Soren Kierkegaard

artistic necessity would encounter each other in his immediate presence,
producing asituation, as happened, for example, one evening in 1845: “Cu-
riously enough, I went out of Vesterport this evening: It was dark. I passed
a couple of boys in one of the narrow alleys. I scarcely took note of them
and had passed them by when I heard one of them telling the other a story:
‘Then they came to an old fortune-teller lady....’This summer the same
thing happened to me in the evening twilight out by Peblinge Lake. There
were two little girls, and the one said, ‘Then he saw an old castle in the
distance.’ I think that the greatest poet could scarcely produce an effect like
these stirring echoes of the fairy tale—about the old castle in the distance,
about what happened next, or that they walked a long wayuntil, et cetera.”
A stone’s throw from Peblinge Lake was Lovers’ Lane, the path that ran
alongside all three lakes on the side nearest the city, though connoisseurs
subdivided it, calling the part next to Sortedam Lake “Marriage Lane,” the
part alongside of Peblinge Lake “Lovers’ Lane,” and that alongside Sankt
Jørgens Lake “Friendship Lane.” In “The Seducer’s Diary” it was along this
latter section of the path that Kierkegaard had Cordelia stroll one spring
evening, suspecting nothing but all the while being spied on by her fate.
When Kierkegaard wandered along Lovers’ Lane early one morning, he
encountered a “curious procession”: Some young girls were dancing with
one another as they approached him. It was probably just a couple of silly
young ladies, “flirts,” he at first thought, but when he came closer he could
see that there were two young men behind them, playing flutes. “So there
is still poetry of that sort in the world,” he wrote in his journal, quite de-
lighted, but then added—with such emotion that it almost pains the
reader—“I came close to dancing with them.”
Kierkegaard saw what other people overlooked; he magnified details that
are usually viewed with indifference. But his gaze did not merely lose itself
in the situation: What was seen was most often accompanied by a reflection
on the symbolic dimension of the situation; he had an allegorical eye. “The
contradiction: The coachman on the pauper’s hearse, whose solitary horse
he had only half covered with the horse blanket, the better to whip it....
the profundity of death.” Or a while later: “It is a peculiarly pitiful sight to
see a poor old nag standing in harness before a wagon, with the nosebag on
but still unable to eat. Or when an unfortunate horse like this has got its
nosebag on wrong, cannot manage to eat, and no one thinks of helping it.”
Kierkegaard, however, did think about helping the horse, but in the end
refrained from doing anything, just like the time he had refrained from
joining the dance.
At other times, for all its tragic qualities, the situation was comical, as one
day in 1840, when the well-off Kierkegaard took a walk on Grønningen