Free Kierkegaard by Stephen Backhouse Page B

is going on around him. His role of the arch-observer who participates in sophisticated society at the same time as he winkles out that society’s weaknesses was one Søren recognised but did not relish. His journals reveal a growing distaste at events and of the part he was playing in them. “ Blast it all , I can abstract from everything but not from myself; I cannot even forget myself when I sleep.”
    In the 1830s Søren was using the journals to test out different parts for himself, some of which he was to play for the rest of his life. One such role is that of “the master thief.” These early entries see Søren working on the theme of a rebel outsider who takes on the system and suffers punishment as a result. The journals are not all doom and gloom, even when they are morbid. Like the soldier in the trench or the nurse on the ward, Søren, the “master thief” awaiting his punishment, was adept at gallows humour. “ One who walked along contemplating suicide,” he wrote in 1836, “at that very moment a stone fell down and killed him, and he ended with the words: Praise the Lord!” Or in 1837: “ Situation : A person wants to write a novel in which one of the characters goes insane; during the process of composition he himself gradually goes insane and ends it in the first person.” Søren is alert to the ridiculousness of his own ennui: “ I don’t feel like doing anything . I don’t feel like walking—it is tiring; I don’t feel like lying down, for either I would lie a long time, and I don’t feel like doing that, or I would get up right away, and I don’t feel like that either . . . I do not feel like writing what I have written here, and I do not feel like erasing it.”
    The restless spirit accompanying the apparently carefree gadabout had in fact been awakened in 1835. Father Michael was concerned and flummoxed about his wayward son. That year, in order to get Søren away from the deathly atmosphere at home and the witty time-wasters of his Copenhagen circle, Michael paid for Søren to spend the summer well out of town. In June, Søren travelled to Gilleleje in North Zealand, the area from which the Kierkegaard family hailed. For the twenty-two-year-old urbanite, the time of country living in the fresh air was a revelation. If Michael had been hoping to occasion in Søren a sense of perspective, it is likely he never knew how successful his scheme had been. Outwardly and in public Søren would appear to continue with his dilettante life for years to come. Inwardly, however, the journals from Gilleleje suggest serious work had begun. The entry for August 1, 1835, has become particularly famous. Its theme is about knowing oneself and one’s way in the world and it deserves quoting at length:
What I really need is to get clear about what I am to do. . . . What matters is to find my purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. Of what use would it be to me to discover a so-called objective truth, to work through the philosophical systems so that I could, if asked, make critical judgments about them, could point out the fallacies in each system; of what use would it be to me to be able to develop a theory of the state, getting details from various sources and combining them into a whole, and constructing a world I did not live in but merely held up for others to see; of what use would it be to me to be able to formulate the meaning of Christianity, to be able to explain many specific points—if it had no deeper meaning for me and for my life? . . . [Truth] must come alive in me, and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all. This is what my soul thirsts for as the African deserts thirst for water. This is what is lacking, and this is why I am like a man who has collected furniture, rented an apartment, but as yet has not found the beloved to share