thing,” as he himself put it. Kierkegaard, incidentally, viewed this ashis
personal victory.
Kierkegaard’s defeat consisted of his exclusion from the social fabric, his
loss of a frank and open relationship with the common man. In spite of all
his strategic calculations, he had not taken into account the most important
thing, namely the world, where a crafty logic sometimes holds sway. And
it made Kierkegaard its victim.
Many years later, Goldschmidt summed things up in a piece with the
heading “P.L.M. and S.K.”: “Both were so unhappy that, when one consid-
ers their fates, the anxiety one feels when confronted with the enormous
gravity of life sometimes becomes intensified into terror.”
The Great Reversal
1846 was anannus horribilis, a dreadful year, but Kierkegaard would not be
Kierkegaard if he merely attributed all the misfortunes to the open-ended
possibilities of mere chance. On the contrary, Kierkegaard was Kierke-
gaard—or, rather, KierkegaardbecameKierkegaard—because he saw his fate
spelled out amid all the adversity. What had happened had not been a matter
of chance, but something meaningful, it had taken place with the collusion
and consent of Governance.
In Kierkegaard’s consciousness, the episode withThe Corsairmarked a
new beginning, and this is attested to quite tangibly by the fact that he began
to organize his journal entries in a different fashion. Since 1833, he had
used notebooks, twenty-six in all, but in 1846 he began using what he called
his “NB Journals,” large (quarto-size) blank books, writing on the first page
of each journal the date he started using it. The various journals are num-
bered in chronological order, although dates for individual journal entries
are more the exception than the rule.
During the last ten years of his life, Kierkegaard used a total of thirty-six
consecutive volumes of these “NB Journals,” the first of which he dated
March 9, 1846, which was of course the period during which he was com-
ing closer and closer to sinking beneath the wake ofThe Corsair. He summa-
rized the events in a “report,” which he began by noting matter-of-factly
that thePostscript, in which he acknowledged his pseudonymous works, had
now been published and thatA Literary Reviewwas about to go to press.
“Everything is in order. All I have to do now is to remain calm and silent,
relying onThe Corsairto support the entire enterprise negatively, exactly as
I wish....Taken by itself it was surely the most fortunate of ideas that I
broke withThe Corsairat the very moment I was finished with my literary