Paying Our Respects to Søren Kierkegaard
On Sunday morning, our last full day in Copenhagen,
we hiked out of the city center to the Nørrbro district.
Our destination: Søren Kierkegaard's final resting place
in Assistens Kierkegard, i.e., Assistens Cemetery.
It being the 200th anniversary of H.C. Andersen,
Copenhagen was rife with reminders (many of which were for sale) of that famous author, best known for his collections of fairy tales.
In contrast, you had to look much harder to find traces of Andersen's friend,
the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.
While I would like to see Copenhagen celebrate Kierkegaard a bit more, I realize that doing so would largely amount to transforming him into another commodity for Copenhagen's thriving tourism industry. And what might Kierkegaard have to say about that? "Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wander whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid."
The Coppenhagen City Museum houses a few of Kierkegaard's effects, including a writing desk, and a sculpture of Kierkegaard, which stands outside the Marble Church, was erected in 1972.
Having visited the aforementioned sights on a previous trip, Ira and I paid homage to the father of existentialism by visiting his gravesite and (ahem) posing by his wax replica in Louis Tussaud's Wax Museum.
Tussaud's was every bit the tourist trap that I expected it to be. I'm pleased to report that Kierkegaard's tomb attracted several visitors during our sojourn at the Assistens Cemetery, about as many as were wandering about Tussaud's.
Keeping in mind Kierkegaard's observation that "Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it," Ira and I lingered long enough at Assistens to savor a Carl's Dark and a Carl's Porter respectively. During our visit, a young woman kindly shot this photo of Ira and me.
we hiked out of the city center to the Nørrbro district.
Our destination: Søren Kierkegaard's final resting place
in Assistens Kierkegard, i.e., Assistens Cemetery.
It being the 200th anniversary of H.C. Andersen,
Copenhagen was rife with reminders (many of which were for sale) of that famous author, best known for his collections of fairy tales.
In contrast, you had to look much harder to find traces of Andersen's friend,
the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.
While I would like to see Copenhagen celebrate Kierkegaard a bit more, I realize that doing so would largely amount to transforming him into another commodity for Copenhagen's thriving tourism industry. And what might Kierkegaard have to say about that? "Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wander whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid."
The Coppenhagen City Museum houses a few of Kierkegaard's effects, including a writing desk, and a sculpture of Kierkegaard, which stands outside the Marble Church, was erected in 1972.
Having visited the aforementioned sights on a previous trip, Ira and I paid homage to the father of existentialism by visiting his gravesite and (ahem) posing by his wax replica in Louis Tussaud's Wax Museum.
Tussaud's was every bit the tourist trap that I expected it to be. I'm pleased to report that Kierkegaard's tomb attracted several visitors during our sojourn at the Assistens Cemetery, about as many as were wandering about Tussaud's.
Keeping in mind Kierkegaard's observation that "Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it," Ira and I lingered long enough at Assistens to savor a Carl's Dark and a Carl's Porter respectively. During our visit, a young woman kindly shot this photo of Ira and me.
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