Soren Kierkegaard

what would be seven letters to Emil Boesen. After several remarks about
the journey, the coming lecture series, and other things of that sort, the
letter turned without warning to a series of imperatives: “Meet her without
being noticed. Your window can help you. Mondays and Thursdays music
lessons from 4 to 5. But don’t meet her in the street, with the exception of
Monday afternoons at 5 or 5:30, when you ought to be able to meet her as
she walks through Vestergade from Vestervold to Klædeboderne; or on the
same day at 7 or 7:30, when she generally goes through the arcades to
Børsgade with her sister. But carefully. Visit the pastry shop down there,
but carefully. For my sake practice the art of controlling every expression,
of mastering chance events, of being able to dream up a story instantly,
without fear or anxiety. And one can deceive people as much as one wants,
I know this from experience, and in this respect at least, I have boundless
daring.... I trust no one.”
We have no idea how Boesen reacted to these orders to sneak around
Copenhagen as if he were some sort of spy, because all of his letters to
Kierkegaard have been lost. Kierkegaard intended more or less the same
fate for his letters to Boesen. On the outside of the packet in which he
preserved them he wrote: “After my death this packet is to be burned un-
opened. For the information of posterity: The contents are not worth 4
shillings.” But in a matchless decision, the people who edited and published
Kierkegaard’sliteraryremainsdecidedtorefrainfromthisincendiaryadvice,
thereby preserving a primary source which, unlike most of what Kierke-
gaard permitted to survive for future publication, has not been censored by
so much as a comma. He was perhaps capable of duping Boesen every now
and again, but it was impossible to fool him completely, so Kierkegaard was
scarcely off the mark when he wrote at one point: “You know how I am.
When I talk with you, I leap about stark naked. With other people I am
always enormously calculating.”
The absence of Boesen’s letters means that we unfortunately have no
idea how Boesen reacted when Kierkegaard recruited him as a spy. But in
examining Kierkegaard’s next letter we can clearly sense that Boesen had
been hurt by all the mistrustfulness and had displayed a certain dissatisfaction
with the entire situation, which had been made all the more unpleasant by
the fact that Boesen himself was unhappily in love and thus already had
his hands full. Kierkegaard was not particularly concerned about this latter
problem, and from his Berlin lodgings he sent Boesen a panacea for roman-
tic crises: “And now you yourself. Do you bear any responsibility, have you
broken any obligation, and does it really disturb you if you walk past her
window and see her laughing? Poetize her, so that she sits inside even more
beautifully,andlaughsandweepsanddoeseverythingyouwish.”Thestolid