Soren Kierkegaard

sides. That was an observation made in haste....No,nowIhave quite a
different understanding of what is going on. Despair is the point....Ihas-
ten to inform you of this, in part so that you will see how diligently I am
studying the writings, and in part so that you will know that I am not slow-
witted when it comes to making discoveries.”
Kierkegaard did not wish to discuss the aforementioned “discovery” by
post, but if “there is opportunity at some point for verbal communication,
I shall be happy to explain myself with reference to the dubious relationship
of this new discovery to the previous discovery and to my first note, which
accompanied the copy ofThe Sickness unto Death.” Kierkegaard was rather
more direct in his journal: “In a note dated Aug. 10, R. Nielsen has now
discovered that the common point shared by Climacus and Anti-Climacus
is despair....Inaprevious note Nielsen had thought that the common
point was offense. That was in fact much closer to being correct, and his
new discovery is quite simply an anticlimax.”
On August 28, Nielsen wrote Kierkegaard from Weidemann’s Bakery in
Lyngby, informing him that, as requested, he had asked at the inn and at
the other baker in town, but in vain: Kierkegaard’s note of August 4 seemed
to havedisappeared entirely. “With respectto my tworemarkable discover-
ies, I am still of the opinion that I will probably be able to bring them into
harmony by means of a third, and I hope to do so when I have the pleasure
ofhearingyourverbalcommunication.Please,therefore,permitmetocon-
sider myself—in anticipation, and for the time being—the Knight of the
Three Discoveries.” Kierkegaard apparently did not give a fig about the
knight of anticipation’s increasingly confused ideas, and in an undated letter
he requested that Nielsen inquire at the Lyngby post office regarding the
missing note, on which Kierkegaard’s servant had allegedly forgotten to pay
the postage. “If you get hold of it, do me the favor of returning it to me
unopened. There is a certain method to my letters, and I do not like to
have them read out of sequence.” The whole business sounds strange, but
Nielsen was nonetheless nice enough to rush over to the post office, though
in vain, and with great expressions of regret he communicated as much to
the magister, who in a sort of pique about this, informed Nielsen that he
did not really have the desire to continue their correspondence: “I have
alwaysbeensomewhatsuperstitious,andfromthemomentmylengthynote
of August 4 went missing, I have in fact despaired of the correspondence.”
That a missing letter—and even more remarkably, a letter of which Kier-
kegaard had made a copy—was able to become the focus of so much atten-
tion was a strange and sorry testimony to how little the two gentlemen
really had to say to each other. Oddly and characteristically enough, the
only thing they seemed to have been able to agree on was that in reality