Soren Kierkegaard

penhagen centaur, an inhuman colossus, a horrid hybrid of mutually de-
structive opposites: a man of wisdom who was lacking in courage, a thinker
but not a man of prayer, a preacher without faith, an unrepentant voluptu-
ary, mortally wounded in the fundament of his being.
With its dreadful power, “Solomon’s Dream” seemsbothto be situated
at an enormous distance from the modest and frugal home of the hosierand
to invite a biographical interpretation of the relationships in that home.
Wanting to draw conclusions directly from the individual episodes in the
story is thus just as naive as wanting to ignore every connection. The dy-
namic center of the story is the traumatic experience that assumes an allegor-
ical form because the pain that would be associated with a direct presenta-
tion of the nocturnal scene would be unbearable. Profoundly reserved on
this matter, Kierkegaard gives his presentation—already an allegory—a
dreamlike character at the very point that judgment is about to be pro-
nounced upon the depraved father. At the same time, the allegory invites
us to demystify the material so that we can penetrate to the reality behind
the words, to the actual happenings of that night, to the father’s despairing
cry. To what extent do these sounds of the night have a merely allegorical
character? Is it perhaps the sounds that are really the most essential detail in
the story? Were those sounds perhaps more bestial than penitent? Did the
son, perhaps, one night catch his father in the act of blasphemous self-pollu-
tion against which he himself had warned the son? “A broken-down lecher,
an old man who scarcely has sensual power...,”reads a savage journal
entry from 1854 in which the son reflects with disgust on the carnal lust
for reproduction—a lust that refused to die—which had brought him into
existence. Or is this too heavy-handed an interpretation? Is it more reason-
able to assume that the father, who for many years shared a bedchamber
with his two sons, mumbled out a few fragments of a macabre tale in his
sleep, fragments which the youngest of his insomniac sons poetically devel-
oped in demonic fashion? We do not know, but both sons subsequently
had a fear of talking in their sleep, and in 1826, when Peter Christian had
recovered from his bout with typhus, he wrote in his diary, “God spared
me from what I feared more than death—from delirium.”
The last of the pieces inserted into Quidam’s diary was dated June 5
and titled “Nebuchadnezzar.” It contains Kierkegaard’s retelling, divided
up biblical-style into verses, of the fourth chapter of the book of Daniel,
which recounts the story of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar who first
dreamed—and then came to experience in his actual life—that he had the
heart of an animal instead of that of a human being. He was therefore com-
pelled to live among the beasts of the field and to eat grass as they did, while