5 Learning to be Human: Lesson One

The house is still, and he stands by the tall window looking out at Nytorv, smoke rising from his pipe. On this clear spring night the wide square is silvery and shadowy in the moonlight. Over to the left, above the rooftops, he can make out the imposing tower of the Church of Our Lady, darker than the sky. It is the end of March in 1848, and nearly five years have passed since he returned home from Berlin, a newly celebrated author, hopeful and ambitious, carrying Repetition and half of Fear and Trembling in his bag. And nearly thirty-five years have passed since he was born in this house: his parents were both peasants by birth, yet his father made enough money to acquire one of the most enviable addresses in Copenhagen. As a small boy Kierkegaard sometimes stood just here, unseen, watching the passers-by below. Then, as now, he surveyed the world from his privileged vantage point, his pride secretly laced with shame for his dubious origins.

He spent the first twenty-four years of his life in this large, elegant house on Nytorv, adjoining the city hall and courthouse. These wide rooms were home before his memories were formed, before he knew the names of things, before he began to ask questions – a prehistoric, mythical place that has shaped him in ways it may take a lifetime to fathom.

He returned to live here four years ago, in 1844: in this room he wrote much of what he now calls his ‘authorship’, and the tall rosewood cabinet is piled high with his own books – two copies of each, printed on vellum, ‘one for her, and one for me’. During those four years he often resolved to stop writing and become a pastor in ‘a forgotten remoteness in a rural parsonage’, where he would be left in peace to ‘sorrow over his sins’. Instead he produced one book after another: slim volumes of religious discourses, and short intense works like Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety, then the enormous Stages on Life’s Way and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. And with every book he renewed his struggle to decide whether his authorship should end; Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which came out in 1846, explicitly brought it to a close, and ended with a ‘First and Last Declaration’ acknowledging that he, S. Kierkegaard, had written the works attributed to his various pseudonyms. But his weighty Postscript was quickly followed by Two Ages, a book masquerading as a book review, and the following year by Works of Love, a thick volume of discourses. He still does not know whether the end of his authorship lies behind him or ahead of him; in any case, he is writing furiously.

He has spent much of his father’s fortune on this authorship – not just print runs of hundreds of copies of each book, and the secretarial assistance of Israel Levin, but everything he needs to sustain his life as a writer: servants, fine food, restaurants, coffee shops, cigars, books and bookbinding, hired carriages when he has to drive out of town to clear his head. Last year, 1847, he sold the last of his inherited stocks and royal bonds, losing the income they yielded, so in December he raised more cash by selling his family home. He has remained here as a tenant through the first three months of 1848, while the long dark winter slowly thawed. Meanwhile, his servant Anders, who manages his household affairs, packed his library into wooden trunks, now lined neatly along the walls. His unpublished papers and journals are kept in tin boxes, in case of fire; these are stacked on top of the trunks, for Anders knows he must save them first if the house is burning down.

When Kierkegaard sold the house, he planned to use some of the proceeds to travel for a couple of years: he is sick of Copenhagen, where he is so well known and so little understood. He hoped that going away would finally release him from his exhausting, angst-ridden yet compulsive cycle of rapid production and publication. Then he realized that travelling would probably stimulate his creativity even more, as it did during that fraught, thrilling first visit to Berlin, when his authorship began. So he invested some of the money from the sale of 2 Nytorv in royal bonds, and at the end of January signed a lease on an expensive first-floor apartment on the corner of Rosenborggade and Tornebuskegade, just inside the northern city wall, ‘which had tempted me in a quite curious way for a long time and that I had often told myself was the only one I could like’. It is a grand, modern residence: six windows of the bel étage face north-east, over Tornebuskegade, and four windows look south-east over Rosenborggade. He will move there in April, now just a few days away. He longs to leave the city and retreat to a quiet place – yet he believes it is his ‘calling’ to remain in the world, in the place God has ‘assigned’ to him: here in his home town, exposed to the public eye.

