The Solitary Dane

Before I went on any trip, I tried to get maps to help in finding my way around unfamiliar cities and nations. Even using a map, I often was diverted by unexpected encounters with sights (often strange) and strangers (usually pleasant). If I got lost, a map showed me the way back to my hotel.

I unfolded the city map of Copenhagen showing all the streets in the city. Several large, pale green blank spaces were stamped “Kierkegaard” in black letters. I had just read the biography of the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard. When I saw his name on big areas of the map, I laughed out loud.

The Danish word “Kierkegaard” translates to “Church yard” or “Cemetery.” Soren Kierkegaard was a depressing, solitary man. To me it is appropriate that his name means “Graveyard”.

In Paris after World War II, John Paul Sartre advocated Kierkegaard’s existentialism. The Danish philosopher became the rage among intellectuals. I did a paper on Kierkegaard while I was in college. The professor gave me an “A”, although I really couldn’t understand what the Dane was writing about. I wonder if my teacher did.

Like Hans Christian Andersen, Soren Kierkegaard was a very strange fellow. Andersen was famous throughout Europe when Kierkegaard was born in 1813. The child Soren grew up to be contemptuous of Andersen and his fairy tales. While Andersen was friendly and gregarious, Kierkegaard was morose and solitary.

Kierkegaard’s father was a wealthy merchant. Soren never had to work for a living. All his stress and suffering came from his emotions.

As a young man, while in seminary to become a minister, he proposed to a young woman. In Copenhagen I walked down the Vesterbrogard (westerly paved street) to the city museum, which has a room devoted to Kierkegaard memorabilia, including the engagement ring. What a rock! It must be more than a carat. Kierkegaard broke the engagement. The young woman married someone else. I don’t know whose heirs gave the ring to the museum.

From the museum I talked on the cobblestone streets across the center of Copenhagen to the old church near the harbor where young Soren preached several sermons while training to become a minister. I sat in a back pew and rested my feet as I quietly contemplated the life of Kierkegaard and wondered why people are influenced by the writings of this peculiar man.

Soren refused to be ordained and broke away from the state church. The official church in Denmark is Lutheran. Most Danes are nominally Lutherans. Emphasis on “nominally”. Soren’s older brother became a Lutheran minister and seems to have lived a fairly normal life.

Kierkegaard maintained that no religion could be “proved” by objective evidence; he was a Christian by a “leap of faith.” His writings stress the “single individual.” My daughter, knowing I was interested in Danes and all things Danish, gave me a book of Kierkegaard’s “Christian Discourses.” I tried to read it but always fell asleep after a few paragraphs.

Kierkegaard did not want to share his life with anyone. For the rest of his life he lived alone in the family townhouse, writing numerous books and articles expounding his philosophy. In his leisure time he ordered expensive meals and hired carriages to drive him -- always alone -- around the boulevards which replaced the ramparts that had hemmed in the center of the old city.

In the biography I read was a drawing of a cobble-stoned square, at that time the center of the city. On the corner behind the fountain was the Kierkegaard home, a handsome four-story townhouse. I found the square, looking just as pictured 150 years ago, with the fountain still shooting up little cascades of water. On the site of the Kierkegaard home was a Chinese restaurant.