stamping mill or in the repeated hammering of a coppersmith, and it is as
though one’s soul has been deafened.”
The Heiberg marriage remained childless, so in their case the fear of the
unfortunate babbling of children at the dinner table was groundless. The
choice of whether to interpret Heiberg’s attempt to refine the manner in
which people live as an expression of his aesthetic totalitarianism or as his
beneficial corrective to the tyranny of formlessness is quite literally a matter
of taste. But it is in any case difficult to call Heiberg a hypocrite, because
he applied his aesthetic theories to his own domestic and public practice,
and in so doing he thus possessed precisely the idea that Kierkegaard later
on would so insistently accuse him of lacking.
Studiosus Faustus
Kierkegaard nowhere tells us what it was like for him to be a part of Hei-
berg’s circle, but the contrast between the pietistic Moravian moderation
and simplicity of his family home and the delicate, crystalline sociability of
the Heibergs must have been so glaring that it would have required an
unusual effort for him merely to stay on his feet. There is a journal entry
dating from around the time of the Heibergs’ 1836 farewell party that gives
an especiallyextendedaccount of Kierkegaard’s situation and mood after an
altogether too exalted evening: “I have just come from a gathering where
I was the life of the party. Witticisms leapt from my tongue, everyone
laughed and admired me—but I left (yes, that dash ought to be as long as
the radii of the earth’s orbit
) and wanted to shoot myself.”
Kierkegaard confined himself to the dash, thank goodness. He was in fact
so bewitched by the Heiberg cult that he appropriated its rituals and made
their household gods his own. He began an intensive study of Goethe,
whom the Copenhagen cultural elite had celebrated enormously after his
death: University Rector Adam Oehlenschla ̈ger delivered an emotional eu-
logy for the German master, and during the following semesters he lectured
on Goethe’s principal works; in April 1834 the curtain rose on Bournon-
ville’s three-act balletFaust; and three weeks later came the presentation of
dramatic scenes from the same work in a translation by Heiberg and Hertz.
Goethe, in sum, wasin, and Kierkegaard wanted to be a part of the action.
At first he borrowed books from the various private libraries, but this proved
too cumbersome, so on February 10, 1835, he went down to Reitzel’s
Booksho pand purchased Goethe’s collected works in fifty-five volumes.