As Kierkegaard stands by the first-floor window of 2 Nytorv, contemplating his future and circling again and again to his past, revolutionary tides are swelling and surging through Christendom. In February The Communist Manifesto was published in London, and quickly distributed to other European cities; in Paris another king has been overthrown; waves of protest are now breaking across Denmark. Here in Copenhagen, crowds have gathered in theatres to hear Orla Lehmann and Meïr Aron Goldschmidt call for universal male suffrage, a free constitution, even a Danish republic. Nationalist feeling runs high, flowing through the well-worn channels of hostility to foreign neighbours, yet also taking new and unpredictable forms: as the monarchy’s absolute rule is challenged, conservatives, liberals and peasants are jostling for power.

In January King Christian VIII died, afraid of communism and anxious about what the new year would bring. Kierkegaard knows this because the old King, who admired his writing, invited him to Amalienborg Palace three times last year, and on each occasion they talked mostly about politics. During his last visit he tried to reassure the King that this ‘class conflict’ was like a dispute between neighbouring tenants, which need not trouble their landlord, and ‘the whole movement would not touch kings at all’. He added that it was ‘miserable to be a genius in a market town’ – perhaps King Christian was fortunate to have only an uprising on his hands.

Yet the late King’s fears have been confirmed: a few days ago, on the morning of 21 March 1848, thousands gathered outside the city hall on Nytorv, beneath Kierkegaard’s window, shouting for a change of regime. The crowds were then led by L. N. Hvidt, chairman of the city government, to Christiansborg Castle to petition the dissolute new king, Frederik VII, Christian VIII’s eldest son. The people’s address to the Crown, written by Orla Lehmann, demanded a free constitution; King Frederik had to agree to dismiss his ministers, and a temporary ‘March Ministry’ was hastily formed. Now, as the trees up on Copenhagen’s grassy ramparts crown the city with pink and white blossom, the long-standing conflict between Danes and Germans over the southern border duchies of Holsten and Slesvig is erupting into war – for, Kierkegaard observes, ‘the new ministry needs a war in order to stay in power, it needs all possible agitation of nationalistic sentiments’.

‘Out there everything is agitated; the nationality issue occupies everyone; they’re all talking about sacrificing life and blood, are perhaps also willing to do it, but are shored up by the omnipotence of public opinion,’ he wrote in his journal this week, as the fighting broke out in south Jutland. ‘And so I sit in a quiet room (no doubt I will soon be in bad repute for indifference to the nation’s cause) – I know only one risk, the risk of religiousness.’

But no one seems to care about this, or understands it. ‘Well, such is my life. Always misunderstanding. At the point where I suffer, I am misunderstood – and I am hated.’ He has a trail of difficult years behind him, which are not so much receding into the past as accumulating upon his present. Under their weight, he is being drawn into intensified reflection on his own unhappiness. The devastating events of 1846 – the months of public humiliation and ridicule he suffered – have decisively changed his relationship to his city and his view of the world. At times he puts himself under such ‘enormous strain’, feels so physically weak, that he believes he is dying. Although his authorship is a burden, he finds relief only in writing: here at home, especially in the quiet night hours, the words run freely from his pen, fluid thoughts dance with joy across the open page, not yet printed and paper-bound, not yet revealed to the public’s innumerable, unforeseeable eyes. Often he returns home from his daily walk and goes straight to his writing desk, still in his hat and coat, new sentences flowing from his hand. And he continues to walk as he writes, pacing back and forth, feeling the rhythm of his prose. There are paper, pens and ink in every room: fine writing paper, cut to quarto size, folded, and sewn into booklets by his bookbinder; modern steel pens, and pencils for crossing out; good-quality black ink. He works late into the night, his windows glowing into the deserted square.

