“The Great Earthquake”
Condolence letters came pouring in. Peter Christian’s mother-in-law Nanna
recalled “the splendid old man” and sadly reflected that she would never
again “receive his friendly, faithful handshake,” while her son Harald wrote
that there were but “few men by whom I felt as captivated upon first ac-
quaintance as by him.” Johan Hahn, an old friend of the family, was the
only one who noted that it might also be difficult for the younger of the
boys. “Poor Søren,” he sighed in a letter to Peter Christian, and continued
movingly, “may not this blow strike him down, shake him out of his torpor,
so that he does not long for the vanity of this world, but gains the desire and
the strength to search after the one thing needful, thereby putting to shame
all those who—perhaps now, especially—doubt his seriousness and his integ-
rity, doubt his efforts to achieve peace and reconciliation with God.”
Meanwhile, Søren Aabye sat in his room and noted his father’s death in
his journal. Under a cross dated August 11, he wrote: “My father died on
Wednesday, the 8th, at 2 o’clock in the morning. I had so deeply wished
that he might live a couple of years longer, and I view his death as the final
sacrifice his love made for me. Because he has not diedfromme, but died
forme, in order that I might still amount to something, if that is possible.
Of everything I have inherited from him, it is his memory, his transfigured
image, that I treasure most (transfigured not by my poetic imagination—
that wouldn’t be necessary—but transfigured by the many individual char-
acteristics I am now learning about) and I will make sure to conceal it
completely from the world. For I well know that at the present time there
is only one person in the world (E. Boesen) with whom I can truly talk
concerning him. He was a ‘trusty friend.’ ”
It would be difficult to imagine the difference between the two brothers
displayed more clearly than in their respective sketches of their father’s
death. Where in his diary Peter Christian adheres to the course of events in
painstakingly concrete fashion, providing a sketch of the hectic final hours,
Søren Aabye’s journal entry is majestic in its rhetoric, lofty, sensitive, practi-
cally a hymn. But this shimmering emotion, with which he makes his fa-
ther’s demise into an expiatory death, a final sacrifice, is shot through with
a strange vagueness. The memory of the father had been transfigured, not
by the son’s poetic fantasies, but by the “many characteristics” of which the
son was now learning. But what were these characteristics? Did the father
go to his grave a mystery, or did the son in fact succeed in wresting his
secret from him at the eleventh hour? The text does not tell us. In the
next journal entry, dated the same day, Søren Aabye reflected on a pair
of opposites: In “paganism a tax was levied upon bachelorhood,” while