Soren Kierkegaard

weeks late—something the dialectically talented uncle was often game
enough to make the theme of the letter itself .He was very fond of this little
niece—and she of him .For his twenty-ninth birthday she thus sent him a
primitive ink drawing of some fruit, which she accompanied with the cha-
grined remark that he must please not show the drawing to anyone—“be-
cause it is so embarrassing.” But later the same year, when Henriette turned
thirteen, Kierkegaard paid her back with an almost demonstratively bad
drawing of a flower that had its petals sticking out all around, a thick stem,
and a single leaf .He assured her that he had labored on the flower for more
than eight days and had sat up all night to finish it .On the right-hand side
of the paper the artist (whose pseudonymous propensities cannot be denied)
wrote meticulously: “A birthday flower respectfully planted by Mr .X .”
Henriette had hardly had time to get annoyed at this impertinent treatment
before Kierkegaard’s servant Anders once again stood in the parlor to pre-
sent the bewildered birthday girl with a package containing the posthu-
mously published writings of Poul Martin Møller!
The next year Kierkegaard was late as usual, but Henriette was not left
empty-handed .With his belated birthday greeting Kierkegaard included
some perfume and a wish that had its own scent of eternity: “Keep well,
dear Jette .Be happy, ‘always happy .’ That is the only advice that can be
given against whatever possible sorrows you might have .If it pleases you,
rest assured of the unchanging, heartfelt devotion with which I remain /
Your entirely devoted Uncle / S .K .” In subsequent years, the letters and
packages continued to arrive with not inconsiderable delays, but in Novem-
ber 1846 Kierkegaard set a personal record by being only one day late, and
this put him in such high spirits that he wrote “cup coffee” instead of “coffee
cup,” this latter being the present that accompanied his letter .That had
been the plan, at any rate, but in his haste he had forgotten to send along
the cup and therefore had to pull out all the stops and dash off yet another
letter in which he excused himself for his unfortunate oversight, sending
his servant yet again, this time with the cup.
Henriette did not write down her memoirs until 1876; by then she was
forty-seven years old and Kierkegaard had been dead for twenty-one years.
They cannot be called objective, but they are presented with great liveliness,
and her devotion to Uncle Søren is touching—even if she could never
entirelyforgive him for having called her “Madame Spectacles” because of
her habit of staring straight ahead, lost in thought .In her memoirs she re-
ports on a little evening dinner party to which she and a female cousin had
been invited: “As we came in, Uncle Søren presented my girl cousin and
me each with a bouquet of lilies of the valley, quite a rarity for the season,
and then he gave each of us beautiful presents .We were hardly finished