was shorter than the other, and I could now see for myself that he was odd-
looking. I instinctively stopped, was embarrassed, and suddenly remem-
bered that I had to go down another street.”
Kierkegaard’s dearly bought lessons in “the school of abuse” meant that
his eyes had been opened to an aspect of Christianity to which he previously
had had only an academic relation. “Truly, I would never have succeeded
in illuminating Christianity in the way that has been granted me, had all
this not happened to me,” he wrote in a journal entry from June 1848, and
fifty or so journal entries later the position has been radicalized: “All this,
God be praised, has not made me unproductive, but precisely the reverse;
and it has truly developed me so that I might illuminate Christianity. It has
indeed developed my literary productivity, and yet it has permitted me
to experience the sort of isolation without which one does not discover
Christianity....No,no,onemust in fact be acquainted with it from the
ground up, one must be educated in the school of abuse.” Kierkegaard, in
sum, was doing something he had derided in other contexts: He was having
“Christian experiences.”
After 1846 he was a dead man, socially speaking. True, the violence to
which he was subjected was only symbolic, but this made it all the clearer
to him that the times must get beyond these symbolic forms: “Only a dead
man can stop and avenge such infamy in which an entire nation is more
or less implicated. But all you who have suffered will be avenged! And I
feel indescribably satisfied that I, if anyone, have found just the task for my
life that is perfectly suited to all the conditions of my life.... Retribution
is coming!”
The Neighbors across the Way
Kierkegaard had done everything to avoid being identified with his pseud-
onyms, but afterThe Corsairthe mob would single him out and shout “Ei-
ther/Or” and “Søren” after him on the street: “With the help of the organ
of vulgarity, the signal had been given to call me only by my first name, so
that it has become a nickname that was shouted at me. Now the better sort
of people are using it. Indeed, it has now become something of a rarity to
see a new Danish play without a character in it named Søren.”
This latter point was something of a misrepresentation, but there was
something to it. The name Søren was used by a number of writers, including
Carit Etlar, who assigned it to a common peasant in his one-act playTony
Goes to War. There was also a Søren in Johanne Luise Heiberg’s vaudeville
A Sunday on Amager, which became a hit. Most of all, however, it was the