Kierkegaard: A Biography

Some weeks after the talk but before the Kjøbenhavnsposten piece which prompted his own newspaper articles, Kierkegaard commented that there was ‘something rather sad and depressing about wanting to achieve something by talking and seeing that in the end one has achieved nothing and the person in question remains intransigently set in his view’. Both timing and topic could say it was the talk itself that he was referring to. But that had hardly been designed to win people over. That Kierkegaard was thinking of something else emerges in the consolation with which the entry concludes, that it is after all a fine thing that ‘the other person, and similarly every individual, is always a world unto himself, has his holy of holies into which no alien hand can reach’.

The pupil of the School of Civic Virtue had gone ‘his own way, almost self-contained’ and ‘never spoke of his home’ – perhaps because home was then the holy of holies. But now, though he wouldn't leave the family house for another nine months it was no longer home. Inner sanctuary had to be found elsewhere. The journal entries from the period from January to midsummer reveal a growing instability which in the course of the late winter and spring came near to nervous breakdown.

The development can be traced in early journal entries.