Soren Kierkegaard

mealtime was seasoned with long, bitter, punitive lectures, and often a
frightful storm would suddenly erupt out of nowhere....Wetrembled
when we were unexpectedly called in to see my father, and sometimes we
received long epistles written in the harshest language.” Mynster thus had
no patience for the mawkish way in which childhood is often presented as
an idyll. Indeed, Mynster asserted that the countless “hymns of praise to the
joys of youth are for the most part built upon an illusion; the glorious light
of a few hours or days is made to shine retrospectively upon the whole of
youth. The pressures of the present cause one to forget the pressures one
suffered from in the past.”
Jakob Peter was educated by a series of private tutors. It was only when
one of his tutors went out of his mind and started fanatically proclaiming
the imminent return of Jesus Christ that Jakob Peter was sent for a year to
the Latin school affiliated with the Church of Our Lady. In their free time
the children played in the hospital’s courtyard or in its long corridors and
quiet rooms, where the corpses were laid out, providing the perfect back-
ground for the ghost stories the maidservant told when the children gath-
ered in the nursery at dusk. In the summer the family’s greatest amusement
on a Sunday afternoon was to take a stroll in the Frederiksberg Gardens and
have tea at a suitable restaurant, while on moonlit winter nights they might
wander around the palace arcades. Apart from a wonderful collection of
conch shells that belonged to the father of one of his private tutors and in
whichJakob PeterandOletook greatdelight,childhooddid notoffermany
opportunities for diversion: “we did not have much in the way of toys or
other equipment.”
The alternative to all this boredom was books, and at an early age, Myn-
ster devoted himself to reading with great passion and with long-term plans:
“As far back as I can remember, being an author had always represented the
highest sort of bliss for me.” He would secretly copy passages from works
of natural science onto fine paper and then amuse himself by dipping the
sheets into water so that they looked as if they had just come off the press!
Mynster’s literary productivity also included writing some poems of his
own, of which the aged bishop provided a judicious selection in his mem-
oirs, generally accompanied by harsh criticism. Nor was he mild in his judg-
ment of himself as a young man: “Capricious and surly,” he wrote of his
nature, supplementing this description with terms such as “self-conscious,
laconic, bashful, always afraid of being a burden to other people.” Mynster
remained painfully aware that he had not changed noticeably with respect
to this latter point: “Quite often, people perhaps still view as aloofness what
is fundamentally only a fear of burdening other people by approaching
them, or a fear of behaving clumsily.” It is not surprising that this shy child