Soren Kierkegaard

girl....When the wildness in my spirit overcomes me, I am almost
tempted to approach her and not exactly with the ‘most honorable of inten-
tions.’...Itcould be a little diversion when I am tired of speculative
thought....Idonot, however, want you to mention to anyone that there
is such a singer in Berlin, or that she plays Elvira, et cetera.”
A clever little scrap of paper, no doubt about that, because of course
Kierkegaard’s fascination with Mademoiselle Schulze wasnotto be kept
secret. If Kierkegaard had truly wanted secrecy, it was certainly careless of
him to have written it on a separate piece of paper, which could fall into
the hands of unauthorized persons. On the contrary, the point was to tempt
Boesen to put into circulation the information entrusted to him. Kierke-
gaard was quite aware that the floodgates of gossip had opened when he
left Copenhagen. Shortly before his departure he had heard that Sibbern
was making the rounds, assiduously running down his reputation, calling
him “an ironist in the bad sense.” Just one single hint at the right time and
in the right place would get the malicious rumor mill to spin even faster
and pump the spicy details about Mademoiselle Schulze in the direction of
Regine, who would hardly be delighted to hear that she had an erotic dou-
ble in Berlin. She would therefore hate her faithless lover with redoubled
vehemence, and her salvation would be within reach.
So Boesen took the bait and must have interrogated Kierkegaard about
the Regine look-alike in Berlin, but Kierkegaard would not reveal anything
and was content to remark in his New Year’s letter that he was still engaged
in his studies, which he was carrying out from a loge near the stage: “By
the way, one shouldn’t joke about this sort of thing. Passion has its own
unique dialectic, as is well known.” Kierkegaard had such confidence in
his plans that when Boesen reported that Regine seemed cheerful, he was
compelled to correct his friend’s impression: “The house of Olsen has great
powers of dissimulation, and association with me has certainly not dimin-
ished their virtuosity.”
Nor had Kierkegaard’s daily association with himself diminished his own
virtuosity as a dissimulator, but as so often happens, deception and self-
deception walked faithfully hand in hand, escorting Kierkegaard into a
world that was utterly unreliable. He was always compelled to cover him-
self, to choose his attitude with utmost care, and to calculate the possible
consequences of even the most insignificant unpremeditated utterance. As
he put it in his fifth letter to Boesen: “Here in Berlin, when I associate with
the Danes I am always cheerful, happy, light-headed, ‘am having the time
of my life,’ et cetera. And even though currents surge within me, so that
sometimes it is as if my feelings, like water, will break the ice with which I
have surrounded myself—and even though once in a while there is a sigh