nant, Cornelia was resurrected as Cordelia, who is one of the loveliest and
most intense female figures, not merely in Kierkegaard’s gallery of characters
but in the entire literature of the Danish Golden Age.
“She Chooses the Shriek, I Choose the Pain”
At one point in that diary, Johannes the Seducer notes, with characteristi-
cally lecherous elegance, that it is an art to poetize oneself into a girl, but
that it is a masterpiece to poetize oneself out again. Kierkegaard knew the
art, but the masterpiece was more difficult. He could never distance Regine
sufficiently to free her from her calamitous fate; she continued to be what
she was—sensually heaven-sent, delightfully terrifying, dizzyingly forbid-
den—because her very nature caused warm springs to gush so seductively
that Kierkegaard could not but let himself be carried along in the current—
on paper.
This story (which could indeed have ended in happily banal fashion) is
thus not merely about two people who for intellectual and psychological
reasons were destined to pass each other like ships in the night. Rather, it
became a grand drama about the extremes in the intellectual history of the
West: immediacy and reflection, sensuous desire and self-control, presence
and absence. And even though Regine is not named one single time in the
whole of Kierkegaard’s published works, she is intertwined with it like an
erotic arabesque, full of longing, sometimes confronting the reader when
one least expects it. This is the case, for example, at one point inPhilosophical
Fragments: “The source of the unhappiness is not that the lovers cannot have
one another, but that they cannot understand one another.” And they could
not understand one another, not at all: She was too immediately passionate
and he was too passionately reflective. As one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms
would subsequently remark inStages on Life’s Way, “She chooses the shriek,
I choose the pain.”
The notion that pure love can overcome every obstacle to communica-
tion certainly reflects a rather naive optimism, but we cannot deny that
Kierkegaard takes a quitemodernposition in basin gthe relation between the
sexes on their mutualunderstandingof one another. And in puttin gforth
this requirement he is, indeed, quite uncompromising, because this sort of
understandin gis in turn the basis for theintimate trustthat is the soul of
marriage. “Marriage is impossible without intimate trust,” it is stated cate-
gorically in one of the drafts ofEither/Or. In a subsequent note (which,
however, was crossed out) he explained that enterin ginto a marria ge is not
like the situation in which “everythin gis sold in the condition ‘as is’ at the