Soren Kierkegaard

that your visit would be in vain a second time .And there is no repetition
(cf.Repetition)—so in all human probability you will find me in next time.”
A New Year’s letter from 1848 makes it clear, however, that dialectics
could also give way to a simple, intimate, and consoling voice: “Happy
New Year! I never go around making congratulatory New Year’s visits.
And only rarely, as an exception, do I write congratulatory letters—but
then, you are among the exceptions.” Kierkegaard went on to say that if
he were to give Hans Peter a “piece of advice about life” or to commend
a “rule for living,” he would say: “Above all, never forget the duty of loving
yourself .Do not let the fact that you have in a way been set apart from life,
that you have been hindered from taking an active part in it, and that in
the eyes of a dim-witted and busy world, you are superfluous—above all,
do not let this deprive you of your notion of yourself, as if, in the eyes of
all-knowing Governance, your life, if it is lived in inwardness, did not have
just as much significance and worth as every other person’s.”
“He gave consolation,” Hans Brøchner writes, “not by covering up sor-
row, but by first making one genuinely aware of it, by bringing it to com-
plete clarity .Then he reminded that while there is adutyto mourn, there
is also a duty not to let oneself be crushed by sorrow.” This is the sort of
unvarnished attitude toward grief that we encounter in his letter of more
than ten pages to J.L.A. Kolderup-Rosenvinge, who had lost his two-year-
old granddaughter Barbara in the spring of 1849 .Kierkegaard offers conso-
lation and does so in a radical manner: “The difference in years makes the
grief more profound .It is always harder for grandparents to lose a grandchild
than for parents to lose a child.” Kierkegaard distinguishes between imme-
diate pain and reflected grief, and he develops his point further: “The grand-
father grieves in a completely different manner from that of the young
mother .While her youth and her hopes about life help her to bear the loss
more easily, and indeed, often by degrees to forget it (this loss, which was
inherently less burdensome for her than for the grandfather), the grandfa-
ther, meanwhile has forgotten nothing; for him the loss resonated immedi-
ately in memory, repeating an earlier loss.” Kierkegaard also touches upon
the frightful possibility that in the midst of one’s grief one might begin to
find fault with someone else because he or she did not grieve deeply
enough, in this case, that “she, the mother, did not grieve as deeply—as the
grandfather.”
In his letters to Henriette Lund—the daughter of his deceased (and favor-
ite) sister, Petrea Severine, and Henrik Ferdinand Lund—Kierkegaard
shows that he is a true master of delight by bringing delight .It is true that
the birthday letters, which Henriette ought to have received on November
15, arrived without exception at least a couple of days late, sometimes many