Soren Kierkegaard

in sum: “Oh, how vile to live in a tiny, little, silly country whose character
consists only of want of character.”
To be a freelance intellectual, much less a humorist, under these condi-
tions required almost more than Kierkegaard could manage: “They have
poisoned the atmosphere for me. With my melancholia and my enormous
burden of work, what I needed in order to relax was to be alone in the
crowd.... I can no longer have this. Inquisitiveness surrounds me every-
where.” If he left the city and took a carriage out to the middle of nowhere
in the hope of finding some simple solitude in the forest, hardly could he
open the door before prying eyes would set upon the tormented aristocrat.
Indeed, “there have been times when I have been received by a mocking
assembly,” which takes a notion “to insult the coachman, so that he almost
becomes afraid because he cannot figure out what is going on.” Then, when
he finally seemed to have succeeded: “I take a long walk on quiet paths,
lost in thought, and then suddenly encounter three or four louts out there,
where I am quite alone, and these fellows take to calling me names: It has
an enormously powerful effect on my physical well-being.” And when he
sat in his regular place in church, a pair of overfed oafs would sit in the
same pew and immediately begin staring at his trousers, mocking him in a
“conversation so loud that every word can be heard.” For reasons unknown
to Kierkegaard, nursemaids had also begun to send little children over to
him “one after the other, in order to ask me what time it is, something that
is also shouted after me in the street (God knows what this is really about
or who has thought it up).”
His walks therefore became shorter and shorter. His contemporaries be-
came increasingly insufferable to be contemporary with, and at the same
time he himself became more and more alienated from his times. And the
humor with which he had previously been able to reconcile himself with
the foolishness of the world now became pointed to the point of becoming
sarcastic—“because I cannot and will not joke under these conditions.” As
a defense he distanced himself from his surroundings. He had to make him-
self a “distinguished” person, but being distinguished was precisely what he
had always hated in Heiberg, Martensen, and Mynster: “Why must I be
forced to be a distinguished person? Strange. I have quite specifically wanted
notto be distinguished, and I have earned the disapproval of the distin-
guished by the entire manner in which I live, precisely by having been
willing to associate with every person.”
In his comings and goings in the Copenhagen that had been so trans-
formed for him, Kierkegaard was, however, still capable of making minor
but wide-ranging psychological studies such as this: “One day I met three
young gentlemen outside the city gate, and as soon as they saw me they