were men of the world. Although they
made fun of his awkwardness, they took pleasure in his company and invited
him to come along on little outings and trips to the theater. One picnic
concluded with an unusually splendid dinner, but since the bashful book-
keeper was unaccustomed to liquid refreshments, he became quite another
person, so wild and unbalanced that he offered no resistance when he was
led to a bordello, “one of the places where, strangely enough, one pays
money for a woman’s contemptibleness.” The next day the bookkeeper
woke up depressed and dissatisfied. Unable to remember what had hap-