dation says perhaps more about the recommender than about the recom-
mendee, but Kierkegaard thought well of Anders: “Anders, with whom I
have been especially happy because...,”hewrote in a journal entry he
did not finish and subsequently crossed out—and which, by its fragmentary
nature, sets one’s imagination spinning. Thank goodness he came home
from the war uninjured. But then Kierkegaard worried that Anders would
hear vulgar gossip about his master.
To these difficulties with war, finances and Anders were later added
problems with Strube, the Icelandic carpenter, upon whom Kierkegaard
otherwise “depended as on no one else, the man I inherited from my father,
whom I have known for twenty years, whom I have regarded as one of
those healthy, strong, powerful workers. ”Alas, how changed, changed ut-
terly! Strube had become “confused, because he has brooded too much.”
The brooding went to Strube’s head, and he had become “opinionated”
and “vehement. ”And one day Kierkegaard came home and discovered to
his horror that someone had rooted about in his desk and had been into
the mahogany chest containing his private papers. Who it was remained
unexplained; perhaps he himself had merely forgotten to close the desk
when he had gone out, but Strube remained under suspicion because he
was extremely overwrought and wanted “to reform the whole world. ”And
this was not good, all the more so because it could have ended as “a sensa-
tional event upon which the newspapers would seize. ”Strube was admitted
to Frederik’s Hospital, where the head physician Seligmann Meyer Trier
treated him and soon freed him of his worst caprices so that he could return
to work. A bit later Kierkegaard wrote to Trier: “Permit me to thank you
yet again for my carpenter. He is once more what he has had the honor of
being for twenty-five years, a worker with life and spirit, a worker who,
although he thinks while doing his work, does not make the mistake of
wanting to make thinking into his work.”
The Sickness unto Death
We are yet again provided with a striking reminder of the distance between
Kierkegaard’s life and his writings, because it was right there—in the all-
too-expensive apartment, with the threat of war hanging in the air, and
with the stench from the tannery assaulting his nostrils—that according to
his own testimony, he wrote “some of the best things I have ever written.”
As early as February 1848, under the heading “N.B., N.B., ”he had
sketched the outline of a new work that was to be calledThoughts that Heal
Radically: Christian Healing. This spiritual medical book was to be in two