The Final Apartment
“She Came Walking as if from the Lime Kiln”
In Copenhagen, moves from one apartment to another generally took place on the third Tuesday in April or the third Tuesday in October. In this way, furniture, servants, and other necessities could be where they needed to be by May 1 or November 1, respectively. When people moved, they tended to remain within the same neighborhood. Hans Christian Andersen lived at fifteen different addresses in Copenhagen, but always near the Royal Theater and Kongens Nytorv, which constituted a sort of focal point for him. Kierkegaard always chose to live near the Church of Our Lady and the old episcopal residence.
On moving day in April 1851 he made an exception, however, and moved outside the city ramparts to Østerbrovej, where he installed himself in a large, brand-new, suburban house, pleasantly situated with a view of Sortedam Lake. The house, which was torn down in 1897, was surrounded by gardens and truck farms, and the area generally had a rural character, as can be seen from Christen Købke’s well-known picture, “Østerbro in Morning Light” from 1836. There was room for two families on the ground floor and for one family on the floor above, which was where Kierkegaard moved in. The place had “an entrance and a view facing a pretty garden and the lake,” as Kierkegaard’s nephew Carl Lund described it in a letter to Peter Christian written in May of that year. Emil Boesen visited Kierkegaard there a couple of times during the autumn and wrote to his wife Louise back in Jutland that “Søren K.” had fine lodgings and that “he was his usual self, behaving as he generally does.”
Kierkegaard left his lodgings every morning and walked the half-mile into town. Later in the morning, the walk home would take him out of the city via Nørreport to the path by the lake or to Farimagsgade, and it was along this part of his walk that he often encountered Regine, who had quietly left her apartment on Bredgade. No words were ever exchanged during these encounters, but the once-engaged couple made up for the lack of words with the frenetic use of an entire vocabulary of gestures that they employed during the few palpitating seconds it took for them to pass each other. This was a sort of guilty guilelessness that had its own internal set of rules, sometimes bordering on ritual and always in accordance with the carefully calculated group of gestures on which it was based. Kierkegaard described their encounters in almost painful detail, noting times of day, distances, variations in route, wind direction, and general weather conditions. It was as if he wanted to be sure that the encounters could always be repeated, so that the two mute figures would eternally be able to glide slowly past each other on the same narrow little path along the lake, each disappearing in his or her own direction without looking back. “During the latter part of 1851 she encountered me every day,” he wrote retrospectively in May 1852. “It was during the period that I would walk home by way of Langelinie at ten o’clock in the morning. The timing was exact and the place merely shifted further and further up the road in the direction of the lime kiln. She came walking as if from the lime kiln. I never went one step out of my way and always turned off at the Citadel Road, even when one day she happened to be a few steps further along on the Lime Kiln Road, and I would therefore have encountered her if I hadn’t turned aside. That was how it went, day after day.”
As time passed, Kierkegaard had become “so frightfully well-known” that these encounters with a “solitary lady” in the early morning hours outside the city ramparts could have attracted attention and given rise to tongue wagging and gossip. He noted that another couple, who also encountered each other regularly and who “recognized both of us,” had begun to look at them with a little too much curiosity. On the other hand, he did not consider what Fritz Schlegel would think if he learned that his lawfully wedded wife was once again up and dressed and out of the house to take a walk so unusually early in the morning. Nor did he consider how he would have reacted if it had been Fritz who had regular encounters with—Regine Kierkegaard! Instead he permitted himself to slide into a little self-deception: Perhaps Regine was taking these little walks in order to arrive at a “reconciliation” with him, “in which case I would naturally have to insist that she have her husband’s consent.” Especially in the light of the fiasco over the episode of the sealed letter, which had merely requested something as innocent as a conversation, Kierkegaard ought to have said to himself that Fritz would never have given his “consent” to these far more intimate encounters. And indeed, after a certain point Kierkegaard could sense that these encounters had lost more and more of their innocence, and that he was ethically obligated to take action: “So I had to make a change.” On the first day of the new year he would choose a new route. “And I did so. On January 1, 1852 I changed my route and went home by way of Nørreport. Then there was a period when we did not see each other. One morning she encountered me on the path by the lake that had now become my usual route. And the next day I also went my customary way. She wasn’t there. Still, for safety’s sake I changed my route from then on, walking along Farimagsvej, and finally I gave up having any fixed route for my walk home.” This appeared to work reasonably well. “But what happened? After some time had passed she encountered me at eight o’clock in the morning on the avenue outside Østerport, the way I walk into Copenhagen every morning. The next day she wasn’t there, however. I continued to walk my regular route into town, which I cannot easily alter. She has often encountered me there, sometimes also on the ramparts, along which I walk on my way into town. Perhaps these are coincidences—perhaps. I cannot understand why she would want to walk that route at that hour of the day. But since I notice everything, I noticed that she was especially likely to walk that route when there was an east wind. So, of course, it might be because she cannot bear the east wind on Langelinie—though she also came when there was a west wind.”
