Soren Kierkegaard

would not be satisfied with brilliantly written letters; she wanted to be out
there atop the seventy thousand restless fathoms, embraced by her merman.
It is not surprisin gthat Joan of Arc was her heroine.
Kierkegaard pulled in the opposite direction, and during the early part
of their engagement he tried to cool down her amorous passions by reading
her a sermon from Mynster every week. But as has happened before in
history—remember Abelard and Heloı ̈se—erotic passion had deep roots
within the religious, which resulted in violent agitation: “The greatest possi-
ble misunderstandin gbetween one person and another with respect to the
religious is in the case of a man and a woman, when the man, wanting to
impart religion to her,... becomes the object of her romantic love.” This
was an instance of exactly this sort of object displacement, and in one of
the undatable letters Kierkegaard explained why, earlier that same day, he
had been compelled to have some firm and serious words with Regine. He
asked her to understand that it was not his wish that “you should think for
a moment that at such times I feel that I am better than you; and in order
to demonstrate to you that I castigate myself in the same way, as a remem-
brance of this mornin gI am sendin gyou a copy of the New Testament.”
Behind this authority-laden admonition we get the clear sense that, earlier
that day, Regine had been too erotically straightforward and that her fiance ́
was now pointin gout quite firmly how inappropriate this had been.
On Wednesday, November 11, Regine sat and waited for a letter that
never arrived. Their amorous Wednesday ritual, which had lasted two
months, was interrupted. She usually invited her fiance ́to dinner with her
parents on that evening, but this time he had taken a coach up to Fredens-
bor gin northern Zealand, and he did not roll up to her place until ei ght
o’clock, which was much too late and quite embarrassing. A contemplative
journal entry makes clear what his state of mind had been in that coach,
rumblin gback to town in the twili ght: “On the floor of the coach, which
was empty, lay six or seven oat kernels. They danced about from the vibra-
tions and formed the strangest patterns. I lost myself in watching them.”
Nor was there a letter to Regine the following Wednesday, but Kierke-
gaard’s servant turned up and delivered a package containing Carl Bern-
hard’s newly published novel,Old Memories. The followin gweek, Wednes-
day, November 25, Kierkegaard pointed out to Regine that the choice of
the book title had been anythin gbut accidental, and there was a sudden
drop in the romantic temperature of the letters: “My Regine! / Perhaps,
alon gwith ‘old memories,’ you had expected that you would also receive
a future memory in the form of a letter. It didn’t turn out that way, so
therefore accept these lines, which—who knows?—perhaps may soon rep-