Soren Kierkegaard

afternoon during the peak of the season at the Deer Park: People rush past
one another, hooting and shouting, laughing and making fun of one an-
other, driving their horses to death, they tip over and are run over, and
when they finally arrive at the amusement park, all covered with dust and
out of breath—well, then they have a look at one another and go home.”
If he was continuing his burdensome studies despite all this, it was because
by doing so he would give “great joy to Father,” since—as the son wrote
with a touch of unconcealed shamelessness—his father believed that the
true “Canaan lies on the far shore of the theological examinations.”
So much for the main points of the letter to P. W. Lund. We do not
know whether it was ever sent, and perhaps it was not even an actual letter
but was merely addressed by Kierkegaard to himself. In any case, we en-
counter here an expressed interest in the natural sciences, which are placed
far above theology but which take on meaning only when they are specula-
tively subordinated to “that Archimedean point that exists nowhere within
the world,” because this point can be sought only in the individual, who
can find himself only by abandoning the distractions of the objective world
in favor of existential concentration.
Nonetheless, Kierkegaard was determined to investigate the natural
world of northern Zealand, and during the first two weeks of his stay he
visited Esrom, Fredensborg, Frederiksværk, and Tisvilde. At the end of July,
in the company of Jens Lyngbye, an older cousin of Hans Christian Lyng-
bye, the local parish pastor, Kierkegaard made his first and only trip to
Sweden, where he visited Mølleleje, a little fishing village on the western
side of Kullen, and thereafter called at the imposing castle of Krapperup,
meeting Nils Kristoffer Gyldenstierna himself, who in addition to being a
lord and a baron was also an ichthyologist and was thus in a position to
show off his impressive “collection of fish.” The next day held visits to
“O ̈stra Ho ̈gkull and Vestra Ho ̈gkull,” which towered 618 feet above sea
level, plus a little “botanical excursion” in the same district, collecting plants
which Pastor Lyngbye afterwards “was so kind as to present me with, dried
and packed in paper.” Not quite a week later, on August 4, Kierkegaard
was sitting with this same Pastor Lyngbye in a boat on the shallow-bottomed
Søborg Lake, which had gradually become so overgrown and so full of mud
that they could only propel the boat forward with a great deal of difficulty.
But if “we ignore this, our natural surroundings were very interesting: The
heavy, six-foot-tall rushes and the luxuriant vegetation of all sorts of water
plants really permitted us to imagine that we were in an entirely different
climate.” The Brazilian climate, for example. When the two men reached
the open lake, they divided up their tasks, so that the parish pastor, who
was also a zealous botanist and zoologist, could gather plants in order to