with perhaps ten times as much shrewdness as possessed by the shrewd—
systematically carried out in the opposite direction. I always take the wrong
approach. I never appear at the time of year when there is excitement in
the literary world. I always appear in huge volumes, never in such a manner
as to provide the reader with a chance to show off by reading it aloud or
that sort of thing, et cetera, et cetera. And this runs through everything,
down to the most insignificant detail....ForuptonowIhavealways been
in the minority, and Iwantto be in the minority. And I hope with God’s
help that I will succeed in this until my final blessed end.”
And he did succeed.
“This Sweat-Soaked, Stifling Cloak of Mush That Is the Body”
“Kierkegaard almost resembled a caricature,” wrote one of his contemporar-
ies, the theologian Peter Christian Zahle, who went on to provide us with
this concise portrait: “Under the low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat one saw
the big head with the coarse, dark-brown hair; the blue, expressive eyes;
the pale yellow color of his face and the sunken cheeks, with many deep
wrinkles down the cheeks and around a mouth, which spoke even when it
was silent. He frequently carried his head tilted a little to one side. His back
was a bit curved. He had a cane or an umbrella under his arm. The brown
coat was tight and snugly buttoned around the thin body. The weak legs
seemed to bear their burden uncertainly, but for a long time they served to
carry him from the study out into the open air, where he took his ‘people
bath.’ ” Zahle gives us a picture of an aging Kierkegaard, but since he aged
strikingly quickly, according to the testimony of many, it is not unreasonable
to assign the portrait to the later 1840s, perhaps even earlier. Thus one day,
when Hans Brøchner had touched on the relationship between existential
intensity and biological age, he intimated to Kierkegaard that he was truly
“the oldest man” he had ever known, Kierkegaard merely smiled, thereby
apparently accepting Brøchner’s “mode of calculation.”
More than the angle from which a person viewed Kierkegaard, it was
the eyes that did the viewing that determined whether one characterized
him, as Zahle does here, as having a “back [that] was a bit curved” or as:
“high-shouldered” (Regine) or with “his shoulders hunched forward a bit”
(Goldschmidt) or “with a crookedness that seemed just on the verge of
hunchback” (Sibbern) or “somewhat deformed or at any rate round-shoul-
dered” (Hertz) or “round-shouldered” (Otto Zinck), or simply “hunch-