up. Wasn’t that what had happened to me? Hadn’t I been brought to the point where I would sacrifice everything—only for him to leave off without the slightest advance having been made? Wasn’t I always asking myself—hadn’t other people, including a psychologist at the student center, repeatedly asked me—whether the whole thing was in my imagination? “As soon as she wanted to speak of it to another,” Kierkegaard wrote, “it was nothing.” The extent to which he left a girl with nothing was the very mark of his artistry. It meant having the self-control to not get her pregnant or abandon her at the
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