and saying, “When God speaks, I keep silent”; immediately thereafter,
however, he would add, “But when I speak, you keep silent.” In addition
to Latin exercises, Nielsen also enjoyed other exercises of the more physical
sort, including deep knee bends, and he is said to have been reasonably
competent at stickball, a game he played with his students on the common
in a nearby park. Nielsen also came along when his pupils took swimming
lessons, which were offered at Rysensteen’s Baths on Kalvebod Beach.
“My old headmaster was a demigod, a man of iron! Woe, woe to the
boy who could not answer Yes or No to a direct question,” Kierkegaard
later wrote. But Kierkegaard also detected a certain sensitivity deep within
the iron headmaster, and in 1843 he sent Nielsen a copy ofThree Edifying
Discourseswith the following dedication, “The excellent leader of the Bor-
gerdyd School, the unforgettable teacher of my youth, the admired para-
digm of my later years.” Similarly, a letter to Nielsen dated May 6, 1844,
was signed “In gratitude and affection, your entirely devoted S. Kier-
kegaard.” But even as early as the very first of Kierkegaard’s letters—dated
March 8, 1829, and addressed to Peter Christian, then in Berlin—Søren
Aabye depicted with touching solicitude how Nielsen was suffering with a
bad leg that prevented him from carrying out his daily instructional duties.
The pupils had to report to his office to recite their lessons, after which
Nielsen assigned them “so many Latin compositions that in the end he
himself was unable to sort them out.” A foot injury incurred while extin-
guishing a fire in one of the school’s wood stoves only made Nielsen’s
condition worse, but eventually he was again able to teach in Søren Aabye’s
class, where he limped in every day, wearing “one slipper and one boot.”
We have quite good testimony about what sort of schoolboy Søren
Aabye was. In the 1870s, H. P. Barfod, the first editor of Kierkegaard’s
posthumous papers, contacted several former schoolmates of Søren Kier-
kegaard, who had by then become so famous, and asked them to write
down their recollections of him. Of course, we must take their memories,
by then close to half a century old, with many grains of salt, but certain
traits recur so frequently that they begin to resemble what might cautiously
be called facts. With few exceptions, virtually everyone emphasized that
Søren Aabye was a tease. Those who were a bit more psychologically so-
phisticated associated his teasing with his slight build and his strange dress,
which left him exposed and vulnerable, inviting the teasing that he tried to
defend against by being a tease himself. In accordance with his father’s taste,
Søren Aabye wore an outfit of coarse black tweed with a short-tailed jacket.
But his wardrobe must also have included other items, because a niece
would later recount that when her uncle was a boy he “ran about in a
jacket the color of red cabbage.” And the trousers were cut unusually short,
{1813–1834} 19