Kierkegaard was a great walker, of course, I tell W. The greatest of modern philosophical walkers! He loved nothing more than to wander through unknown streets, or to let himself be carried along by the crowd. Yes, that's when it was that he was at its happiest, this man who wrote 'the crowd is untruth', when he was at one with city crowd, being carried along, with his bamboo cane or an umbrella and his high-shouldered, crablike gait.
He wasn't a silent man, he wasn't lost to inwardness, not there, on the streets of his city. If he praised Socrates as a 'virtuoso of the casual encounter' – the Greek philosopher speaking 'with equal facility to hide tanners, tailors, Sophists, statesmen and poets, with young and old', so, too was Kierkegaard. Doesn't he tell us, in his journals, that he speaks every day 'with about fifty people of all ages'? Contemporary accounts have him walking arm in arm with politicians and actors, with poets and philosophers – but didn't he, too, speak to herdsmen and bakers, bar-women and fruit-sellers?
At home, he rarely opened his door to anyone. But on the streets … That's where he thought, he wrote to his sister. That's where ideas came to him, and where he left them behind, too. 'I have walked my way to my best ideas, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it'. No thought so burdensome: I'm his burden, of course, W. says. I'm the obstacle to his thinking, but how can W. walk away from me when we're walking together?
And when, as a result of the satire of a Copenhagen newspaper, Kierkegaard became known to his interlocutors? When children followed him, shouting out 'Either/Or, Either/Or'? When he felt himself to have become the object of ridicule, of laughter? He went inside, closing his doors even tighter. His inwardness went unchecked. He became paranoid, raving … Christianity festered inside him and became something else. His Christianity went sour! Was it any coincidence that he had only a short time to live? He was dying, dying of ridicule! Dying of loneliness! Poor Kierkegaard! Poor Soeren!, as they called after him in the street. Poor Soeren!
'And what do they call after you in the street?', W. says. 'What do they shout after you?' Poor Lars!, poor Lars! … But no one seems to notice me, W. is disappointed to find out, as we head towards Fenwicks to buy gin.
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