Soren Kierkegaard

study the lives of mollusks, while the university student leaned back roman-
tically in the stern of the boat, enjoying “the clamor of wild ducks, gulls,
crows, et cetera,” which in general made a “very pleasant impression.” Out
on a little islet in the lake the two men also visited the ruins of Søborg
Castle, where Queen Margaret I of Denmark had been born—“though I
did not see anything new,” as Kierkegaard noted. (After his outing Kierke-
gaard had compared what he had seen with the text in his travel guide—
J. G. Burman-Becker’sInformation on the Old Castles of Denmark and the
Duchies—and he thus noted simply that “everything is more or less as in
Becker’s description of Danish castles.”)
Kierkegaard had left town in order to see something different and for-
eign, but he was forced to admit to himself that other people had long since
gawked at, walked on, and written up the natural scenes whose supposed
pristineness had been the great attraction. If one of the many painters of
the period—Wilhelm Bendz or Martinus Rørbye, for example—had been
in the vicinity, he would have found in Kierkegaard a perfect model for a
slightly ironic depiction of a Copenhagen intellectual in a natural land-
scape. Typically enough, it was also in these surroundings that Kierkegaard
produced his first sketch of himself as he might appear to an observer,
namely as a “man dressed in modern attire, wearing glasses, and with a
cigar in his mouth.”
This self-portrait is from his stay in Tisvilde, to which the sick and palsied
made pilgrimages at Midsummer Eve in order to drink from the spring of
Saint Helene. According to legend, the spring derived its name from a
Swedish hermit woman who was murdered by criminals and cast into the
sea, but who subsequently had been miraculously avenged by the forces of
nature. The whole tale had a slightly exotic character, but since Kierkegaard
wanted to know what he was going to see before he saw it, with the tourist’s
never-failing pleasure of anticipation, he consulted the relevant literature,
in this case J. M. Thiele’sDanish Folk Legends. At the end of an avenue of
chestnut trees on the outskirts of Tisvilde is a three-sided, ten-foot-tall ro-
coco monument of sandstone, with inscriptions in Danish, German, and
Latin telling of the time when sand dunes drifted across the land and buried
man and beast in the rural village of Tibirke. But when Kierkegaard gazed
down on the little, pleasant buildings then visible, his great expectations
could find nothing on which to focus. Literature, on the other hand, can
manage what all-too-peaceable nature is incapable of. So suddenly Kierke-
gaard felt—or, perhaps better, his journal reported—that the whole business
was a “fiction, a strange fiction: that precisely in this district where people
seek healing, preciselyhereis where so many people have found their graves.
Illuminated in the evening twilight, the whole place looks like a legend