He has spent these last weeks in Nytorv writing a new work, The Sickness unto Death. This is a diagnostic manual for lost souls; it sets out Kierkegaard’s philosophy of human existence more lucidly and directly than any of his previous works. The opening pages declare that human beings are not just bodies and minds, but spiritual beings, related to a higher power. Yet our spiritual lives are not given to us, ready-formed if not full-grown, as our bodies are: we all face the task of becoming ourselves. This means living each moment in relation to God, constantly turning and returning to the eternal source of our being. ‘There is so much talk about wasting a life, but only that person’s life was wasted who went on living so deceived by life’s joys or its sorrows that he never became decisively and eternally conscious as spirit, as a self – or, what amounts to the same thing, never became aware in the deepest sense that there is a God and that he, he himself, exists before this God – an infinite benefaction that is never to be gained except through despair.’

Yes: despair is a benefaction, a blessing, for it is the sign of a human being’s connection to God, his highest possibility. And yet it is also a curse, for the depth of the human soul is measured by the intensity of its suffering. ‘Is despair an excellence or a defect? Purely dialectically, it is both. If only the abstract idea of despair is considered, without any thought of someone actually in despair, it must be regarded as a surpassing excellence. The possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal, and this superiority distinguishes him in quite another way than does his upright walk, for it indicates infinite uprightness or sublimity: that he is spirit … Consequently, to be able to despair is an infinite advantage, and yet to be in despair is not only the worst misfortune and misery – no, it is ruination.’

And this ambiguous spiritual disease is, Kierkegaard suggests, universal – as far as he can tell; he can only see into his own soul, though the better he knows himself the more he discerns the reflections of his own despair in others:

Just as a physician might say that there very likely is not one single living human being who is completely healthy, so anyone who really knows mankind might say that there is not one single living human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbour an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or something he does not even dare to try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself, so that, just as a physician speaks of carrying an illness in the body, he walks around carrying a sickness of spirit that signals its presence at rare intervals in and through an anxiety he cannot explain.

To be in despair is to lose one’s true self, and those who realize they suffer from this disease long for a cure. Yet most people, he has observed, lose themselves in this world without even realizing it: ‘The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed.’ And indeed, to the world this spiritual carelessness looks like the ease of a happy, successful life: ‘Just by losing himself in this way, such a man has gained an increasing capacity for going along superbly in business and social life, for making a great success in the world. Here there is no delay, no difficulty with his self and its infinite movements; he is as smooth as a rolling stone, as courant as a circulating coin. He is so far from being regarded as a person in despair that he is just what a human being is supposed to be.’

This worldly view is perverse, paradoxical, unwittingly ironic. However vain and conceited people may be – and however much such attitudes are encouraged in the world – by this very worldliness they belittle themselves, refusing their higher spiritual calling. Choosing a metaphor apt to his present circumstances, Kierkegaard asks his reader to:

imagine a house with a basement, ground floor, and first floor planned so that there is supposed to be a social distinction between the occupants according to floor. Now, if what it means to be a human being is compared with such a house, then all too regrettably the sad and ludicrous truth about the majority of people is that in their own house they prefer to live in the basement. Every human being is a psychical-physical synthesis intended to be spirit; this is the building, but he prefers to live in the basement, that is, in sensual categories, merely a body. Moreover, he not only prefers to live in the basement – no, he loves it so much that he is indignant if anyone suggests that he move to the superb upper floor that stands vacant and at his disposal, for he is, after all, living in his own house.

But how does a person become ‘eternally conscious as spirit’ here in the world, where there is so much else to do? How can he express his spiritual nature in all these everyday places – in quiet furnished rooms, on bustling streets, in smoky cafés, at the theatre, in the marketplace, or strolling in the Frederiksberg Gardens? Only by becoming ‘transparent to himself’, and feeling his despair in all the complex, shifting, uncertain forms it has taken within his soul:

Very often the person in despair probably has a dim idea of his own state, although here again the nuances are myriad. To some degree, he is aware of being in despair, feels it the way a person does who walks around with a physical malady but does not want to acknowledge forthrightly the real nature of the illness. At one moment, he is almost sure that he is in despair; the next moment, his indisposition seems to have some other cause, something outside of himself, and if this were altered, he would not be in despair. Or he may try to keep himself in the dark about his state through diversions and in other ways, for example through work and busyness, yet in such a way that he does not entirely realize why he is doing it, that it is to keep himself in the dark. Or he may even realize that he is working in this way in order to sink his soul in darkness and does it with a certain keen discernment and shrewd calculation, with psychological insight; but he is not, in a deeper sense, clearly conscious of what he is doing, how despairingly he is conducting himself.