Regine remained mysterious; she would come walking along, appearing out of nowhere, like a goddess, turning up at locations that seemed entirely coincidental, but scarcely were. She would fail to show up for a while, then reappear—even her choice of wind directions interfered with Kierkegaard’s inferences. “Then my birthday came. I generally tend to go somewhere on my birthday, but I wasn’t feeling entirely well. So I remained at home and walked into town as usual in the morning in order to speak with the doctor because I had considered celebrating my birthday with something new that I had never tasted before, castor oil. She encountered me right outside my door, on the sidewalk just at the beginning of the avenue. As has happened so often recently, I cannot keep from smiling when I chance to see her—ah, how important she has become to me!—She smiled back and then nodded in greeting. I went one step past, removed my hat, and walked on.” The description is very visual, with an elevated vantage point from which we can survey the entire scene: how the birthday genius with the sluggish bowels smiles at his beloved (though no longer girlish) Regine, who smiles to him in return. Then one step forward, hat off, and onward, away.
On the following Sunday, May 9, Kierkegaard went to church services at the Castle Church, where Paulli was to preach. Regine was also there and took her seat near where Kierkegaard was standing. Paulli, who had earned his doctorate in theology the year before and had therefore been granted the right to decide whether he would preach on the text of the Gospel or the epistle for that Sunday, chose to preach on the epistle, which for that Sunday happened to be James 1:17ff., the passage about every good and perfect gift coming from above, on which Kierkegaard himself had preached at the Citadel Church a year earlier. “The first religious impression she had of me is bound up with this text, and it is a text on which I have placed great emphasis. I hadn’t actually believed that she would remember it, even though I do know (from Sibbern) that she has read the Two Discourses from 1843 where this text is used.” When Regine heard the words from the epistle of James, she turned and, “concealed behind the person next to her,” she looked in Kierkegaard’s direction and—behold!—it was “sore fervent.” He consciously refrained from returning her look. “I looked straight ahead, at nothing in particular.” But it was a very demanding nothing in particular: “I confess that I was rather shaken by it as well. Paulli had finished reading the text aloud. She collapsed rather than sat down, so that I actually felt a little anxiety—such as I have felt on one previous occasion—because her movement was so vehement.”
The situation became still more agitated. For in fact, when Paulli began his sermon he said that the words of the text are “implanted in our hearts.” And indeed, he continued by asking whether, if these words “were to be wrenched out of your hearts, would not life have lost all its value for you?” Kierkegaard was not in doubt about Regine’s reaction: “It must have been quite overwhelming for her. I have never exchanged a word with her; I have walked my path, not hers. But here it was as if a higher power had said to her what I had been unable to say.” He reported his own condition: “I stood as though on glowing coals.”
Several days later he again encountered Regine, but he could not bring himself to greet her. It was as though the spiritual eros between them in church had brought him to his ethical senses. “I am amenable to everything, but if anything is to be done, I must have her husband interposed between us. Either/Or! If I am to become involved with her, it must be on the grandest scale, and I would want it to be known to everyone, with her transformed into a triumphant figure who would be granted the fullest restitution for all the disparagement that was her lot because I had broken my engagement to her. Still, I do reserve the right to give her a serious dressing-down for the vehemence she displayed at that time.” This sounds quite impressive, but Kierkegaard also knew himself well enough to know that his plans would never be put into effect, because “there are seventeen reasons why it cannot be done.” Seventeen was surely too low a figure!
September 10, 1852, was an especially important day for both of them: “So, I became engaged twelve years ago today. Naturally, ‘she’ did not fail to be right on the spot and meet me. And despite the fact that in the summer I go out walking earlier than I do at other times, … she encountered me both today and yesterday morning out on the avenues by Østerport.” When they had encountered each other the day before and had been just about to lose themselves, breezing along in their shared gaze, “she suddenly averted her eyes.” Kierkegaard wondered at this but the explanation came immediately thereafter. Regine had seen someone behind Kierkegaard, approaching on horseback, and had therefore looked away. On the anniversary of their engagement the encounter was more successful, though not entirely so: “So today she looked at me, but she did not nod in greeting, nor did she speak to me. Ah, perhaps she had expected that I would do so. My God, how very much I would like to do that and do everything for her. But I dare not assume that responsibility; she herself must ask that I do so. But I have very much wanted to do so this year.” All in all it may have been a good thing that their encounter had been thwarted. Kierkegaard was not about to “deck her out with celebrity” and become a success. Regine was not the person who had “first priority” in his life, because, as he reminded himself, that person was God. But it was a dialectical affair: “My engagement to her and the breaking of our engagement are actually my relationship to God; they are, I dare say, religiously understood, my engagement to God.”
The encounter on Christmas Day in the Church of Our Lady, where Mynster preached at the vesper service, was unusually intense. They had encountered each other here during previous Christmas services, but this year, 1852, there were cryptic circumstances. Kierkegaard had of course occasionally received letters—via the postal delivery office—from anonymous women who had enclosed little gifts, and the thought occurred to him that among these letters there might perhaps be one from Regine. Then on Christmas Eve a “little gift” suddenly arrived. “I don’t know how it happened, but it occurred to me that it might be possible that she could have done it.” He tells us nothing about the nature of the gift in question. We are told only that it had some connection to the preface of Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits, “but also, unless I am very much mistaken, also to the preface of those Two Edifying Discourses from 1843.” In the preface of those discourses Kierkegaard had addressed himself to “that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader”—who, of course, had originally been Regine. There are no items among the few surviving letters and notes that Kierkegaard received around Christmastime in 1852 that could be linked to Regine, but there must have been something.
When he went to vespers at the Church of Our Lady, he had forgotten about the “little gift,” but when he was about to enter the nave of the church, just as he turned in to the corridor on the right, there stood Regine. “She was standing there. She was not walking, she was standing there, apparently waiting for someone, whoever it was. There was no one there. I looked at her. Then she went toward the side door through which I was about to go. There was something strange about this encounter, so indiscreet. As she passed by me and turned to go through the door, I moved bodily in a motion that could have been merely a stepping aside to make room, but it also could have been a half greeting. She turned about quickly and made a motion. But now, if she had wanted to speak, she had no further opportunity, because I was already inside the church. So I went to my usual place. But it did not escape me that even though she sat far away, she incessantly looked at me. Perhaps she had been waiting in the corridor for someone else, perhaps for me, perhaps that little gift was from her, perhaps she had wanted me to speak to her, perhaps, perhaps.”
And perhaps, perhaps it was Regine herself who had been Kierkegaard’s little gift that evening, enchanting in all her ambiguous silence.
