we had important common ground in a few strange ideas, and in such
conversations Father was almost always delighted with me because I could
portray the idea with a lively imagination and pursue its implications with
daring consistency. In fact, a curious thing about Father was that he was
most richly endowed with something we least credited him as possessing—
imagination, albeit a melancholy imagination. Thus, the thirty-fourth year
was supposed to be the limit, and Father was supposed to outlive all of us.
That is not how it has turned out—I am entering into my thirty-fifth year.”
Thus father and son had jointly worked out the notion of the death of
the children before their “thirty-fourth year,” and we are to understand
that it was Søren Aabye who together with the father fostered the idea in
their melancholy way, while Peter Christian had been excluded and was
only now being introduced to the theory. Presumably he had never had
the least inkling of the frightful fate that the eldest and youngest Kierke-
gaards had for years viewed as intended for him. It is worth noting that in
his letter to Peter Christian, Søren Aabye made absolutely no mention of
his father’s curse, which of course was the foundation of the theory about
the thirty-four-year age limit. Butperhapshe made the tacit assumption that
Peter Christian could infer the theory about cursing God, which he had
presumably known about from a relatively early date.
What is more probable, however, but also much more frightful, is that
the father’s cursing of God was not the only explanation of the origin of the
theory! Because not a few circumstances seem to indicate that the cursing of
God was only one component, and that the curse only makes sense when
it is viewed in conjunction with a sin of a quite different—somatic—order.
The great earthquake—and not the cursing of God in itself, that sin of
childhood to which Søren Aabye, despite all his neurotic tendencies, would
not have attributed such far-reaching consequences—was therefore a sud-
den glimpse into this other order.
Not until 1845 did Kierkegaard present a poetic version of this cause-
and-effect relationship; that was how long he waited. And we, too, will
have to wait until then.
From the Papers of One Still Living
For Søren Aabye, May 5, 1847, represented the deadline with respect to
those conclusions from coincidence that the father and son had arrived at
with such “melancholy imagination.” In 1838 he still had nine years left.
He was one still living, and the shock had not paralyzed his ability to work;
indeed, quite the opposite was the case. In fact, in the midst of everything—