Soren Kierkegaard

hoarse as the screech of a gull, or it fades away like a blessing on the lips of
a mute.” Rarely has impoverishment of language been expressed with such
linguistic richness, and this entry is ancestrally related to one of the “Diapsal-
mata” that would subsequently appear in the first part ofEither/Orand that
Kierkegaard would attribute to the pen of the Aesthete A.
We can glimpse something of the doings of the two friends during this
period by examining Emil’s letters to his cousin Martin Hammerich, who
had been the first person in the 357-year history of the University of Copen-
hagen to have been permitted to defend his dissertation for the magister
degree (on the Norse myth of Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods) inDanish,
and who was now in Bonn studying Sanskrit with A .W .Schlegel .Emil
wrote Martin very diligently, and on August 20, 1836, he could report:
“Søren Kierkegaard’s scholarly interests are still coursing through him, half
terrified of one another because none of them has sufficient mastery over
the others; and even if he were to adopt a firmer stance, he still has no
notion—except perhaps a very abstract one—of why it is that he has come
into the world .Therefore his life is bound to be somewhat disjointed .”
Presumably it is in this shared sense of doubt and irresolution that we are
to find the common ground inhabited by these two friends, for Emil’s life
was not particularly coherent, either: “Almost every day, opposed ideas
poison one another in my head, which is sick with reflection,” Boesen
complained in Kierkegaardian style .And not without reason had the two
friends taken as their motto a couple of lines from Oehlenschla ̈ger’s “Mid-
summer Eve’s Play”: “See, time comes and time goes; there is a church in
the distance.”
The church was a distant possibility, but for the time being Søren Aabye
did not count himself as much “more than a listener.” Emil was in the same
situation but he had already earned his theological degree, and in one sense
the distant church was a possibility that was quite concrete and ready at
hand: He was considering (“just now I am really haunted by the idea”) of
seeking appointment as a pastor at Zion Church in Tranquebar [Tarangam-
badi], India, but he was tempted neither by the annual salary of “six hundred
Madras rupees” nor by the missionary position associated with the call;
rather, Boesen had a great yearning to travel to foreign places .Subsequently
he also entertained the notion of traveling to South America as a ship’s
pastor on the frigateRota .Instead, however, he chose almost the exact
opposite of such fabulous temptations to see the world, dedicating himself
to his “lovely, little crooked congregation out on Strandvejen,” a privately
funded home for crippled girls, where he did some teaching in addition to
preaching every other Sunday and holiday .The tenderness with which he
regarded these invalid misses was typical of him, and he wrote to his cousin