or it is even worse .For the other beast seeks its prey among those who are
asleep, but it has no way of lulling to sleep those who are awake .Habit, on
the other hand, does .It sneaks up on a person, lulling him to sleep, and
when this is accomplished it sucks the blood out of the sleeping person
while wafting a cool breeze upon him, making his sleep even lovelier .This
is what habit is like.”
And Kierkegaard’s love for Regine never became soporifically trivial like
this .That was why it was so salutary for Regine to run into him somewhere
in town and, for a few seconds, once again experience something that the
peaceable Fritz probably never understood.
“A People’s Government Is the True Image of Hell”
Fate curiously decreed that while Kierkegaard was writingWorks of Love,
Karl Marx—who came into the world on Kierkegaard’s fifth birthday—
was down in Brussels with Friedrich Engels, writingThe Communist Mani-
festo .And of course, this latter work had more far-reaching consequences
than Kierkegaard had envisioned when he reassured the king that the entire
matter was really nothing but a minor domestic squabble in the lower
reaches of the house.The Communist Manifestoappeared in February 1848
and a Danish edition was published four years later, but Kierkegaard never
read it, so it is not quite clear what Kierkegaard had in mind when he wrote
about “communism.” Still, there can be no doubt that he was against it,
very much so, in fact, as can be seen in his general disdain for the political
process he called “leveling,” which led to the introduction of democracy
in 1849.
“The state turned upside down and came to stand on its head,” is Kier-
kegaard’s graphic description of the somersault in which the priorities that
for generations had been seen as something close to eternal verities were
overturned in the course of a few years .That the truth concerning a ques-
tion should be decided by anything as accidental as a numerical figure, in
which every person’s vote was worth the same as every other person’s,
seemed just as unnatural then as it seems the most natural of things today.
It is no great feat to depict Kierkegaard as a medieval obscurantist who got
goose bumps at the mere thought of anything as riotous and easygoing as
enlightened absolutism .Similarly, it is easy to portray him as a reactionary
antidemocrat, utterly indifferent to even the most reasonable demands for
improvements in the conditions for those at the bottom of the social peck-