Soren Kierkegaard

moves through the language like an English clown, walking on his hands
and making somersaults with the language, but he has no style. For he uses
superfluous words and says whatever occurs to him. The contents of this
Danaides’ vessel of reflection is a story of falling in love, of engagement, of
breaking off, cast in the form of a diary. Every section has the stylized begin-
ning ‘A year ago today.’ Here one encounters a male individual who has
lost everything that constitutes personality. Feeling, understanding, will, res-
olution, action, backbone, nerves, muscle—everything has been dissolved
into dialectics, sterile dialectics that rotate around an uncertain center, un-
certain of whether it is the result of centrifugal or centripetal force, until in
the end it gradually vanishes.... And of course, in the book, the female
being who is placed on the experimenter’s rack also turns into dialectics and
vanishes. But in real life she would necessarily have had to go mad or jump
into Peblinge Lake. The exposition can be briefly summarized as follows:
“A year ago today. So! Now I have got engaged, then. She is truly de-
lightful, but a little maid like this is full of bother. She cannot comprehend
that I both want to be engaged and also want to break off, that I both want
to break off and also not to break off, both to marry and not to marry.
She cannot comprehend that my engagement is dialectical—that is, that it
signifies both love and a lack of love, that I intend both to be done with it
and also to remain forever upon the pinnacle of desire.—A year ago today.
The method does not work. It must be changed. She lacks a religious back-
ground, so we are not suited for each other. And if she comes closer to
religion, she is also lost to me. She must be set free because only then will
she belong to me, and then she can become engaged and married to whom-
ever she wants. But she is nonetheless married to me and so on ad infinitum.
“If sound common sense, in all its unsophisticated immediacy, might be
permitted to intervene here, it would perhaps say: ‘If you want to regard
life as a dissecting room and yourself as a cadaver, then go ahead and tear
yourself to bits as much as you like. As long as you do no injury to others,
the police will not interfere with your activities. But to spin another being
into your spiderweb, to dissect it alive, or to torture the soul out of it drop
by drop through experimentation—this, after all, is not permitted except
with insects, and does not the mere thought of it contain something appall-
ing, something revolting, to healthy human nature?”
It is clear that this was not so much literary criticism as it was a criticism
of Kierkegaard’s character, the weak, eccentric, and unhealthy aspects of
which were not merely exhibited with Møller’s perfidious talent for indeli-
cate comparisons, but also with the disturbing intuitive sense that was,
Goldschmidt tells us, typical of Møller when he was in an ill humor, took
up his pen, and dipped it in poison: “He had... a remarkable ability to see