nonetheless filled with longing for the lost pleasure of love. So, unlike his
firm and resolute letters to Boesen, his journals from this period can sound
quite vacillating: “So the matter is now decided once and for all, and yet I
will never be finished with it. She has no idea what sort of advocate she has
in me. She was clever. In parting she asked me at least to remember her
once in a while. She knew very well that as soon as I remember her, there
would be the Devil to pay.” And right enough: Kierkegaard was bedeviled
with thoughts of suicide and with febrile fantasies of seeing Regine again:
She approaches him in a double form, as vigorous, serene, and transparent,
but also as pale, introverted, and withered, destroyed with sorrow over her
faithless lover. One is hardly mistaken if one finds here the germ of those
“nervous affectations” and the cause of that “sleeplessness” about which
Kierkegaard complained in his letters to Boesen.
The conflict between demonic reflection and light-hearted immediacy is
a recurrent theme in these melancholic monologues. Only the heartless
could doubt their authenticity, but they are carried through with so much
literary precision that the artistry occasionally diminishes one’s sympathy for
the unhappy lover: “They say that love makes you blind. It does more than
that—it makes you deaf, it makes you lame. The person who suffers from
it is like the mimosa plant that shuts itself up so that no picklock can open
it, and the more force is used, the more tightly it shuts itself up.” And Kier-
kegaard had shut himself up. Therefore the more often he attempted to
open up inhisjournals the fewer confessionsmade theirway ontothepaper.
Because whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. And
if one cannot remain silent, one must poetize.
The Incidental Tourist
Kierkegaard was far from being a tourist in the traditional sense: “Travel is
foolishness,” he wrote just a few lines into his first letter to Boesen. On
board the mail steamer there were several Laplanders who plied their musi-
cal instruments plaintively in the moonlight while Kierkegaard gazed out
on the still, black sea. Later he went down to his cabin and wrote: “It is
surely no wonder that they call the sea the mother of all, since it cradles a
ship between its maternal breasts in this fashion.” A lengthier journal entry
centered on Regine, whose devotedness he contrasted with his own incon-
stancy and the melancholy fantasies that kept him awake, accompanied by
the massive sound of “the steamship’s double movements.”
NordoesBerlin,wherehestayedformorethanfourmonths(fromOcto-
ber 25, 1841, until March 6, 1842), take up much space in his journals.