The first element whence the imaginary figure which I fancied I
recognized again in Lermontof had its rise was doubtless to be found in
the relations between my older friend and myself (in the reversal of
our rôles, and my consequent new feeling of superiority over him). The
essential point, however, was not the comparatively accidental shape in
which I fancied I recognised myself, but that what was at that time
termed _reflection_ had awaked in me, introspection,
self-consciousness, which after all had to awake some day, as all other
impulses awake when their time comes. This introspection was not,
however, by any means a natural or permanent quality in me, but on the
contrary one which made me feel ill at ease and which I soon came to
detest. During these transitional years, as my pondering over myself
grew, I felt more and more unhappy and less and less sure of myself.
The pondering reached its height, as was inevitable, when there arose
the question of choosing a profession and of planning the future rather
than of following a vocation. But as long as this introspection lasted,
I had a torturing feeling that my own eye was watching me, as though I
were a stranger, a feeling of being the spectator of my own actions,
the auditor of my own words, a double personality who must nevertheless
one day become one, should I live long enough. After having, with a
friend, paid a visit to Kaalund, who was prison instructor at
Vridslöselille at the time and showed us young fellows the prison and
the cells, I used to picture my condition to myself as that of a
prisoner enduring the torture of seeing a watchful eye behind the
peep-hole in the door. I had noticed before, in the Malmö prison, how
the prisoners tried to besmear this glass, or scratch on it, with a
sort of fury, so that it was often impossible to see through it. My
natural inclination was to act naïvely, without premeditation, and to
put myself wholly into what I was doing. The cleavage that
introspection implies, therefore, was a horror to me; all bisection,
all dualism, was fundamentally repellent to me; and it was consequently
no mere chance that my first appearance as a writer was made in an
attack on a division and duality in life's philosophy, and that the
very title of my first book was a branding and rejection of a
_Dualism_. So that it was only when my self-contemplation, and with it
the inward cleavage, had at length ceased, that I attained to quietude
of mind.