Soren Kierkegaard

eternalnolens volens[Latin: “will one or won’t one”]. But then, indeed, the
entry continues: “This might not have made such a profound impression
on someone else, but my imagination—especially in its early days, when it
did not yet have any tasks to apply itself to. ”The sentence ends at this
point, but it does not end properly—at the very least, it is missing a verb.
Kierkegaard has to be quickly on his way, for he has written himself into
the dangerous territory where art and reality, poetry and truth, struggle with
one another. A mere ten additional words in that direction, and he would
have revealed himself to be a literary freebooter who has had to go a-plun-
dering in his own past because it had been years since there were other
subjects anywhere else that possessed the required appeal to his artistic cre-
ativity. Kierkegaard omitted those ten words and instead returned to his
familiar formula: “Such elemental melancholia, such an enormous dowry
of sorrow, and the most profoundly lamentable fate of having been brought
up as a child by such a melancholy old man—and then by means of innate
virtuosity, to have been able to deceive everyone, as though I were life and
merriment itself—and then, that God in heaven has helped me as he has.”
Kierkegaard’s ambivalent attitude toward this melancholy old man,
whose misguided solicitude had poisoned his life, is without parallel in
world literature—not even Kafka could demonize his way into anything
like it—and we virtually wallow in his father’s errors: his repression of his
son’s sexuality, which resulted in psychosomatic conflicts; the slave morality
produced by an overly strict parent whom the son,thanks to these very humili-
ations, paradoxically enough worshipped and imagined that he loved, be-
cause he was afraid to admit his hatred; the feelings of inadequacy that
stemmed from the exaggerated moral and intellectual expectations that the
son was supposed to live up to in his father’s stead; the paranoia that was
rooted in the father’s continual monitoring of the son’s behavior—and that
later emerged in reversed form in the son’s notion of being a spy whose
task it was to unmaskthe others; the irony that stemmed from compulsive
artificiality and inhibited aggressiveness—an aggressiveness that in turn was
connected via obscure channels to the miserable way Regine was treated
and that subsequently found expression in the idea of punishing his times
by allowing them to become guilty of the death of a martyr.
It would be an easy matter to lengthen, broaden, and deepen this catalog
of upbringing strategies that effectively crippled the child, and there could
be a special appendix containing a number of the bone-chilling childhood
vignettes captured on the canvas of the journals. We will have to content
ourselves with only a couple of them: “Nonetheless, I am indebted to my
father for everything, from the very beginning. Melancholy as he was, when
he saw me melancholy, his plea to me was ‘Make sure that you really love