Soren Kierkegaard

Socrates (the spiritual ancestor he so greatly revered) had once perambu-
lated .Ironically enough, a novelistic possibility Kierkegaard had sketched
in his journal one December morning in 1837 came in fact to resemble his
own prosaic reality: “I would like to write a novella in which there would
be a man who walked past the plasterer’s shop on Østergade every day,
doffed his hat, and stood quietly for a moment with the words he uttered
regularly each day, O, you wonderful Grecian clime, why was it not permit-
ted me to live under your skies in the days of your prime?” The plasterer in
question was Giuseppe Barsugli, and prior to the opening of the Thorvald-
sen Museum in 1848, his display windows in Østergade were one of the
few public places where Copenhageners could get a notion of sculpture.
Thus one did nothaveto travel .One could help oneself in other ways,
merelythinkingoneself southward, as happened in the month of May that
same year, 1837, when the bemused student carried out a little experiment
on his windowsill: “It is curious how the blue-violet hue of Italy, which is
otherwise absent in this country, can be produced by looking through a
window into the air on a clear evening, with a candle between oneself and
the window.”
Kierkegaard moreover had rich opportunities to plan expeditions with
an especially academic meticulousness .His relatively large collection of geo-
detic reference materials thus included C .F .Weiland’sCompendiousGeneral
Atlas of the Entire World; a globe by G .F .von Oldenburg (with floor stand)
of which he was the proud owner; F .W .Streit’sMap of Europeaffixed to
a wooden roller; an impressive, lacqueredGeneral Map of Denmark, also
fastened to a rod; and he was also the owner of J .H .Mansa’sMap of the
Northeastern Portion of Zealandglued to a piece of linen but ready to be
packed up and put into its traveling case when it was time for a trip to
Gilleleje, for example.
Kierkegaard kept his longing to travel under control by reminding him-
self that deep down there was really noreasonto travel, for when he reached
his destination his poetic sensibilities dilated so greatly that he was simply
unable to focus on his foreign surroundings and instead isolated himself in
his hotel room, and “suffering a bit from melancholia,.. .I plunge into the
most enormous [literary] productivity.” The first trip to Berlin, in 1841,
was a minor exception to this rule, but otherwise his later journeys pass
almost entirely unnoticed in his journals .In early May 1846, in the middle
of his row withThe Corsair, when he traveled to Berlin for the fourth and
final time and spent a couple of weeks there, he did fill his journal with a
dozen stirring sketches about the theology of the Creation story, but they
could just as well have been written in Copenhagen.