Soren Kierkegaard

years old.” At that time Peter Christian was thirty-two, pale and sickly after
his typhus, so presumably it was Peter Christian’s turn to die next. But
miraculously he recovered, and on July 3, 1838, when he turned thirty-
three and went to take communion with his father, Søren Aabye noted:
“Ide ́es fixesare like cramps—a foot cramp, for example—the best cure for
them is to step on them.”
Just more than a month later, the morbid theory about untimely death
collided with the demise of the father, and this must have come as an inde-
scribable relief for the two sons. At the same time, of course, the death was
a catastrophic event, especially for the youngest son, who would later speak
of his father’s death as “a frightfully shattering event.” Nonetheless he clung
to remnants of the original theory, namely that not one of the children
would live longer than age thirty-three. So on July 6, 1839, when Peter
Christian turned thirty-four, Søren Aabye was forced to see his “law of
interpretation” invalidated yet again. This, then, was the state of affairs
when Kierkegaard wrote the journal entry on the great earthquake, presum-
ably in September of that year. Three years earlier, at some point in January
1836, he had sketched the paradoxical anatomy of the situation: “Supersti-
tions are strange. One might think that once a person has seen that his
morbid fantasies are not fulfilled, he would abandon further belief in them;
but on the contrary, they grow stronger, just as the desire to gamble in-
creases in a person after he loses in the lottery.”
Typical of the trembling theatrics with which he interpreted his life,
Kierkegaard wrote the following in his journal for Wednesday, May 5,
1847: “How strange that I have turned thirty-four. It is utterly inconceiv-
able to me. I was so sure that I would die before or on this birthday that I
could actually be tempted to suppose that the date of my birth has been
erroneously recorded and that I will still die on my thirty-fourth.” Hans
Brøchner, with whom Kierkegaard must have shared his frightening no-
tions, states plainly that Kierkegaard was so convinced of their validity that
“when he did reach this age, he even checked in the parish records to see
if he really had gone beyond the limit.”
On the birthday itself a letter arrived from Peter Christian. As was his
custom, the younger brother burned it, but Peter Christian must certainly
have touched on the particular importance of the thirty-four years, for two
weeks later Søren Aabye replied to the letter, noting that the birthday in
question had long haunted his thoughts as a miraculous impossibility: “At
the time it happened, it amazed me not a little—indeed, now I can say it
without fear of upsetting you—that you turned thirty-four. Both Father
and I had had the idea that no one in our family would live longer than
thirty-four years. However little I agreed with Father in other respects,