All this dwelling on despair might strike people as too extreme, and as ‘a sombre and depressing point of view’. Kierkegaard believes it is none of these things: ‘It is not sombre, for, on the contrary, it tries to shed light on what generally is left somewhat obscure; it is not depressing but instead is elevating, inasmuch as it views every human being under the destiny of the highest claim upon him, to be spirit.’ Indeed, like Socrates, he regards these provocations as a service to his country. Instead of fighting the Germans in Slesvig-Holsten, or campaigning for popular reform, or defending the monarchy, he is battling for a spiritual cause: ‘I love my native land – it is true that I have not gone to war – but I believe I have served it in another way, and I believe I am right in thinking Denmark must seek its strength in the spirit and the mind. I am proud of my mother tongue, whose secrets I know, the mother tongue that I treat more lovingly than a flautist his instrument.’

Yet his patriotism goes unappreciated, and his countrymen belittle his immense efforts. ‘That enormous productivity, so intense that it seems to me as if it must move stones, single portions of which not one of my contemporaries is able to compete with, to say nothing of its totality – that literary activity is regarded as a kind of hobby in the manner of fishing and such. And I am regarded as a kind of Englishman, a half-mad eccentric.’

The little boy who once stood here also felt himself to be outside the world he watched from his window. The Kierkegaards were not native to Copenhagen, nor to the bourgeois society their wealth gave them access to. Søren Kierkegaard was different from the other boys, who laughed at the odd, old-fashioned clothes his father made him wear: cropped trousers and a jacket with short tails made from rough dark tweed, and woollen stockings. Now, as he prepares to leave Nytorv for good, he feels more keenly than ever the weight of his childhood home, carried deep within him.

Deeper still is his first home, his mother Anne. Like every human soul, he came into being within the quiet, dark warmth of a woman’s body, and he longs for such a sanctuary when the bright lights of the world become too harsh for him. Yet in all his writings, published and unpublished, Kierkegaard has never mentioned his mother. This is not because he has forgotten her; it is the silence owed to something sacred, which held him long before he knew how to speak.

In May 1813, when Anne Sørensdatter Kierkegaard gave birth to her seventh and last baby, Søren Aabye, she had been married to Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard for sixteen years, and the family were settled in the big house on Nytorv. Anne was nearly forty-five, and her husband was fifty-six: they had already exceeded the life expectancy of Copenhagen citizens, and were old enough to be their new son’s grandparents. Many years earlier, Anne had worked as a servant in the home of Michael Pedersen and his first wife, Kirstine, who died childless in March 1796. Anne was married to Michael in April the following year, and their first daughter, Maren, was born within five months of the wedding. Anne was, in fact, a distant cousin of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard. While her husband had become a wealthy merchant and a respected citizen, she still could not write her own name.

Anne Kierkegaard was cheerful, kindly, and enjoyed looking after her children. ‘She was especially gratified when she could get them peacefully into bed, since she then wielded her sceptre with delight, cosseted them and protected them like a hen her chicks,’ recalled her granddaughter Henriette Lund. ‘Her plump little figure often had only to appear in the doorway of the nursery, and the cries and screams would give way to a hush; the rebellious young boy or girl soon fell sweetly asleep in her soft embrace.’ Of course, such a mother was especially attentive to little Søren Aabye, her youngest child, with his sensitive nature, large bright eyes, crooked spine and thin shoulders. Even when he was fifteen years old, a girl who visited his family thought him ‘a spoiled and naughty boy who hung on his mother’s apron strings’.

