Soren Kierkegaard

to educate and entertain from nine in the morning until eight in the eve-
ning, was both gifted and eager as a pupil, so the reading list soon went far
beyond what was usually assigned to children. While the boy ate apples and
nuts, Mynster would go over the indispensable classics and then question
the child about them, backwards and forwards. They also read English,
German, and French together, while Mynster struggled on his own with
Italian and was eventually able to scrape his way, more or less, through such
authors as Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, and Machiavelli. Furthermore, he took
an interest in economics and for a while made quite an extensive study of
Adam Smith. And in addition to all this, he read the categorical Kant, who
led him backwards to Hume. Then he disappeared into a passion for Jacobi
and was bewitched by Helve ́tius. He took on Montesquieu and Rousseau
in French and then returned to the young titans of German philosophy—
to Fichte, but especially to Schelling, the philosophical comet who dazzled
everyone. His friendship with the Norwegian, Adrian Bentzon, led him to
Aeschylus and to Goethe, but the greatest miracle was his reacquaintance
with Homer, whose works he read in the warm summers with his heart
pounding and his temples throbbing: “Of course, from handbooks of his-
tory and mythology I knew well whatpeople call the contents, but an entire
newworldwasopenedformeandenchantedmewithitselevatedsimplicity
and its profound feelings which, however, are always expressed within the
boundsofmoderationandwhichoftenonlyfindexpressioninafewchords.
I came to the clear realization that as long as Homer is still read, genuine
taste will never die out entirely. I translated the fourteenth song of the
Odysseyand the sixth song of theIliadinto hexameters.”
Later he also read Jean Paul and was quite carried away, for where others
fell silent for lack of the right words, this German romantic kept on, daring
to utter “what others said could not be spoken.” Mynster had been inspired
by Jean Paul’s aphoristic style, and in his memoirs he reprinted some of his
youthful attempts, bittersweet bon mots which—if not in their quality, then
at any rate in their tone—call to mind the Kierkegaardian “Diapsalmata.”
One of these aphorisms exudes its own tragic world-weariness: “My situa-
tion is like that of the Greeks of the modern era: During the merriest days of
the Easter season, there is always a time when I wander among the graves.”
Another of these aphorisms immediately calls to mind the final portion of
Fear and Trembling, which employs a metaphor about the time the Dutch
dumped spices into the sea. Mynster wrote: “In order to keep them from
losing their value, do not indulge in enjoyments too frequently, just as the
Dutch uprooted cinnamon trees in order to keep the price of cinnamon
from falling.” A third aphorism brings us into more grotesque territory: