"Selections From the Writings of Kierkegaard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kierkegaard Soren)

be bound by the ordinary ties of human affection? But the natural
desire to be as happy as others and to live man's common lot, for a
moment hushed all anxious scruples. And the love of the brilliant
and promising young man with the deep, sad eyes and the flashing
wit was ardently returned by her.

Difficulties arose very soon. It was not so much the extreme youth
and immaturity of the girl she was barely sixteen as against his
tremendous mental development, or even her "total lack of
religious pre-suppositions"; for that might not itself have precluded
a happy union. Vastly more ominous was his own unconquerable
and overwhelming melancholy. She could not break it. And
struggle as he might, he could not banish it. And, he reasoned,
even if he were successful in concealing it from her, the very
concealment were a deceit. Neither would he burden her with his
melancholy by revealing it to her. Besides, some mysterious
ailment which, with Paul, he terms the "thorn in his flesh,"
tormented him. The fact that he consulted a physician makes it
likely that it was bodily, and perhaps sexual. On the other hand,
the manner of Kierkegaard's multitudinous references to woman
removes the suspicion of any abnormality. The impression remains
that at the bottom of his trouble there lay his melancholy,
aggravated admittedly by an "insane education," and coupled with
an exaggerated sense of a misspent youth. That nothing else
prevented the union is clear from his own repeated later remarks
that, with more faith, he would have married her.

Though to the end of his life he never ceased to love her, he feels
that they must part. But she clings to him with a rather maudlin
devotion, which, to be sure, only increased his determination. He
finally hit on the desperate device of pretending frivolous
indifference to her affections, and acted this sad comedy with all
the dialectic subtleness of his genius, until she eventually released
him. Then, after braving for a while the philistine indignation of
public opinion and the disapproval of his friends, in order to
confirm her in her bad opinion of him, he fled to Berlin with
shattered nerves and a bleeding heart.

He had deprived himself of what was dearest to him in life. For all
that, he knew that the foundations of his character remained
unshaken. The voluntary renunciation of a worldly happiness
which was his for the taking intensifies his idea of being one of'
the "few in each generation selected to be a sacrifice." Thereafter,
"his thought is all to him," and all his gifts are devoted to the
service of God.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, more than at any
other time, Denmark was an intellectual dependency of Germany.
It was but natural that Kierkegaard, in search for the ultimate
verities, should resort to Berlin where Schelling was just then