When Kierkegaard was born, his sister Maren was fifteen; next were Nicolene, aged thirteen, and Petrea, aged eleven. His eldest brother, Peter Christian, was nearly eight; Søren Michael – known as Michael – was six; and his closest brother Niels had just turned four. Although he entered a world full of children, he now regards his childhood as a paradise already lost in infancy: ‘I never had the joy of being a child, for the frightful torment I suffered disturbed the peace requisite for being a child, for being capable of diligence, etc., in order to please one’s father, because the unrest within me caused me to be always, always outside myself.’

Whenever he traces the roots of this unrest, reaching back to his dimmest memories, he encounters the large, looming figure of his father, whose gloomy presence seemed to fill the house on Nytorv. ‘His build was powerful, his features firm and determined, his whole bearing forceful … To him, obedience was the principle.’ Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard was exacting, thorough in everything he did, and prone to depression. When Kierkegaard recalls him now, it is this dark, uneasy feeling that connects him to his former self, the young boy who looked up at his stern father with fear and trembling: ‘Oh, how frightful it is when for a moment I think of the dark background of my life, right from the earliest days. The anxiety with which my father filled my soul, his own frightful melancholy, the many things in this connection that I cannot even write down.’

Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard grew up on farmland in Sædding, a small parish on the western side of Jutland. His peasant father, Peder Christensen, tended the parish churchyard (kirkegaard) and had taken that as his name, spelled according to the local pronunciation. Michael Pedersen’s early years were hard; he never forgot the day he cursed God while out herding sheep in bitter weather, hungry and cold. When still a boy he went to Copenhagen to work as an apprentice in his uncle’s hosiery shop. At the age of twenty-four he became a licensed hosier in the city, and a few years later he began to import goods, such as sugar and coffee, from the Danish colonies in eastern India (known as Dansk Østindien) and the Caribbean. By the close of the eighteenth century he had made a substantial fortune and retired from mercantile business. In 1809, his family expanding, he bought the house on Nytorv and lived there for the rest of his life in prominent yet restrained prosperity. The financial crash of 1813 – the year Søren Aabye, his seventh child, was born – ruined many Danish families, but Michael Pedersen had invested his wealth in gold-backed bonds, and came through the crisis better off than ever.

This remarkable transformation of a God-forsaken peasant boy into one of the richest men in Copenhagen is not just a story of good fortune. Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard’s career exemplifies the social changes that reconfigured Europe during his lifetime: as a new ethic of self-improvement seeped through the old feudal hierarchies, thousands of people migrated from rural areas to cities. Wealth was no longer just something fathers handed down to their sons; it could be created and grown through innovation. Men like Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard – whose own father had been a serf in bondage to his landlord – could profit from slave labour in the Danish Gold Coast of west Africa, just as the next generation are now exploiting the new railways to increase profits further. In 1792 the Danish king, Christian VII, was the first European monarch to ban the slave trade. This decree took over a decade to come into effect, and slavery itself continued in far-off colonies through the first half of the nineteenth century – long enough to secure the rise of the bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, making money by trade acquired a new dignity. For centuries Christianity encouraged people to regard worldly prosperity with suspicion; now commerce is not just respectable, but virtuous.

As if demonstrating how the new affluence gained through colonial trade supported the growth of both learning and leisure, after he retired from business in his fortieth year Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard occupied himself with intellectual pursuits. That was how Kierkegaard always knew his father: he read a great deal, usually sermons or philosophical books; he had strong opinions, and an appetite for argument. Visiting relatives found it ‘very intriguing to hear the old man debate with the sons, with none of them giving in, and to see the quiet activity of the old mother, and how she would sometimes listen in admiration and sometimes interrupt to calm things down when they became too heated. They talked about heaven and earth and everything in between.’ Kierkegaard’s view of the world as a battlefield was formed in the parlour on Nytorv: here he learned to see men of faith as knights, and love as a dance to ‘martial music’. His first adversaries were his father and his brothers; later they were his fellow students, then his fellow writers. Even Regine became his opponent – one who ‘fought like a lioness’ when he tried to break up with her.

