Soren Kierkegaard

Amid surroundings of natural beauty and far from the temptations of the
big city, the unfocused university student was supposed to settle down and
get to work on his theological studies. “To judge from his letters, Søren is
now well and busy with his studies,” Peter Christian wrote in his diary on
July 7. In any event there was no lack of self-esteem; on July 6 Søren Aabye
wrote to his friend P. E. Lind, then in Copenhagen: “When I was in town
I was accustomed to enjoying a certain amount of attention from a number
of students, something which really pleased me and which my personality
required.” Nonetheless, he was now quite certain that his present isolation
would also be favorable because, as he put it, it “teaches me to focus my
gaze on my own interior, it encourages me to seize hold of myself, my own
self, to hold it fast amid the ceaseless changes of life, to direct towards myself
the concave mirror in which, until now, I have sought to capture the life
around me.”
It was not an easy matter to position this “concave mirror” so that it
produced an undistorted reflection of the self-reflective student. This is
made clear in a long letter the twenty-two-year-old had started writing just
before his departure, a letter addressed to the naturalist Peter Wilhelm Lund
way over on the other side of the world, somewhere deep within the en-
chanting and terrifying natural world of Brazil. The letter is dated July 1,
1835, and it begins: “You know how delighted I was to listen to you talk
in those days, how enthusiastic I was about your descriptions of your stay
in Brazil.” After his first stay in Brazil, which lasted three years, Lund had
been in Copenhagen from April to December 1829 and again from July
1831 until October 1832, so it must have been during one of these intervals
that Kierkegaard had listened to Lund’s tales. Now Lund was once again in
Brazil where, after some excursions to Rio de Janeiro in the company of
the German botanist Riedel, he had moved to the town of Curvelo in the
province of the same name, and on the advice of his fellow countryman
Peder Claussen (“Pedro Claudio Dinamarquez,” as the Brazilians called
him), he had begun to devote himself to investigations of the local limestone
caves, which contained great quantities of animal bones and skeletal re-
mains. In October 1835 Lund settled in the rural village of Lagoa Santa,
where he painstakingly excavated limestone caverns, studying fossilized de-
posits of marsupials, edentates, rodents, ungulates, and bats—fossils suppos-
edly stemming from the era “before the Flood”—but their actual age
proved, bit by bit, to be the undoing of the biblical Creation narrative,
reducing it to catastrophic chronological confusion.
In honor of his—in two senses—distant relative, Kierkegaard festooned
the first part of his letter with flowery rhetoric, but then he became more
concrete and turned to reflections concerning the choice of his life’s work: