A young woman is crying on the streets of Copenhagen. She had just spoken to her former lover, Sören Kierkegaard for the first time in 14 years. He stands motionless, gripping his top hat. Regine Olsen departs from Copenhagen forever with her husband and former tutor, Johan Schlegel. Kierkegaard and Regine met when she was 15, and he 24. They were immediately drawn to one another. On one occasion Regine played the piano for him, Kierkegaard shut her song book and explained it wasn’t the music he was interested in. In 1840 Kierkegaard proposed. Not long after, Kierkegaard began to doubt his ability to be a good husband. He was convinced his sadness meant he could never love her to his fullest. He would drag his beloved down with him, he thought. A year passed and Kierkegaard returned his ring to her and called off the engagement. Regine threw herself into a long period of depression. She pleaded for him to take her back, even suggesting she’d live in a cupboard so long as it was with him.
Kierkegaard became harsh and unlike himself. Later writings like The Diary of a Seducer, shine some light on this change. Kierkegaard believed if she knew the truth - that he still loved her - she’d never be happy. He became a “scoundrel,” so she could forget about him and find happiness with a man who could love her better. When Regine married Schlegel, Kierkegaard couldn’t bring himself to attend the wedding. Kierkegaard likened his ending the engagement to Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. He later wrote how his sadness was,
“the most faithful mistress I have even known.”
Regine and Kierkegaard would pass each other in the streets of Copenhagen for over a decade following the engagement, often in calculated ways. They always looked at each other, never saying anything. For instance, in an entry from January 1850, Kierkegaard writes that he and Regine have for over a month,
“seen each other almost every blessed day, or at least twice every other day.”
Kierkegaard’s entries from this time have the character of plain and at times almost raw reporting, something that scotches the suspicion of fictionalizing that can inescapably intrude in other contexts.
“During the latter part of 1851 she encountered me every day,” Kierkegaard reports in May 1852.
“It was during the period when I would walk home by way of Langelinie at ten o’clock in the morning. The timing was exact and the place merely shifted farther and farther up the road to the limekiln. She came walking as if from the limekiln. . . . That was how it went, day after day.” One cannot help noting the altogether non-accidental nature of these meetings, the punctuality and precision, even the synchronizing, with the point of encounter shifting as if to divert attention away from it—as much for the bashful lovers themselves as for outsiders. Still, not a word was spoken between Kierkegaard and Regine.
On Sunday the 9th of May, 1852 Kierkegaard is at morning service in Christianborg’s Royal Chapel, where the king’s chaplain, Just Paulli, preaches. Regine is also there and sitting quite near where Kierkegaard is standing. According to the Ordained Altar-Book for Denmark, the gospel for this Sunday is a text from the gospel of St. John, but instead Paulli has chosen to preach on the text from the epistle with precisely the words that meant so much to Kierkegaard and Regine. Paulli is not far into the epistle’s text before Regine turns and, “concealed by the person next to her,” looks in the direction of Kierkegaard, who notes that she does so “very fervently,” but otherwise quite consciously refrains from returning her glance.
“I looked straight ahead, at nothing in particular,” he explains, although this show of indifference required considerable effort:
“I confess that I, too, was somewhat shaken. Paulli finished reading the text aloud. She sank rather than sat down, so that actually I was a bit worried, as I was once before, for her emotion is so vehement.”
It was to be even more shattering. For as he introduces his sermon, he says to the congregation that the words of the text are “implanted in our hearts”; yes, he continues, if these words “should be torn from your heart, would not life lose all its worth for you?” Precisely because the words from James’s epistle have become a symbolic sealing of the unbreakable tie between Søren and Regine, Paulli’s construal of the text sounds like a direct commentary on their loving relationship, which is rooted so deeply within their hearts that life without it would have no meaning.
On Saturday the 17th of March 1855, fourteen years of silence are broken. Departmental Chief Johan Frederik Schlegel has been appointed governor of the Danish West indies for a five-year term. On the very day of their departure Regine in all haste leaves her apartment in Nybrogade and ventures out into town in the hope of meeting her old love. And, as though the final gesture of a generous Providence toward these two persons whose life histories are so uncontrollably linked, it is not long before her eyes fasten on the familiar figure with the broad-brimmed hat. As she passes him by, she says under her breath:
“God bless you—may all go well with you!”
For just an instant that Saturday meeting in a random Copenhagen street turned everything upside down. Regine’s blessing succeeded in rendering speechless a man never otherwise at a loss for the right words and made him stand still in a more or less symbolic posture, hat in hand. Kierkegaard was here exposed to a situation of the kind one might describe with antiquated words, words with which one fumbles to articulate the sense that the most potent things in life always come from the other, they are not at one’s own beck and call or in one’s own power to effect. What went through the master-thinker theologian’s mind in that moment of blessing, no one knows. Perhaps, just for once, there was no thought in his mind at all, simply acceptance of this blessing from the most important woman in his life. Nor does one know what went on in Regine’s mind, though she was no doubt anxious to get back quickly to the empty apartment in Nybrogade and to try to appear as unconcerned as possible. A few hours later she began to put the city behind her, unaware that her blessing would be the last words ever said to her former lover.
8 months later, in 1855 Kierkegaard died. In his Will he left everything to Regine - everything including all of his love letters, and two engagement rings, found in none other than a cupboard.
“If I dared to wish, then I certainly know what I would wish for, and if I dared to wish for seven things, yet I would have only one wish, notwithstanding the fact that I would gladly wish it seven times, even though I knew that it had been fulfilled the first time. And that wish is identical with my deepest conviction: that neither Death, nor Life, nor Angels, nor Principalities, nor Powers, nor the present, nor that which is to come, nor the Exalted, nor the Profound, nor any other creature may tear me from you, or you from me. - Yours Eternally, Soren Kierkegaard”
“You don’t understand, I need to be miserable” is an incredibly easy lie to ruin your life over
Beautiful.