Soren Kierkegaard

“Many people resemble the devil tree of America: With a large explosion,
they spread their fruit as soon as it is ripe—often long before it is ripe.”
Mynster also wrote what he later contemptuously called a “sentimental
drama”inoneact,aswellasatragedythatremainedanunfinishedfragment.
And Mynster was tempted to enter the university’s gold-medal competi-
tions for essays on set topics. Mynster’s first attempt was in 1795 in answer
to this question, probably rhetorical: “What sort of times are most suited to
produce a great poet—those that are simple and unsophisticated, or those
that are cultivated and sophisticated?” Mynster wrote several drafts but was
unabletocompletehis essay.Thefollowingyearthetopic wasacomparison
of ancient and modern popular education, and Mynster actually completed
a short essay, but it did not please him and he consigned it to his desk
drawer. Things were different in 1798, however, when the subject was
“the advantages and shortcomings of both public and private education.”
Mynster wrote his essay in three weeks and won the prize. His essay had
been motivated in part by “the indignation I felt and still feel at modern
educators, generally the shallowest of people, who think that with their
phrasesandtheirfragmentaryknowledgetheycanreshapethehumanrace.”
Perhaps things have not really changed so much since then.
“All of that looks quite nice now,” Mynster wrote in retrospection, ad-
mitting that he had in fact experienced plenty of happy times, “but I truly
had many burdensome and bitter times as well. Within me there was a
storm and stress that I was embarrassed to discuss with anyone, that I tried
to discuss with myself in verse and in prose, though without success....A
love smoldered, but found no object; there were emotions that could not
be subdued, thoughts that would not come to fruition, an ideal I despaired
of ever achieving....Many were the times that I descended into lethargy;
everything, myself included, became a matter of indifference to me.” Jakob
Peter became adept at the enervating sport of deception: “No one knew
my condition. I fulfilled the responsibilities of my job. In the company of
others I behaved as I always had. But whether I was with others or alone,
whether I was at work or idle, I was filled with the same darkness.”
The young theological graduate also began to drink a bit, and continued
to do so for about half a year. Previously he had not kept strong drink in
his room, but Ole had given him a bottle of liquor, “and in my dispirited
and probably somewhat neurotic condition it was so inexpressibly pleasant
to me to go and have a nip, that I needed whatever remaining strength of
character I possessed in order to resist doing so and thus starting down a
path that might have been very pernicious.” Mynster never quite freed
himself of this depressive tendency, and even many years later he would
sense what he called “a bitter peace that is never very distant from my