Nonetheless (or rather, precisely for this reason) as early as his very first
letter, dated September 16, he tied Regine quite literally to writing, which
of course is the medium of recollection par excellence.
My Regine!
To
Our own little Regine
A line like this under the word serves to alert the typesetter that he
must space out the word indicated. To space out means to pull the
words apart from one another. Therefore, when I space out the words
written above, I believe that I would have to pull them s o f a rapart
that a typesetter would probably lose patience because it is likely that
he would never get to set anything more in his life.
Your S. K.Not only was Regine spaced out to such an extent that she has been able
to extend beyond time and space and into the history of world literature,
she has also had a sort of official status from the very start. She is spoken of
as “our own little Regine,” and has thus been lifted out of the more intimate
space in which lovers usually converse. Regine belongs to us, to posterity,
tothe reader.
The followin gweek, on Wednesday, September 23, Kierke gaard contin-
ued to carry out ambivalent maneuvers with his pen. He sent a homemade
ink drawin gdepictin ga little man with an enormous telescope, standin gon
Knippels Bridge, from which he stares to the right in the direction of the
words “Tre Kroner”—the military battery out in Copenhagen harbor. The
letter begins: “My Regine! This is Knippels Bridge. The figure with the
telescope is me. You know that figures in landscapes usually appear a bit
odd; you may therefore take comfort in the thought that I do not look at
all that ugly and that every artistic impression, even a caricature, always
contains somethin gof the ideal.” So far so good; then comes a symbolic
hint about the future. The writer of the letter claims that his ink drawing
has been judged by several “art critics” who were surprised that he had
completely omitted the surroundings. He explains that some believed that
this omission was owin gto the artist’s weakness in depictin gperspective,
while others inclined toward what he implies is the more likely theory,
namely, that the absence of surroundings may be an “allusion to a folktale
about a person who had so lost himself in enjoyin gthe view from Knippels
Bridge that in the end he could see nothing but the image produced by his
own soul, somethin ghe could have seen just as well in a darkened room.”