Soren Kierkegaard

test between the Young Man’s last and next-to-last letters. It is clear from
this protest that, like the reader, Constantin Constantius has had a difficult
time taking this matter seriously: “He suffers from a misplaced melancholic
high-mindedness that has absolutel yno place an ywhere except in a poet’s
brain. He awaits a thunderstorm that will make him into a husband, a stroke
perhaps. It is completel ythe reverse.” And Constantin Constantius adds
that he finds it absurd to relate oneself to a being who holds a thunderstorm
in his hand as his trump card.
Constantin Constantius chooses—once again—to abandon the Young
Man, but no sooner does he make that decision than yet another letter
arrives, the last in the series, proclaiming in its opening lines: “She is mar-
ried. To whom I do not know. Because when I read it in the papers it was
though I had been struck b ya blow. I lost the newspaper, and since then I
have not had the patience for an ymore detailed investigation. I am m yself
once again. Here I have repetition. I understand everything, and existence
seems to me more beautiful than ever.”
The Young Man understands everything. The reader does not. The
young woman has married someone else. It was in the newspaper. Period.
All the definitions with which the book was supposed to add intellectual
weight to the categor yof repetition disappear into thin air at the gentle
push of a chance event. “It did indeed come like a thunderstorm,” the
youth wrote in high-strung fashion. But the little thunderstorm simile is
well-chosen, and he does not shrink from adding a final, humiliating clause,
“even if it is to her generosit ythat I owe the fact that it happened.” And
this is undeniabl ythe case, so in relation to the Young Man, the woman
thus assumes the same place occupied b yGod in relation to Job. The Young
Man’s repossession of himself is thus not a repetition in the truest sense of
the term. This fact is involuntaril yconfirmed b yhis rhetorical questions,
with all their imploring gestures: “I am myself once again. Here I have
repetition.... Thedivision that had been a part of m ybeing has been
resolved. I am unified once again....Soisn’t this a repetition? Didn’t I get
everything back double? Didn’t I get myself back again, and precisely in
such a fashion that I was doubl yable to sense its significance?”
The work is not able to live up to the theological requirements of repeti-
tion as forgiveness, which had been the book’s original point of departure.
So it is altogether fitting that the Young Man concludes his final letter with
a moving paean to the woman’s generosity, since as mentioned, it was she,
and not God, who had been the occasion of the self’s reconciliation with
itself: “The goblet of intoxication is offered to me once again. I am already
breathing in its bouquet. I alread ysense its effervescent music. But first, a
libation to her. She saved a soul that sat in the loneliness of despair: Praised