14 ‘This is How it is with Me’

The weeks between 9 August, the anniversary of his father’s death, and 10 September, the day of his engagement to Regine, were always the most difficult time of the year. Most Danes ‘longed and prayed for summer’, but Kierkegaard did not like the relentless Scandinavian summer days, when the sun was too strong for him. He stayed indoors in his darkened rooms, and as he waited for autumn – his favourite season, bittersweet with longing and recollection – he remembered how an old man’s ‘noble wisdom’ and a young girl’s ‘loveable foolishness’ had educated him to become an author. Between them, his father and Regine had shaped his soul into ‘a unity of age and youth’, of severity and mildness. Now he knew, though, that this combination of extremes was already deep within him, always his ‘possibility’.

In 1850 he spent this period reading through Practice in Christianity one last time before sending it to the printer: it would be published in late September under his new pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, and ‘S. Kierkegaard’ would be named on the title page as its editor. Day after day autumn’s gentle, melancholy dusk descended on Copenhagen’s streets like an incoming tide, each wave of darkness a little more forgiving than the last. With his heart in his mouth, Kierkegaard sent Bishop Mynster a copy of his new book, printed with a personal dedication. Practice in Christianity deployed bolder, more aggressive tactics than The Sickness unto Death, making significant moves against Mynster as well as against Martensen. The question of this book was how to follow Christ, and it explored the difference between rigorous and lenient Christianity, between asceticism and worldliness, between imitating Jesus in his suffering and admiring him from a safe distance. Mynster, well known as the author of Observations on Christian Teachings, was implicitly but unmistakably cast in the role of a lenient, worldly ‘observer’ of Christ, and his familiar style of preaching was parodied and denounced as un-Christian: ‘The Christian sermon today has become mainly “observations”: Let us in this hour consider; I invite my listeners to observations on; the subject for our consideration is, etc. But “to observe” can mean in one sense to come very close to something; in another sense, it signifies keeping very distant, infinitely distant – that is, personally … Christian truth cannot really be the object of “observations”.’

For pages and pages Anti-Climacus went on like this, evidently with the approval of his editor, S. Kierkegaard. Mynster was like an artist – perhaps like Thorvaldsen – who chiselled or painted the figure of Christ, then stepped back to survey his work. This aestheticization of Christianity was an evasion, a lie, self-indulgence, sheer hypoc- risy. ‘I do not comprehend this calmness of the artist,’ Anti-Climacus declared, ‘this artistic indifference that is indeed like a callousness toward the religious impression of the religious … And yet the artist admired himself, and everybody admired the artist. The point of view of the religious is completely dislocated; the beholder looked at the picture in the role of an art expert: whether it is a success, whether it is a masterpiece, whether the play of colours is right, and the shadows, whether blood looks like that, whether the suffering expression is artistically true – but the invitation to imitation he did not find. The artist was admired, and what was actual suffering, the artist has somehow turned into money and admiration.’ The person who merely admires Christ from a distance, he argued, ‘will make no sacrifices, renounce nothing, give up nothing earthly, will not transform his life, will not be what is admired, will not let his life express it … Only the imitator is the true Christian.’

Kierkegaard himself was caught between these two versions of Christianity, unable to live with either of them. ‘Ah, a person can certainly proclaim leniency. One spares oneself, one is loved by people, receives their gratitude, their devotion; one can look out with self-satisfaction, or at any rate with tranquillity, upon the many happy and smiling people who find repose in what one proclaims,’ he wrote in his journal just before Practice in Christianity was published. But such a teacher was not imitating Jesus, who ‘could not reassure a single one of [his disciples] with the joy of a secure life’. Proclaiming a properly rigorous Christian teaching, on the other hand, was ‘sheer spiritual trial: whether you can endure it yourself; whether you ought not to spare yourself; whether it might not end with corrupting instead of benefiting, tearing down instead of building up. Sheer unrest and worry and fear and trembling for the sake of others about whether you are not demanding too much of them. And then this dismal sight, to see their anger and bitterness – to have no one’s gratitude, but to have everyone eager to get away from you.’