The Final Apartment
The Strube family had accompanied Kierkegaard in his move beyond the city’s ramparts, but they did not long remain a part of his household. When the Strube daughter was confirmed, Kierkegaard gave her a beautiful outfit, a shawl, and apparently some “gold ornaments” as well. On the afternoon of her confirmation day she strutted around the garden in all her finery, suddenly putting herself on display with visible delight, almost provocatively. Kierkegaard, who must have seen all this from a window up in his apartment, became alarmed at this, and perhaps, too, he was afraid of what gossips might say. In any event, he decided that Strube and his family were to move out and rent rooms elsewhere, which astounded the “somewhat crazy carpenter,” who could not understand what had happened.
This story is from A. F. Schiødte, a pastor in Aarhus, but he did not reveal his sources, so this will never amount to much more than an anecdote. Schiødte may have heard the story from Kierkegaard’s servant, Anders Westergaard, whom he had once met in Viborg, where Westergaard was then serving as a police officer. Not only did Schiødte, who was an enthusiastic admirer of Kierkegaard, obtain various biographical information from Westergaard, he also secured himself a relic: Westergaard sold him a hat that had formerly belonged to Kierkegaard, and Schiødte subsequently wore it around town on special occasions!
In October 1852, after something less than a year and a half out in Østerbro, Kierkegaard moved back into town and settled in a building that then bore numbers 5–6 on Klædeboderne (it is now number 38 Skindergade). The back half of the building had the address 5 Dyrkøb and was directly opposite the Church of Our Lady. It was in this part of the building that Kierkegaard rented three rooms on the belle étage from a Mrs. Borries, who had at first been rather skeptical about renting to him because she had heard that Kierkegaard was known for “making things more difficult” (as Johannes Climacus himself had described his mission in the Postscript), and this was not the kind of lodger she wanted in her rooms! But she received him politely, and after having inspected the rooms, Kierkegaard sat down on the sofa, looked around with eyes that Mrs. Borries found strangely captivating, and then said, in his fine voice, “Yes, I will stay here.” Mrs. Borries immediately gave up all her reservations and, as an exception to her usual practice, even agreed to arrange for domestic help. This job went to an impoverished shoemaker’s widow, who was trustworthy and capable, but unfortunately rather slow-witted and thus without the least sense for the irony and the little sarcastic remarks she witnessed every now and again. In other respects Kierkegaard was a quiet tenant, but when he began his attack on the clergy, Mrs. Borries became terrified at “the explosive power she had in residence.” Her terror, however, gave way to sympathy that culminated the day Kierkegaard was to be admitted to Frederik’s Hospital. For on that day, when she opened her door, there stood Kierkegaard, directly opposite her, in his doorway, standing “erect, though supported by someone else, and he took off his hat to her with a look that was just as enchanting as the one with which he had previously conquered her.”
When he moved into these much more cramped quarters at Mrs. Borries’ place, Kierkegaard probably rid himself of a portion of his library, which he sold to various used-book dealers, including A. G. Salomon, to whom he had already sold six rixdollars’ worth of books in the early part of June 1850. Kierkegaard generally had to accustom himself to a more modest standard of living, and during his final years he was subjected to a sort of financial oversight exercised by his brother-in-law Henrik Ferdinand Lund, who dispensed the remains of his now greatly diminished fortune in small allotments.
These more straitened physical and economic circumstances did not agree with Kierkegaard, but he was happy to be back in town again, because it was here, right in the middle of everything, that he belonged: “I am now living so close to the Church of Our Lady that I can hear the cries of the watchman at night when he calls out every quarter-hour. And when I occasionally awaken at night—well, a person might occasionally be quite interested in finding out what time it is…. He cries out in a loud, shrill voice, as clearly as if he were standing right next to me, and so loudly that he would awaken me if I were asleep (something I would not want): Hallo, watchman! Then, after this heroic use of his powers, he lowers his voice and softly says what time it is. And this is how it goes, from one quarter-hour to the next, from hour to hour. If I were to lay awake all night long, listening every quarter-hour, all I would get to know would be: ‘Hallo, watchman!’ ”
Kierkegaard was sleeping right across from the church whose bishop he would attack so furiously two years later.