Soren Kierkegaard

the sword and a good sound drubbing and much other unpleasantness, but
all the nasty plans stayed in his writing desk. In that same desk was also to
be found a striking and in many respects atypical journal entry, a little tale
labeled “a fantasy” and titled “The Squint-Eyed Hunchback.” The tale be-
gins: “Many years ago in the city of F. there lived a man who was known
by everyone, though only very few had seen him because he almost never
left his home.... He wasslight of build, squint-eyed and hunchbacked,
and he viewed squint-eyed hunchbacked people as the only truly unhappy
people, and himself as the unhappiest of all. Because, said he, if I had merely
been squint-eyed, I could go out in the evening and no one would see it,
but then I am also hunchbacked. He hated all people and had sympathy
only with those who were either hunchbacked or squint-eyed or both, but
only those who refused to bear their fate patiently, loving God and men—
because he viewed that as cowardice. He had been engaged, but he broke
it off because of the taunts he thought he heard.”
We are almost tempted to believe that Kierkegaard had got a splinter
from a troll’s magic mirror in his eye and had drawn his own self-portrait.
For he indeed emphasized details that people of the day—viciously encour-
aged byThe Corsair—tended to associate with him, namely his oddly
hunched back and his broken engagement. And when in addition he
brooded gloomily on the defiance and self-contempt that are typical of the
isolated person, this most definitely does not diminish the impression that
this is a demonic self-portrait. But it is not a self-portrait in any straightfor-
ward sense, because the tale continues: “He was the publisher of a paper
and sowed discord among people. Defiance and pride and avarice. At home,
he lived in splendor. He had large mirrors in which he would look at him-
self, and then he would say in delight, ‘Actually, you look like Caesar, apart
from the fact that you are squint-eyed—and apart from the fact that you
are hunchbacked, but people can’t see that when they look at you head-
on.’ He published a book titledThe Squint-Eyed Hunchback, revealing his
innermost self, something other writers never do. He imagined that he
needed the paper in order to express his life view, but he didn’t have one
at all. The paper carried only grumbling and banter, and his life view was
ill temper and despair. To his confidant he said, ‘Why must I be squint-eyed
and hunchbacked and therefore excluded from becoming, for example, a
pastor or an actor?’ When the confidant said that this was also the case with
blind people, with the one-eyed, the lame, the knock-kneed, with people
whose legs were formed like the curved legs of a stool, then the little man
said, ‘Well, all that is nothing compared with being squint-eyed and hunch-
backed.’ ”
What looks at first like a self-portrait thus turns out to be a portrait of
the journalist Goldschmidt, who valued profitable counterfeiting more