One day in October, Kierkegaard heard from Just Paulli, a priest and theologian who was married to Mynster’s eldest daughter, that the Bishop was ‘very angry’ about Practice in Christianity. ‘These were his words, the minute he came into the living room he said: “The book has provoked me intensely; it makes profane sport of the holy.” And when Paulli most obligingly asked him if he might say so to me, since he would presumably speak to me, Mynster answered, “Yes and he will no doubt come to see me sometime and I will tell him myself.”’ The following morning Kierkegaard visited Mynster, full of anxiety. ‘Pastor Paulli told me yesterday that you intend as soon as you see me to reprimand me for my latest book. I would ask you to regard it as a fresh expression of the respect I have always shown to you that I come to see you immediately upon hearing of this,’ he began. The Bishop was as diplomatic and affable as ever. ‘He answered: “No, indeed I have no right to give a reprimand. As I have said to you before, I have nothing at all against each bird singing its own song.” Then he added: “Indeed people can say what they like about me.” He said this mildly and with a smile but the added remark made me fear a little sarcasm nonetheless, and I immediately sought to rescue the situation. I answered that this was not my intention, and I would beg him to say if I had in any way distressed him by publishing such a book. Then he replied: “Well, it’s true I do not believe it will do any good.”’

Mynster’s disapproval seemed to channel the judgement of his father from beyond the grave, but he was even more afraid of God’s judgement, now and in eternity. Although Jesus offered his followers grace and love, promised to ease their burdens and give them rest, they were first ‘rent asunder in terror and fear’ – and Kierkegaard felt the ripples of this terror in his own soul. Sometimes Jesus appeared to him a fearsome figure: ‘You became a sword through the heart of your mother, a scandal to your disciples,’ he wrote. ‘Oh, why did you not lower the price? When I have doubts about myself, and it seems to me as if I must first and foremost cut the price for my own sake, and when it seems to me as if I owe it to others to cut the price – now it can cause me anxiety to think of you, as if you would become angry, you, who never cut the price yet nonetheless were love.’ He felt ‘infinitely far’ from the Christian ideal that he now believed to be the only true one, and which he finally dared to write of directly – though still in the voice of a pseudonym. He, Kierkegaard, shuddered at the thought of dying to the world, dying to ordinary human life: ‘For my part, I love being a human being; I do not have the courage entirely to be spirit in that way. I still so much love to see the purely human delight that others take in life – something for which I have a better than ordinary eye, because I have a poet’s eye for it.’

More and more, though, he thought that the situation in Christendom called for a renewed emphasis on the ideal of dying to the world that Arndt and Tersteegen – who gave away his inheritance and lived as a hermit on bread, milk and water – and their medieval forebears impressed upon him. Modern Christianity leaned too far towards worldliness, and Kierkegaard countered this by leaning further in the opposite direction. He continued to study Luther’s sermons, and in his journal he analysed Luther’s religious innovations and their effects on later generations of Christians.

As a young man, Luther was tormented by the question of his salvation; in an effort to earn God’s grace, he entered a strict Augustinian monastic order, pushed his ascetic practices to extremes, spent his days in penance, slept in the snow. Then this same religious passion – and not its abating – drove him out into the world. Only after posting his ninety-five theses and refusing to recant at the Diet of Worms did Luther finally leave his monastery and – in defiance of his Church, in defiance of public opinion – marry a former nun, Katherine von Bora, who bore him six children. Yet Luther’s reforms coupled worldliness and religion in ways that suited the secular mentality already creeping into Europe: ‘Luther certainly possessed the inner truth to dare to venture doing opposite things and yet be quite free in doing them: married and yet as if not married, within worldliness and yet as if alien to it despite partaking of everything, etc. Ah, but it was dangerous simply to teach this in a straightforward manner, because it made things altogether too easy for the whole of worldliness.’

During the autumn and winter of 1850 these reflections brought Kierkegaard back to the question of marriage, which ten years earlier had been his life’s turning point, and occupied his longest books. Now that the principle of religious freedom was enshrined in the Danish constitution, marriage was a political question as well as a personal one. Several influential voices in Copenhagen were calling for the introduction of civil marriage, some citing Luther’s own example in support of their cause. ‘Shall we continue to force all members of the People’s Church to undergo church wedding ceremonies, of which the Gospels know nothing, and which Martin Luther openly disdained when he himself entered into a civil marriage that – as a marriage between a monk and a nun – broke with all the notions of churchly marriage in his day?’ asked Grundtvig. In the strange new world of post-1848 Denmark, ardent Christians who sought to protect their Church from the influence of the state, and freethinkers campaigning to liberate civic life from ecclesial control, made different arguments for the same reform.

