Soren Kierkegaard

entire person: “She did not love my well-formed nose, nor my fine eyes,
nor my small feet—nor my clever head—she just loved me, and yet she did
not understand me.”
The journals report on indispositions, headaches, dizziness, insomnia, vi-
sion problems, cramps, urinary difficulties, and other things of this sort,
including recurrent constipation. Thus in a letter to Peter Christian dated
February 5, 1843, the younger brother complained of “a case of hemor-
rhoids,” while to his nephew, the physician Henrik Lund, he confessed that
he was suffering from “a hardened obstruction,” which in plain language
meant that “my a[rse] is stuck shut.” Colonel Barth once heard Kierkegaard
complain about abdominal pains and counseled him to get himself “a horse
to ride and to ride properly; then the stomach would certainly be all right
again.” But since a cure based on this sort of horse sense was quite under-
standably not the thing for Kierkegaard, he chose instead to alleviate his
problem with Miss Reinhard’s boiled prunes or a dose of castor oil.
In a letter dated April 2, 1841, Henrik Lund’s uncle Henrik Ferdinand
informed his older brother Peter Wilhelm, who was in Brazil, that Uncle
Søren not only had “got engaged to a young and quite pretty girl, a daughter
of Councillor Olsen,” but also that he had been sick: “His chest... is
affected and he has begun to spit blood again.” The condition was not given
a medical diagnosis, but it was also attested to by Henriette Lund, who
mentions “a party for a group of young people” at which Kierkegaard “was
taken ill, to the point of spitting up blood.”
Kierkegaard himself nowhere mentions spitting up blood, perhaps be-
cause for him the disparity between mind and body was the seat of the most
profound suffering. A “Remark” in his journal from 1845 captured the
misrelation perfectly: “Just as an invalid longs to cast off his bandages, my
healthy spirit longs to cast off the fatigue of the body. Just as the victorious
general cries when his horse has been shot from under him, ‘A new
horse!’—oh, would that the victorious health of my spirit might dare to cry
out, ‘A new horse, a new body!’ ” In the margin, next to the words “fatigue
of the body,” Kierkegaard added: “this sweat-soaked, stifling cloak of mush
that is the body and the body’s fatigue.” Kierkegaard could also formulate
the relation between spirit and flesh in a modern metaphor: “Like a steam-
ship whose machinery is too large in proportion to the ship’s construction—
that is how I suffer.” Or even more summarily and with yet another mari-
time metaphor: “I am now living in melancholia’s private berth.”
As fortunately is the case with most people, as the years passed Kierke-
gaard, too, seems to have become more reconciled to his body, concerning
whichThe Corsairhad practically compelled him to have a sense of humor.
But as few others have succeeded in doing, Kierkegaard was gradually able