Aloneness: the Holistic Alternative

What characterizes despair is just this—that it is ignorant of being despair.
–Søren Kierkegaard

But there are perhaps more truthful ways for me to express my diurnal existence here than this.

When Danes have been walking in the cold for a long time, upon stopping they always exhale strongly, vapor shooting out of their mouths.  I think they copied this habit from trains.  I always notice this when I arrive at the station in the morning, when it is still dark, and we are only lit as backdrops against the saturated fluorescence of the station’s lighting.  The Danes—and myself—also cry a great deal, an effect of the cold wind drying out one’s eyeballs and activating the tear ducts.

If it has snowed a great deal, and a train passes the station without stopping, the snow flies out of front of it, providing a freezing powder-shower and blinding you for a moment.  A second blast hits you once the last car passes.  I think the Danes give me a funny look when I intentionally stand right on the edge of the tracks to ensure this happens, but I’m busy wiping off my glasses when they’d do it.

The building in which Kierkegaard was born is now a bank, sporting neoclassical architecture.  I walk past it several times a day on the way to class.  I see numerous young women walk in to make transactions.

All the Danes speak English or at least understand it.  Whereas some other Europeans, like the French, exude a passive dislike towards hearing or thinking in English, the Danes always light up when they hear me speak.  In its own way, this tendency is equally awkward for the purposes of conversation.  Whether resented or eagerly studied, my presence is never as an equal in such countries.  They all seem to think that Ohio is a part of the Bible Belt, though I have not yet met a Dane who has heard of the Rust Belt.

One side of the trains is always very close to the bricks or mortar of the Metro tunnels of Copenhagen.  Staring at this side induces a kind of lateral vertigo. The opposite side, often aligned with Romanesque arches, appears much more graceful and grandiose, as the arcs rise and fall with the passage of my car.  Parallel trains seem to crawl along like snails; it is impossible for me to guess exactly how fast these trains move.

When I go north to Nørrebro—a region of Copenhagen with great coffee houses and a strong youth culture, but also known for significant gang activity—I always walk across the manmade lake-rivers of the city, which are frozen almost all the way down.  They are as wide as two city blocks, and walkers always look like specks as they traverse it, whether out of the practical desire to avoid traffic or sheer curiosity.

I went there today after my only class in the morning for a long but invigorating walk to Assistens Kirkegård, the enormous cemetery where Kierkegaard is buried (Kierkegaard is the old spelling of “cemetery” in Danish…insert off-color joke here).  The two other big names buried here are Hans Christian Andersen and Niels Bohr, who are of course of secondary interest to me.

After locating the entrance thanks to mostly-correct directions from a nearby veterinarian, I ran into the caretaker, a portly, jovial Dane who was, naturally, very interested in where I was from.

Caretaker: You are from America?  Oh, Ohio?  That is the Bible Belt, yes?
Tom: Yes.  Can I just make sure…this is the graveyard where Kierkegaard is buried, right?
Caretaker: Do not just go from place to place, visiting the famous dead.  Forget Kierkegaard.  Move about the cemetery slowly, absorb it in.  Your kind of movement is the American way.  That is why your economy is so bad.  You can have ten Obamas, the economy will still be bad.
Tom: Yes.  Is there a map of the cemetery I could buy?
Caretaker: This is a socialist country.  The maps are free here, it is not Obamaland.

So I took one of their enormous maps, and though I intended to take his advice on taking in the whole cemetery, I couldn’t resist going straight to Kierkegaard.  Unfortunately, my camera’s batteries died again, so I can’t show you the place, but I can try to describe it.

Kierkegaard is buried in the oldest part of the cemetery.  Though it is close to the street, I heard no signs of traffic or human noise as I approached his grave.  He is buried with his family, his mother and siblings; he had no children of his own. I looked at the dates on the stone–born 5 May 1813, died 11 November 1855–and I was struck, like never before, at how short his life was.  The tombstone bears an inscription which was partially covered with snow; I was extremely curious to discover it in its entirety.  I stood there for about five minutes, conflicted over what I was about to do, before I opened the iron gate of his garden sepulcher and kneeled over his body, brushing off the snow.   For a moment I was overcome with the realization that I was standing on the father of Existentialism, before I stepped back out.

Unfortunately, I still couldn’t read the inscription, so I walked over him one more time to clear off more snow.  When I stepped back, the limestone tablet appeared engraved with two kinds of lettering: black enamel on top, blinding white near the bottom (the letters caked with snow).  The inscription is in old Danish, which I copied down:

DET ER EN LINDEN TID,
SAA HAR JEF VUNDET,
SAA ER DEN GANSKE STRID
MED EET FORSVUNDET,
SAA KAN JEG HVILE MIG
I ROSENVALE
OG UAFLADELIG
MIN JESUM TALE.

I looked at the resting place for twenty more minutes, spreading my coat out on the ground and crossing my legs Indian-style, exposed to the elements.  But it didn’t feel cold to me at all.  All the people I saw in the cemetery were walking dogs, and by some of the graves I could see fresh urine (K. was spared).  An old woman approached, and I asked if she could translate it: she couldn’t, as the language had changed too much since then.

I packed up, put my coat back on (which was freezing from being on the ground), and prepared to depart.  But it was unexpectedly much harder to leave the grave than it was to approach it.  I had no trepidation when I arrived, but there was something deeply sad about leaving him, now.  I thought about the caretaker, no doubt passing by here every day, anti-America vitriol running through his mind, and never stopping at a single monument to avoid partiality towards the dead.  I noticed the cross above the grave, which was decked with snow on both arms but whose top was barren, its scalp warmed for being nearest the sun.  There were crows and ravens cawing in the trees, whose branches forked rather than curved, forming dark fractal patterns against the pure-gray cloud line.  I periodically sensed another dog-walker and lurched self-consciously, but it was just the sighing of tree branches, or an errant bird.

And I thought about the man below me who believed that the only authentic way to live your life was through a constant oscillation between despair and unshakeable Christian faith, and who now found his home in a place infinitely more tranquil and nurturing than any graveyard in the States or anything he could call home while living.  I almost wished, then, that he had been forgotten, his body stuffed away in some dark alley like Andersen’s little match girl, caked by the quotidian grime of the city; or else lost entirely, survived only by a lavishly prepared but empty grave, the beautiful chafe balanced by a hollow kernel.

This place was too wholesome for the man, for the life, it sought to encapsulate.  The unknown caption solidified my doubt. I wandered the cemetery after that, recognizing only a handful of names, and taking shortcuts over the fresh snow, stepping on God knows how many buried dead.

On the train ride home, a Turk was sitting behind me talking on his cell phone, and I could sense how alone he was, for the first time.  I caught a few Danish words and intonations as he spoke; no doubt, he had merged his native tongue and Denmark’s in an attempt at solidarity.

I asked my host mother about the inscription, and she offered a possible translation, whose clauses were all fucked up and parts of speech nonsensical, and I remained unsated.  She was kind enough to send me an email with a historical explanation of the caption and its relation to Kierkegaard, who specially chose it for his grave.  I was just curious enough to use Google Translate and a couple more internet searches to arrive at a further explanation.  So I can now present my own translation of the passage, a Danish psalm from the nineteenth century:

It has been a short time

and now I have won,

and the strife has now,

suddenly, disappeared;

I now rest in the halls of roses

and unendingly

talk with Jesus.

Advertisement