Soren Kierkegaard

with life’s philosophical problems: “It is no great accomplishment for the
least little puddle to become so clear that one can see the sediment at the
bottom, but our souls, however, ought to be more like the deep ocean.”
There are certain obligations incumbent upon those who live in Philoso-
pher’s Alley!
Throughout his life, Søren Aabye viewed Emil as his true friend, but it
can be difficult to get a sense of the essence of their friendship because it left
no paper trail, so to speak .During their youth, they had only to walk a few
hundred yards to be in one another’s company, and there was thus no need
to write letters—a loss for posterity .And indeed, the only surviving letters
from Emil to Søren Aabye, three in all, date from the 1850s, by which time,
for a number of reasons, the intimacy of their relationship had decreased
significantly .“Generally, he did not write letters, or at any rate only little
notes whose contents were carefully considered .The style seemed easy, but
it had been carefully scrutinized, and he could usually remember them for
a long time,” Boesen recalled .He could also recollect how his friend usually
burned letters as soon as he had read them: “And when he destroyed them
he was shaken to the core.” We can almost see him doing this.
Emil did not burn his letters .On the contrary, he did posterity the favor
of preserving them .In addition to a good many brief notes from Søren
Aabye to Emil, eighteen real letters have also been preserved, of which the
earliest, dated July 17, 1838, is four pages long .It begins with such emotion
that it is on the verge of collapsing into literary mannerism, but there can
be no doubt about the devotion, the genuineness of the feelings, expressed
in the letter: “Dear Emil!!You, my friend,the only one, through whose
intercessions I have endured a world that seemed to me unbearable in so
many ways; the only one who remained when I permitted doubt and suspi-
cion, like an onrushing storm, to wash away and destroy everything else.”
Emil did more than lend a patient ear to his friend’s lengthy monologues:
Apparently his “intercessions,” which had been as admonitory as they were
edifying, had also managed to wrench his friend free of a thoroughgoing
pessimism which wanted to break with the world .Nonetheless, a deep
yearning, not forerosbut forlogos, was still raging restlessly within Søren
Aabye, who wanted to give vent to his passions in words: “What I need is
a voice that is as penetrating as the gaze of aLynceus, as terrifying as the
groan of giants, as pervasive as a sound of nature, ranging from the deepest
bass to the most evanescent chest tones, which can be modulated from the
softest, most divine whisper to raging, volcanic energy .This is what I need
in order to breathe, in order to give voice to what is on my mind, in order
to make the bowels both of rage and of sympathy tremble... .My speech
is not suited to this .It is uncircumcised, unevangelical; it is as nocturnally