Although he argued with his sons, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard was proud of their intelligence. ‘When I can’t sleep, I lie down and talk with my boys, and there are no better conversations here in Copenhagen,’ he used to tell Søren’s schoolfriends. Though the retired Jutland hosier could work his way through philosophical systems, he did the family’s daily shopping himself, and could often be seen striding home from the market, carrying a fat goose.

As Kierkegaard grew up he felt his father’s strict discipline and strong character as an oppressive force that he needed to fight against. His own nature was free-spirited and independent – and one way of protecting his freedom was to conceal his inner life. Even among his schoolfriends, he ‘did not reveal his character in the way that young people usually do’. Exuberant as well as melancholic, he learned ‘to cloak this life with an outward existence of joie de vivre and merriment’. This habit of secrecy and disguise is another childhood lesson, learned in 2 Nytorv, which has remained with him into his fourth decade. It has become integral to his authorship, and to his life as a writer: he has not only published many of his works under the cover of pseudonyms, but made himself conspicuous in the streets and cafés of Copenhagen in order to conceal the long hours spent at his writing desk.

His duplicity is inseparable from the deep attitude of ambivalence that shapes his relationship to the world. He longs for the ‘purity of heart’ that Jesus preached to his followers, yet he finds himself continually divided in two. This, too, he traces back to his father, and the religion he embodied: ‘He made my childhood an unparalleled torture, and made me, in my heart of hearts, offended by Christianity, even if out of respect for it I resolved never to say a word about it to any person and, out of love to my father, to portray Christianity as truly as possible. And yet my father was the most loving father.’ He wanted to please his father, and he wanted to defy him; Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard’s love for his sons was confusing, for if he was well meaning, he was also destructive. This confusion deepened Kierkegaard’s unrest and ambivalence: ‘I acquired such anxiety about Christianity, and yet I felt myself strongly drawn toward it.’ In retrospect, this seems to be not only a paternal legacy, but, stronger still, a destiny – which, he now realizes, prevented him from marrying Regine. ‘It sometimes happens that a child in the cradle becomes engaged to be married to the one who will one day be his wife or her husband; religiously I was already, in early childhood – previously engaged. Ah! I paid dearly for once misunderstanding my life and forgetting – that I was betrothed!’

Perhaps his secretive habits only pushed his father’s austere, frightening relationship to Christianity deeper within him, where it grew more powerful. ‘Already as a small child, I was told as solemnly as possible that “the crowd” spat on Christ, although he was the truth. I’ve kept this hidden deep within my heart and, in order to hide it the better, have even concealed the fact that I’ve hidden it deep, deep within my soul under an external appearance of just the opposite … I constantly come back to this as to my first idea.’

Such is his duplicity, though, that even his impulse to concealment is dogged by a contrary inclination to reveal himself, through writing. In 1842, just before he launched his authorship with Either/Or, he began to write a philosophical satire about a character named Johannes Climacus, a young philosopher who later became one of his pseudonyms. In that unfinished, half-autobiographical work Kierkegaard described an imaginative game Johannes used to play as a boy with his elderly father, ‘a very stern man, to all appearances dry and prosaic’:

But under his ‘rustic cloak’ manner he concealed an ardent imagination which not even his great age could blunt. When on occasions J.C. asked permission to go out, as often as not he was refused; though once in a while the father would suggest by way of compensation that his son should take his hand and go for a walk up and down the room. At first blush this seemed a poor substitute; and yet, just as with that ‘rustic cloak’ manner, there was more behind it than appeared.

