Kierkegaard, like Kafka, found a sense of release in the renunciation of his beloved, which furnished the material for his most successful book, Either/Or, with its famous "Diary of a Seducer" that has itself seduced generations of readers, only to disappoint salacious expectations. "But to walk like this alongside a girl whose love I truly had not disdained," he later wrote in his journal, "but which I had to give the appearance, humanly speaking, of disdaining: Yes, this is the task for me." 

Kierkegaard wrote Either/Or immediately after setting himself this strange task, on his first visit to Berlin, where he was present at the most serendipitous convocation of the century. Schelling, the last great philosopher of German idealism, had re-emerged from retirement by royal command, an aged Jason to confront the dragon's teeth of the Young Hegelians. Attending Schelling's first lecture was the cream of the Continent's intellectuals: Bakunin, Engels, Stirner, Burckhardt, Humboldt, Ranke, Savigny and Trendelenburg. Kierkegaard was not impressed. He came home determined to take philosophy neither to the Left nor the Right. Instead, he decided to take a leap of faith. 

For that, he has never been forgiven, either by the atheists or by the orthodox Christians. He does not figure on many academic reading lists. Yet his life story was stranger and more romantic than fiction. Regine told her side of it some 60 years later. Kierkegaard remains the patron saint of anyone who has ever been lonely, despairing or unhappy in love. And that includes most of us.