year under my supervision has not exactly made her more naive; it has
taught her, among other things, that I take note of even the most insignifi-
cant of insignificant things. My plan of action with respect to the children
must be altered. It pains me, but I trust no one.”
It is not quite clear what the above-mentioned “plan of action” consisted
of, but this much seems certain, that the nieces and nephews unwittingly
functioned as six gullible little snoops in the service of a higher cause. In
themselves their activities were certainly not very important, but as con-
necting links between the separated pair they were sufficiently important
that, were the need to arise, they would have been available for service as
something like ambassadors of reunification. Thus in his next-to-last letter
to Boesen, Kierkegaard could proclaim: “In the event I return to her, I
would wish to include the few creatures she has learned to love through
me, that is, my four nephews and two nieces. To that end I have maintained
a continuing correspondence with them, often with some sacrifice of time.
Naturally, in order to divert attention I have given this the appearance of a
sort of eccentricity on my part.”
“The Aesthetic Is Above All My Element”
Kierkegaard was not nearly as calculating in his letters to Boesen as in those
to his little nephews and nieces. In return for Boesen’s willingness to slink
along the walls of Copenhagen houses, watch from windows, cross-exam-
ine a portrait painter, and circulate rumors concerning Mademoiselle
Schulze, his exiled friend granted him a sort of confidential relationship. In
his fourth letter to Boesen, Kierkegaard wrote quite plainly: “To the same
degree that I believe I am an exceptional lover, I also know that I am a bad
husband and will always be so. Alas, the one quality always or usually stands
in an inverse relation to the other....Insaying this I am not underestimat-
ing myself, but my intellectual life and my worth as a husband are mutually
incompatible.”
Kierkegaard here touched on what was undoubtedly one of the principal
motives behind the break with Regine. He wanted to be an author, not a
husband. Thus, for the sake of aesthetics, he incurred a guilt from which it
was just about impossible for either religion or ethics to absolve him. This
(among other things) was the seat of Kierkegaard’s conflict. In a subsequent
letter he wrote openly that he would have been “a lifelong torment to her,”
andinawonderfullyrevealingslipofthepenheaddedthatitwas“ablessing
of God that I did not break off the engagement for her sake”—but that was
not the point of God’s blessing, because “her” was crossed out and replaced