The defence of the traditional position was led, of course, by Bishop Mynster, who argued that Luther’s marriage to Katherine von Bora was a Christian union, not merely a civil contract. Kierkegaard, however, saw this marriage as significant not because it belonged inside or outside the Church, but because it was a subversive, scandalous religious act that echoed the ‘divine scandal’ of original Christianity. He argued that Luther could just as well have married a kitchen maid, or a doorpost (despite the six children) – for his sole aim was ‘defying Satan, the pope, the whole world’. This marriage had nothing in common with the conventional family life enjoyed by nineteenth-century Danish clergy. When Kierkegaard compared Bishop Mynster to Luther, he saw ‘a clever and prudent man, who shrinks from nothing, nothing, as much as he shrinks from scandal’. He did not go quite so far as to argue that it was now more Lutheran to abstain from marriage – especially in a way that scandalized public opinion, like his own decision not to marry.

In January 1851 Kierkegaard published an article in The Fatherland in response to Andreas Rudelbach, a theologian and Church historian who argued on Lutheran grounds for civil marriage. ‘Surely the deepest and highest interest of the Church in our day is to become emancipated particularly from what is rightly called habitual and state Christianity,’ Rudelbach urged in his book On Civil Marriage, before adding that ‘this is the same point that one of our outstanding contemporary writers, Søren Kierkegaard, has sought to inculcate, to impress, and, as Luther says, to drive home to all those who will listen’. In his Fatherland article Kierkegaard protested that he had never, in all his authorship, called for reform: ‘Simply because I have from the beginning understood Christianity to be inwardness and my task to be the inward deepening of Christianity, I have scrupulously seen to it that not a passage, not a sentence, not a line, not a word, not a letter has slipped in suggesting a proposal for external change.’ Individual Christians might feel called by conscience to agitate for social, political or ecclesial reform, but ‘essentially Christianity is inwardness’. Kierkegaard felt that he and Dr Rudelbach – whom he knew personally, and respected as a scholar – would never understand one another religiously: ‘For him it has long since been settled that he is a Christian. And now he busies himself with the history and the external forms of the Church. He has never felt the unrest of the question, every single day, about whether he is in fact a Christian. Never, no, because the person who has felt it one time, one day, one hour will not let it go for his whole life, or it will never let go of him.’

Early in May he paid another visit to Bishop Mynster. Again he was agitated when he entered the episcopal residence, but this time he trembled more from anger than from fear. Mynster’s recent book on religious freedom and civil marriage mentioned Kierkegaard alongside Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, whose journalism – as P. L. Møller had predicted back in 1847 – the Bishop now cited approvingly. Goldschmidt, Mynster remarked, was ‘one of our most talented authors’; Kierkegaard was ‘the gifted author’ who rightly opposed ‘the disastrous confusion of politics and Christianity’. This juxtaposition was enough to enrage Kierkegaard; for several weeks before his visit, he had rehearsed and elaborated his fury by drafting numerous polemical responses to Mynster.

When he saw the Bishop he was too proud to tell him that he was hurt by his endorsement of Goldschmidt, still deeply hurt that five years ago Mynster had not defended him against The Corsair ’s attack. Instead he harangued Mynster with concern for his reputation: ‘I repeated again and again that what concerned me was whether his reputation might not have suffered too much by presenting Goldschmidt in this way. I pointed out to him that he ought to have required a retraction [of the Corsair writings] on Goldschmidt’s part … that it was impossible for me to defend this conduct of his.’ Mynster was evasive: in order to demand a retraction, he said, he would have to read through all Goldschmidt’s writings – ‘So, can M. really be ignorant of the fact that there existed a journal called The Corsair, that G. had edited it for six years, and can M. be supposed not to understand that this was what I was referring to!’ Again Kierkegaard repeated his objections: ‘‘‘I want to have it said, and quite clearly, I want my conscience to be clear, it must be noted that I have said that I cannot approve of it” (and in saying this I leaned across the table and wrote it in my hand, as it were) … Every time I said this, I saw to it that he replied and indicated that he had heard it.’

