Soren Kierkegaard

Martin that a “pretty head can very well sit on a bent body.” Indeed, he
had had the good fortune to have “fallen a little bit in love” with one of
the young ladies .Six months later, however, he was fascinated with a young
lady out in Christianshavn, but she was watched over by an ill and grumpy
aunt, who lay in a shadowy side room, groaning inarticulately and following
Boesen’s every movement with her bleary eyes .One day, however, he put
on his “silk vest” and set out with firm resolve, but his courage failed him
nonetheless, and he once again found himself up in the attic of his father’s
house, all alone with his erotic daydreams.
It was also up in that garret that Boesen worked on various short stories,
all of which caused him difficulty and would not really go where their
author wanted them to .In a letter of June 3, 1837, he confided to Martin
that he was “working on an anonymous short story,” but that it never
seemed ready to be ended .And to judge from the sketch he gave to Martin,
it was the figures Boesen was working with rather than the piece’s literary
qualities which were more striking .Within the framework of a symbolic
tale we see a “hermit,” who sits and ponders in his hut “night and day,
seven days a week” while his two lovely daughters leap from rock to rock,
gathering strawberries .The hermit immediately leads one to think ahead to
Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Victor Eremita, “the victorious solitary,” but
when one learns the names of the two daughters one has to ask oneself
whether Boesen might not have been a supplier of literary raw material to
Kierkegaard’s later corporate enterprise, because “the one was called Anxi-
ety and the other was called Trembling.” Or might it have been just the
reverse— that Kierkegaard had supplied Boesen with the inspiring motifs
upon which Boesen continued to embroider?
No one knows .Nor does anyone know what else the two friends did
together, for we search in vain for evidence of excursions, visits to the
theater, nocturnal high jinks in shady locales, or whatever else, for better
or worse, is a part of being young .There is not even any evidence of a joint
trip to the Royal Theater, concerning which there is plenty of information
in other respects .Søren Aabye was practically a fixture at the theater when-
ever Mozart’sDonGiovanniwas on the playbill; indeed, according to H .P.
Holst, “he never missed a performance ofDon Giovanni.” Søren Aabye
could not, however, top the experienced Don Giovannist with whom he
fell into conversation at the theater in mid-November 1836, who “had
been seeingDon Giovannifor thirty years.” The pronouncement might
sound like an empty boast but it might well have been rather close to the
truth, forDon Giovanniwas performed at the Royal Theater for the first
time on May 5, 1807, precisely six years before Søren Aabye came into the
world, and from 1829 until 1839 it was performed twenty-eight times, with