Soren Kierkegaard

resent a bygone time.” This sounds just exactly as ominous as it was. Kier-
kegaard continued, with brusque sarcasm: “It is lovely that you expect let-
ters from me, especially when this expectation is not a fierce unrest that
must be calmed down, but is a still and holy longing....Freedom is love’s
element. And I am convinced that you respect me too much to wish to
see in me a diligent lord-in-waiting who carries out love’s bureaucratic
responsibilities with the conscientiousness of an accountant, or to want me
to compete for a medal for perseverance in Chinese handicrafts. And I am
convinced that when a letter does not arrive,my Regineis too poetic to see
in this a lack of ‘due diligence,’ to use the official expression; that even if a
letter were never to arrive, she is too poetic to lon gto return to the fleshpots
ofEgyptor to wish to be continually surrounded by the amorous churnings
of a sentimental lover.” There was really no danger with respect to that last
bit, the part about the sentimental lover. After the letter’s somewhat dubious
“Your S. K.” there was a short postscript: “At this moment I am walking
past your window. If I look at my watch, it means that I have seen you. If
I do not look at my watch, I haven’t seen you.”
The actual circumstances behind this cryptic postscript can be more or
less reconstructed: Accompanied by his servant, who was supposed to de-
liver the letter, Kierkegaard had walked from his apartment on 38 Nørre-
gade, across the plaza opposite the Church of Our Lady, presumably along
Strøget, then across Højbro Plads, and down to 66 Børsgade. He had care-
fully calculated the interval between the point when his servant would de-
liver the letter and the moment when Regine would read the last sentence.
If he then saw her in the window, he would signal by taking out his watch;
if not, it—his watch—would remain symbolically in his pocket. With its
minutely detailed staging, this episode could just as easily have been set in
“The Seducer’s Diary” as in 66 Børsgade.
Just before Christmas, Kierkegaard’s letters took on a more conciliatory
tone. He wanted to convey to Regine that the painful episodes and the
absent letters in November had been intended as a test of her faithfulness.
“I will test thee no longer, now I know thy heart,” he wrote on Wednesday,
December 16, quotin gChristian Winther. A len gthy New Year’s letter,
which arrived Wednesday, December 30, is loving, concrete, and uncom-
plicated. Kierkegaard recalled the Wednesday in Lyngby a little more than
a year earlier: “I felt so indescribably light. I drove to Lyngby, not as I
usually do, dark and dispirited, slumped in a corner of the coach. I sat in
the middle of the seat, unusually erect; my head was not bowed down, but,
happy and full of confidence, I looked about. I was so infinitely happy to
meet everyone I encountered.” And the letter ends with a sort of submis-
sion: “I came, I saw,sheconquered.”