Towards the end of the summer he was back on Mynster’s doorstep, a few days after sending him two new publications: On My Work as an Author – a short version of The Point of View for My Work as an Author – and Two Discourses at Friday Communion. (He also sent copies to J. L. Heiberg: the discourses for him, and the essay on his authorship for his wife Luise.) He was anxious to hear Mynster’s opinion of these little books, but the Bishop had only looked at one of them. Kierkegaard returned to the subject of Goldschmidt, and then ‘there were a few words about the pastoral seminary, but he tried to evade this and was of the opinion that the best thing would be for me to start founding a pastoral seminary myself.’ The Bishop dismissed him gracefully with a ‘Farewell, dear friend.’

Between these troubling visits to Mynster, Kierkegaard preached a Sunday sermon on ‘The Unchangingness of God’ at the Citadel Church inside the garrison by the entrance to Copenhagen’s harbour. That Sunday morning he prayed to God ‘that something new might be born in me’ – for he felt that this church service was his ‘confirmation’. The sermon was on his favourite biblical passage, from the Letter of James: ‘Every good and perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of Lights, in whom there is no change or shadow of variation.’ He had planned his sermon ‘with the thought of “her’’’: unable to talk to Regine directly, he felt that it might please her to hear him preach, and unusually he allowed his name to be listed as preacher when the service was announced. ‘Beforehand I suffered greatly from every sort of strain, as is always the case when I have to use my physical person.’

Though not yet forty years old, Kierkegaard stood before his listeners a frail figure: more stooped and slender than ever, his hair thin, his face tired. He addressed the congregation in such a weak voice that they had to strain to hear him, but his words were full of feeling. He spoke at length of the ‘sheer fear and trembling’ which the thought of God’s changelessness causes ‘for us light-minded and unstable human beings’.

And now the eternal Changeless One – and this human heart! Ah, this human heart, what do you not hide in your secret inclosures, unknown to others – that would not be the worst – but at times almost unknown to the person himself! It is almost, as soon as a person is a few years old, it is almost like a grave, this human heart! There lie buried, buried in forgetfulness, the promises, the intentions, the resolutions, complete plans and fragments of plans, and God knows what – yes, that is how we human beings talk, for we seldom think about what we say; we say: There lies God knows what. And we say this half light-mindedly, half in weariness of life – and then it is so frightfully true that God knows what. He knows down to the least detail what you have forgotten, knows what has changed in your remembering; he knows it unchanged … an Omniscient One, and an eternally changeless memory from which you cannot escape, least of all in eternity – frightful!

He spoke like this for fifteen minutes – ‘It is almost as though it were far, far beyond human powers to have to be involved with a changelessness such as that; indeed, it seems as if this thought must plunge a person into anxiety and unrest to the point of despair.’ Then he paused; and yet, he said, ‘there is also reassurance and blessedness in this thought. It is really so that when you, weary from all this human, all this temporal and earthly changefulness and alteration, weary of your own instability, could wish for a place where you could rest your weary head, your weary thoughts, your weary mind, in order to rest, to have a good rest – ah, in God’s changelessness there is rest!’

The whole church was silent, full of faces turned towards him, and it was as though their hearts were turned too. ‘Be like the child,’ he told them, ‘who really profoundly senses that it is in the position of being face-to-face with a will where only one thing helps, to obey. That the thought of God’s changelessness is blessed, indeed, who doubts that; just see to it that you become like that so that you can blessedly rest in this changelessness! Ah, such a person speaks as someone who has a happy home: My home is eternally safeguarded; I rest in God’s changelessness. No one but you yourself can disturb this rest.’ And there will be, paradoxically, freedom in this submission: ‘If you could become completely obedient in unchanged obedience, you would at every moment freely rest in God with the same necessity as a heavy body sinks to the earth, or with the same necessity as something that is light rises toward heaven.’ Of course, such constancy is so difficult, probably impossible, for human beings to accomplish, even though they long for God as the thirsty man in the desert longs for a cool spring. And yet, Kierkegaard concluded, another paradox of God’s changeless omnipresence is that it is not inert, but continually, actively seeks those who long for him:

No one, either in life or in death, travels so far away that you, O God, are not to be found, that you are not there; you are indeed, everywhere – this is not the way springs are on this earth, springs are only in special places. Moreover – what overwhelming security! – you do not remain on the spot like a spring; you travel along. No one strays so far away that he cannot find his way back to you, you who are not only like a spring that lets itself be found – what a poor description of your being! – you who are like a spring that even searches for the thirsting, the straying, something unheard of about any spring. Thus you are unchanged and everywhere to be found. And whenever a person comes to you, at whatever age, at whatever time of day, in whatever condition – if he comes honestly, he will always find (like the spring’s unchanged coolness) your love just as warm, you Changeless One! Amen.

