Soren Kierkegaard

pened, he isolated himself still further, but then suddenly became sick, sick
unto death. While he lay there at death’s door, the bordello episode
emerged from the fogs of his fever, taking on the form of a frightening
possibility, “and this possibility was that another being owed its life to him.”
He could not determine whether his anxiety was a consequence of the
illness, a febrile fantasy, or whether the sickness had facilitated the emer-
gence of a repressed “memory of actual events.” He survived, however. But
shortly thereafter the head of the mercantile firm died, and the bookkeeper
inherited his enormous fortune. This made it possible for him to devote
himself to his studies, whose peculiar character was reflected in the sizable
library he accumulated as the years passed. The library consisted of works
on physiology, profusely illustrated: “He had the costliest engravings as well
as entire series of his own original drawings. There were faces depicted as
portraits....There were faces depicted in accordance with mathematical
proportions....There were faces constructed in accordance with physio-
logical observations, and these in turn were compared with other faces that
were sketched in accordance with hypotheses. In particular it was family
likeness and the consequences of the relations of generations with which he
concerned himself physiologically, physiognomically, and pathologically.”
We do not have to do much more than scratch the surface of the portrait
of this bookkeeper before Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard emerges as a
young man. He, too, was frugal, meticulous, and punctual, thus just the
sort of character who appealed to his well-to-do uncle Niels Andersen Sed-
ing, who rewarded him by making him the sole heir of his “great fortune.”
Here, as in other cases, it is hardly worth the trouble to determine exactly
where historical reality ends and poetic license begins, but in Kierkegaard’s
first sketch of the tale the most important details are the following: “Once,
in his early youth, a person in an unbalanced state of mind permitted himself
to be carried away so far as to pay a visit to a prostitute. The whole matter
is forgotten. Now he wants to marry. Then anxiety awakens. The possibility
that he could be a father, that somewhere in the world there might live a
being who owed its life to him, torments him day and night. He cannot
tell anyone about it. He himself does not have real certainty of the facts.”
The fateful visit to the bordello is thus the kernel of the tale around which
Kierkegaard adds his fictive layers. The fear about the consequences of the
visit was not, however, a fear about possible offspring—that is a poetic diver-
sionary tactic. It was rather a fear about having contracted a contagious dis-
ease, and this was why the anxiety stirs only at the point when the person
wants to marry, thus risking further transmission of the infection. The preoc-
cupation with the faces of children was thus genuine enough, but the motive
behind it is reversed, so to speak. Thus, where the bookkeeper studied chil-