Soren Kierkegaard

There is, of course, no such folk tale. Kierkegaard is merely creating a
fiction. The fiction is bleak, however, because it informs Regine that she
is about to disappear from his sight. True, he does stand there on Knippels
Bridge staring into his telescope, butin realityhe is lookin gat a self-created
image in his soul, woman as ideal, perhaps as myth, but in any case not the
eighteen-year-old Regine Olsen of flesh and blood and desire. This is borne
out by Kierkegaard’s comments on the unique construction of the tele-
scope: “The outermost glass is in fact a mirror, so that when you train it on
Trekronerand stand on the left side of the bridge at an angle of 35otoward
Copenhagen, you see something quite different from what is seen by all the
other people by whom you are surrounded....Only in the proper hands
and for the proper eye is it a divine telegraph; for everyone else it is a useless
bit of furniture.” The telescope is thus a sort of periscope that uses an angled
mirror to reflect reality into its own darkened interior in order to satisfy the
curious eye with images no one else can see: The Regine of reality has been
replaced by the “Regine” of reflection. And in every essential respect it is
to this latter person that the letters are addressed—and not to the “Miss
R. Olsen,” whose name appears so prosaically on the outside of the envelopes.
By the same token, the letter writer’s proper element is not the immediate
future, but eternity. His epistles are characterized by studies of light and
atmosphere and by meditations on eternity and the moment, on presence
and recollection; they lose themselves in the lyrical appreciation of nature,
in the change of seasons, just as they can suddenly plunge all the way back
to Greek myths or dwell on Regine in a particular situation, preferably at
a window that opens onto a romantic vista. “It is in the late summer, toward
evening.—The little window is open. The moon is swelling; it outdoes
itself in radiance in order to obscure its reflection in the sea, which seems
to outshine it, almost audible in its splendor. It flushes in indignation, con-
ceals itself in the clouds; the sea trembles.—You are sittin gon the sofa, your
thoughts floating far from you, your eyes fixed upon nothing. Only when
they reach the infinity of the enormous sky do the infinite thoughts fade
away. Everythin gin between has vanished. It is as if you were sailin gin the
air. And you summon together your fugitive thoughts, which show you an
object. And if a sigh had propulsive force, if a person were so light, so
ethereal, that the compressed air released in a sigh could send him off—the
deeper the sigh, the quicker—then you would surely be here with me in
an instant.”
It is almost a scenario taken right out of Chagall: The sigh is the propul-
sive force that sends the ethereal lovers toward one another in a gentle arc,
up into the bluish airy space above the roofs of the city—full of romantic