That Sunday sermon was a turning point in Kierkegaard’s authorship. ‘When I went home,’ he later wrote in his journal, ‘I felt well, animated … On Monday I was so weak and exhausted that it was frightful … I became weaker and weaker … Then I became really sick. The lamentable, tormenting pain that constitutes the limit of my person began to rear up in fearsome fashion, something that had not happened to me in a long, long time. For a moment, I understood this as a punishment for having failed to act quickly enough.’ Nevertheless, he felt that his prayers were answered: he had received his ‘confirmation’. ‘Something new has been born within me,’ he wrote, ‘for I understand my task as an author differently; it is now dedicated in a quite different way to straightforwardly advancing religion. And I have also been confirmed in this: this is how it is with me.’

That week he received letters from two unknown women who, having read his books, had gone to the Citadel Church to hear him preach. One letter was from a young woman who ventured to address him because, she explained, ‘I have been told that you are gracious and kind to the young and lenient to those who have gone astray.’ Kierkegaard’s writing, she continued, had helped her to a spiritual awakening:

In the frivolous, or perhaps, as you remark somewhere, the melancholy spirit of the times, I long ignored God and my relation to him, but this was an unhappy state of affairs, as I soon realized. I sought comfort in prayer, but I felt that God would not hear me; I went to church, but my scattered thoughts would not follow those of the preacher; I tried, in the philosophy books that I could understand, to find rest for my lost soul, and I found some. I had read Either/Or with profound admiration, and I tried to obtain some of your works by borrowing them since I could not afford to buy them. I received the Christian Discourses of 1848, which were not what I had wanted, but I read them – and how can I ever thank you enough? In them I found the source of life that has not failed me since. When I was troubled, I sought refuge there and found comfort; when need or chance brought me to church and I walked away downcast, conscious of one more sin for having been in the House of the Lord without reverence or humility, then I would read your discourses and find comfort. In everything that happened to me, in sorrow or in joy, this small portion of the riches you have bequeathed to the world became the constant source from which I drew comfort and sustenance.

Last Sunday you were listed as the preacher in the Citadel. What could I do but walk out there, and I was not disappointed. This was not one of those sermons I have heard so often and forgotten before it was concluded. No, from the rich, warm heart the speech poured forth, terrifying, yet upbuilding and soothing at the same time; it penetrated the heart so as never to be forgotten.

‘If only you would preach more often, but please, always with your name posted,’ begged the author of the other letter, who also spoke of her heart as she reflected on Kierkegaard’s sermon. ‘From the very outset when you began to publish your pseudonymous works,’ she wrote:

I have pricked up my ears and listened lest I should miss any sound, even the faintest, of these magnificent harmonies, for everything resounded in my heart. This was what needed to be said – here I found answers to all my questions; nothing was omitted of that which interested me most profoundly … I doubt that there is a single string in the human heart that you do not know how to pluck, any recess that you have not penetrated. I thought I knew what it meant to laugh, before 1843 as well, but no, it was not until I read Either/Or that I had any idea what it meant to laugh from the depths of my heart; and it is with my heart that I have come to an overall understanding of everything you have said. Many a time I have been almost embarrassed to hear clever people say that they did not understand S. Kierkegaard, for I always thought that I understood him. I am never lonely, even when I am by myself for long periods of time, provided only that I have the company of these books, for they are, of all books, those that most closely resemble the company of a living person. But please do not think that these books have only taught me to laugh; oh no, please believe that again and again I have been roused by them to see myself more clearly and to understand my duty, to feel myself ever more closely tied to ‘the truth, the way, the life’; I have become infinitely liberated by musing on them – but – also infinitely tempted to give up all that gregarious society in which one lives, which is so far from knowing what it really means to live that, if anything, it mostly resembles a parody on it. Yet it is not by fleeing that one shows one’s strength.

