excitement, but utterly lackin gin concreteness. This distance from the
world and from everyday life was repeated in a letter of December 9, though
now in the opposite direction: In a drawin g(now lost) Re gine depicted
herself in the undersea home that her lover had imagined for her and that
he had described with these lines: “There are many small but cozy rooms
down there, where one can sit safely while the sea storms outside. In some
of them one can also hear the distant clamor of the world, not troublingly
noisy but quietly fadin gaway, fundamentally irrelevant to the inhabitants
of these chambers.”
The manner in which Regine reacted to this insistent isolation from the
world is reflected indirectly in four short lines from her hand; they contain
a touching, feminine protest against the existence—now above the earth,
now under the sea—to which she had been consigned: With his Wednesday
letter of November 4, Kierkegaard had included a color picture of an orien-
tal landscape with unmistakably erotic symbolism in the form of towers,
open gates, and a soaring minaret in the background. In the foreground a
youn gman is sittin gon a bench with a strin ged instrument, probably a lute,
in his lap, while a smiling, bare-armed woman extends a rose toward him
from an open window, the curtains of which flutter invitingly over his head.
It is all very daring; Kierkegaard, on the other hand, is not. On the contrary,
his commentary on the picture causes every erotic possibility to evaporate
in a cloud of dialectics: “She holds a flower in her hand. Is it she who
extends the flower toward him? Or has she received it from him? Is she
giving it back to him in order to receive it once again? No one knows but
the two of them. The wide world is behind him. He has turned his back
on it. A stillness reigns everywhere, as in eternity, to which such moments
belong. Perhaps he sat like this for centuries; perhaps the happy moment
was only very brief and yet lon genou gh for an eternity.” And so on and
so forth. On the reverse side of the picture Kierkegaard had written a little
verse in German fromThe Boy’s Magic Horn, also quite chaste, but then,
right under the German verse, come the only lines Regine has left posterity
from the period of her engagement to Kierkegaard:
And if my arm so pleases you
With solace and with peace,
Fair Merman, then hurry! Come and take
Both my arms, take two!Regine, too, could cite verse. And more than that, this little passage from
Johannes Ewald’s romanceThe Fishermendemonstrates that she could cite
precisely and, indeed, with erotic emphasis. She would not be put off, she