Soren Kierkegaard

But the most striking thing is that time and again one does not come across
what one might normally expect of an entry in a travel diary. On July 8,
the diary reports on a walking tour from Esrom and thence via Nøddebo
to Fredensborg. In itself this seems quite straightforward, but then, com-
pelled by a sudden rainstorm to take shelter in a wretched peasant cottage,
the writer makes a markedlyliteraryentry: “Clad in my enormous cape, I
entered the parlor, where I found myself in the presence of a party, con-
sisting of three persons, who were having dinner. Among the furnishings
there was of course a great long table at which it pleased our peasants to
feed....Theadjoining room, to which the door stood ajar, was a store-
room for linen, canvas, cotton drill, et cetera, in disorderly heaps, which
could easily lead one to believe that one was in a little den of thieves, to
which the location of the place... as well as the external features of the
people seemed appropriate. We will now have a little look at them. At
the far end of the aforementioned long table sat the man himself, with his
sandwiches and a bottle of spirits in front of him. He listened impassively
to my account of my sorrowful fate, merely taking a nip from his glass every
now and then, something that the cubic capacity of his nose appeared to
testify he had done quite frequently....Thewoman was not particularly
tall, with a broad face and an ugly upturned nose....Therain drenched
us quickly, so we had no reason to hurry on that account, but the little boy
(Rudolph) who was with me was quite afraid. There I sat, sopping wet, the
water pouring down, beset by thunder and lightning in the middle of Grib’s
Forest, and beside me was a boy who trembled at the lightning. Walking
at a stiff pace we finally reached a house in which we took refuge.”
Here the travel diary has ceased to be a travel diary and has become a
sketchpad on which Kierkegaard is experimenting in the art of the short
story, and in doing so he yields his place to a fictional figure who gives an
“account of my sorrowful fate” to a drunken peasant with a cubic-capacity
nose. The little “den of thieves” bears the stamp of Steen Steensen Blicher,
whoseCollected Short StoriesKierkegaard purchased when the various vol-
umes began to appear in 1833. Despite Professor Madvig’s characterization
of Blicher as a “very handsome talent, though limited to a certain sphere,”
Kierkegaard continued to read him passionately, and here he attempted to
copy Blicher’s literary genre paintings and sketches of the common people.
The scene with the peasants reads as if it were lifted fromThe Hosier, which
in any case would have attracted Kierkegaard simply by its title.
A good many other journal entries also have a transparently literary char-
acter. This is particularly so for the most famous of them all, which Kierke-
gaard titled “Gilleleje, August 1, 1835,” and which reads as follows: “The
way in which I have attempted to depict things in the preceding pages is