Since Sunday this woman had been talking about Kierkegaard’s sermon to everyone she met; he had expressed eternal truths, yet ‘nobody has proclaimed those truths to me before as you did so in such a way that I could hear them, that is, with the ears of my soul.’ Now, although she knew he would not permit it, she needed to thank him personally. ‘Were I a man and therefore someone who could think and write coherently,’ she added, ‘surely it would then be a different matter, for I could publish something about you and would have no need to trouble you privately.’

In the early autumn of 1851 Emil Boesen visited Copenhagen for a few days. Kierkegaard gave his old friend a copy of For Self-Examination: Recommended to the Present Age, which he had just published. Here he imagined Luther returning to test the faith of nineteenth-century Danish Lutherans: ‘You know that faith is a restless thing,’ says Luther. ‘To what end has faith, which you say you have, made you restless, where have you witnessed for the truth, where against untruth, what sacrifices have you made, what persecutions have you suffered for your Christianity, and at home in your domestic life where have your self-denial and renunciation been noticeable?’ This book contained three discourses, on the New Testament texts assigned by the Church to the fifth Sunday after Easter, to Ascension Day, and to Pentecost. It offered a rigorous interpretation of Christianity as a hard, narrow path that followed Jesus into suffering. Jesus was born in poverty and wretchedness, and he knew his fate from the very beginning – ‘And this way, which is Christ, this narrow way, as it goes on, becomes narrower and narrower to the end, to death.’ The Holy Spirit would, Jesus promised, bring gentle comfort, new life, faith, love – but these blessings came only to those who had first died to themselves, died to the world.

By then Kierkegaard was living, for the first time in his life, outside the city walls, on the second floor of a newly built villa in Østerbro. It was a tranquil place at the end of Sortedam Lake, surrounded by private gardens. When Emil called on him there they talked late into the night, and Kierkegaard asked him to return the next evening, and again the next. He had few opportunities, these days, to ‘talk himself out’ as he used to.

When he lived at his previous address on Nørregade, he had often seen Regine during his daily walks – sometimes ‘every blessed day’ for weeks at a time. Soon after he moved out to Østerbro he began to encounter Regine at around ten o’clock each morning on his way back home from town. On 1 January 1852 he resolved to change his route, anxious to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and now took the lakeside path. One morning he saw Regine there, and changed his route again. But then he began to meet her at eight o’clock in the morning by Østerport, the city’s eastern gate, or a little later on the ramparts, as he walked to town. ‘Perhaps it was coincidence, perhaps. I could not understand what she was doing on that route at that hour,’ he wrote in his journal. He also continued to see her in church on Sundays.

‘Then came my birthday. As a rule, I am always away on my birthday, but I was not feeling quite well. So I stayed at home; as usual, I walked into town to talk with the doctor because I had considered celebrating my birthday with something new, something I had never tasted before, castor oil. Right outside my door, on the pavement in front of the avenue, she meets me. As so often happens of late, I cannot keep from smiling when I see her – ah, how much she has come to mean to me! – she smiled in return and nodded. I took a step past her, then raised my hat and walked on.’ After years of the most indirect communication, this meeting of glances, smiles and silent greetings lightened Kierkegaard’s heart. Perhaps reconciliation and friendship were not impossible after all. It was as if a window had suddenly opened to let the spring breeze flow into an airless room, bringing with it a blessing on his birthday.

The following Sunday, Regine was there in church, sitting near the place where he always stood. Pastor Paulli, Bishop Mynster’s son- in-law, gave the sermon – and like Kierkegaard’s own life-changing sermon at the Citadel Church the year before, the text was his favourite passage from the Letter of James, ‘Every good and perfect gift is from above.’ ‘She turns her head to the side and looks at me, very fervently. I look straight ahead, at nothing in particular.’ Then Paulli began his sermon in a manner so out of character that Kierkegaard found it ‘inexplicable’: these sacred words about God’s good gifts were, said the pastor, ‘implanted in our hearts – yes, my listener, if these words should be torn from your heart, would not life have lost all its value for you?’

Regine must have felt overwhelmed by this, he reflected afterwards. ‘I have never exchanged a word with her, have gone my way, not hers – but here it was as though a higher power said to her what I have been unable to say.’ As for his own feeling – ‘It was as if I were standing on glowing coals.’