The proposal was adopted, and J.C. was given completely free choice as to where they should go. So they walked out of the city gate to a nearby country castle, or away to the beach, or about the streets, or wherever J.C. wished, for everything was in the father’s power. While they walked up and down the room the father would describe everything they saw. They greeted the passers-by; the carriages rattled by them and drowned out the father’s voice; the cake-woman’s wares were more inviting than ever … If the way was unfamiliar to J.C., the boy would add suggestions, while his father’s almighty imagination was able to construct anything, using every childhood fancy as an ingredient in the drama taking place. For J.C. it was as if the world was being created as they conversed; as if his father were God, and he God’s favoured one who was permitted to interpose his poor conceits as merrily as he liked.

After giving up on his book about Johannes Climacus and his quasi-divine father, Kierkegaard contemplated writing a novella called The Mysterious Family, which would reproduce the ‘tragedy’ of his childhood. ‘It would begin in a thoroughly patriarchal-idyllic fashion, so that no one would suspect anything before that word suddenly resounded, providing a terrifying explanation of everything … the terrifying, secret explanation of the religious that was granted to me in a fearful presentiment which my imagination hammered into shape.’

He did not write this book, nor disclose the mystery of his family. His father once told him a secret about his own past: a transgression which Kierkegaard sometimes hints at in his writing, but will never disclose. ‘A guilt must rest upon the entire family,’ he wrote during his student years, when all but one of his siblings were dead; ‘the punishment of God must be upon it: it was supposed to disappear, obliterated by the mighty hand of God, erased like a mistake.’ And with no hope of a happy future, he added, ‘what wonder then that in desperation I seized hold solely to the intellectual side of man, and clung onto that, so that the thought of my remarkable mental capacities was my only comfort, ideas my only joy’. By then his childhood habit of self-concealment, formed partly in defiance of his father’s severe attention, had taken on another, conflicting motive: from loyalty to his father, he could not tell his secrets.

He has continued to carry this conflict within him since Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard’s death in 1838 – ten years ago now. As he struggles with his painful memories, he dutifully remembers his father every day in his prayers. In Works of Love, a collection of discourses on the Christian ideal of neighbourly love published last year, in 1847, he suggested that love for the deceased is the purest kind of love, because it expects nothing in return. Yet for the same reason it is painful to be angry with a dead father; his anger can expect no response, and has only itself to fight with.

At last he turns from the window: even if he cannot sleep, he should try to rest. There will be just a few more nights like this one, looking down at Nytorv, and up across the square to the south side of the church tower. Inside the room, the moonlight touches the steel pen on his high desk, the precious tin boxes, the packing cases full of books, the tall rosewood cabinet containing his works. Kierkegaard believes that ‘learning to love’ is the most important human task, and also the most difficult – and he began this lesson here, with a mother and father who died in this house. He saw death and grief close-up while still a child: when he was six years old, his brother Søren Michael died after an accident in the school playground; three years later, in 1822, his eldest sister Maren died at the age of twenty-four after years of frail health. Love has proved to be inseparable from anxiety and loss. Although he has tried countless times to flee from his anxiety, or deflect it with defensive wit, or crush it between pen and paper, he knows it is more truthful, more fully human, to let himself experience it – for learning to love means ‘learning to be anxious’.

Five years ago, he wrote in Fear and Trembling that everyone has to undertake the task of loving anew: while scientific knowledge accumulates through generations, in love we cannot build on the progress of our forebears. Nevertheless, we first learn to love – whether trustingly or anxiously, steadfastly or inconstantly, warmly or at a distance – from our parents, and we carry their long legacies folded up inside us. When Kierkegaard was a child, his peace-making mother Anne was the antidote to his forbidding, complex father, as the New Testament God of love is said to supersede the older God of law. While his father embodied a Christianity that made him anxious and taught him to fight, his mother embodied the deep rest which he now seeks in God. He learned to love the first woman in his life passionately, tenaciously, in search of solace, longingly yet secure of his own worth, with the arrogance of a clever child. He loved the first man in his life fearfully, reverently, defiantly, jealously, with the eagerness to please of a clever child. Of course he did not understand, back then, that those first forms of loving were a formation, replete with repetition; that those childish ways cut a path he would retrace long after leaving home.