søren K

On Sunday, Martin and I walked to Assistens Kierkegaarden, a beautifully landscaped park and cemetery just west of the city center, where Hans Christian Andersen, Niels Bohr and Søren Kierkegaard were all buried, interred, buried, respectively. It was an overcast, muddy day...perfect for roaming the grounds, dodging bare branches and noticing the relative silence inside the park's tall brick walls. People rode their bikes, pushed their baby carriages, and Martin translated several signs for me that read something like, "This part of the park is an active cemetery, so please sunbathe on the other side of that wall." You didn't much get the sense that it was a morbid place so much as a peaceful respite from the neighborhood around it.

I wanted to remark on the city's reverence for a certain philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, whose work I read throughout college in my Religious Studies major. His surname, coincidentally, is the same as the name of the park -- Assistens Kierkegaarden -- making the literal translation of his name Søren "Graveyard".


It's really no wonder, then, that the posh ground-floor restaurant named for him in the Royal Danish Library is called, simply,





...søren k.








I've included, for my fellow religion majors, a picture of his family plot, in that very kierkegaarden. (Ten points to anyone who recalls Professor Mark C. Taylor stealing dirt from his gravesite?)

I suppose I included this post because I found it remarkable how one man has been memorialized in so many different ways, though, as the story goes, he never got to realize any of his own academic fame; his work was only published post-mortem. It's led me to think a lot about unrealized potential, thought, and art.