the city gates to a nearby country palace, or down to the seashore, or here
and there on the city streets, wherever Johannes wished, because his father
was capable of everything. While they walked up and down the floor, his
fatherdescribedeverythingtheysaw:Theygreetedpassersby;carriagesrum-
bled past them, drowning out his father’s voice; the fruits that the pastry
women were selling were more tempting than ever. He related everything
so exactly, so vividly, with such immediacy, down to the least detail....
For Johannes it was as though the world were being created during their
conversation,asifhisfatherwasOurLordandthathehimselfwastheLord’s
favorite, whowas permitted tocontributehisown foolish whimsas merrily
as he liked—because he was never rebuffed, his father was never annoyed,
and everything was included and always to Johannes’s satisfaction.”
There is a loving, almost lyricallightness in this literary flourish in which
Kierkegaard—for the time being—was able to hold the traumatic experi-
ences of his childhood at arm’s length. An invisible hand has erased every
troublesomeelementandhascausedeveryvoiceotherthanthefather’sand
the son’s to fall silent. One quickly forgets that this episode took place only
“one time,” just as one quickly comes to identify Johannes with Søren
Aabye, so that the scene silently slips into the parlor of the house at 2 Ny-
torv. After that, it does not take long until the episode is counted as a
biographical fact—which it isonlyto the extent that any narrative also nar-
ratessomethingaboutitsnarrator.Behindtheimageofthefather’swalking-
in-place at home in the parlor one catches a glimpse of a very resolute man
who wants his son to acheiveintellectuallythe success he himself has had
financially.Indeed,as anadultSørenAabyecouldrecall—and agreewith!—
his father’s insistence, repeated “thousands of times,” that if one really
wishedtomakesomethingofoneselfasanauthoroneshould“writeinone
of the European languages” and not in the hole-in-corner tongue known
as Danish.
It is only when Kierkegaard, as an adult, takes us step-by-step down a
long, narrow staircase into the inner courtyard of his childhood that we
learn that this idyllic, pastel-toned version of the Kierkegaard home was a
poeticfiction.“Alas,itisfrightful,”hewroteintheautumnof1848,“when
even for a single moment I think of the dark background of my life, right
fro mits very earliest beginning. The anxiety with which my father filled
my soul, his own frightful melancholia [Danish:tungsind, ‘heaviness of
spirit’], the many things of this sort that I cannot even write down. I felt
suchananxietyaboutChristianity,andyetIfeltmyselfsopowerfullydrawn
toward it.” Displaying the sort of emotional ambivalence and misunder-
stood loyalty that brings to mind the paradoxical devotedness of incest vic-
tims,Kierkegaardusuallytakesusintohisconfidenceonlyasaparenthetical
{1813–1834} 15