Copenhagen has put out a fair number of banners marking Søren Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday. Danes, however, do not seem to be thronging the various Kierkegaard-related exhibitions. I’m wondering if they find his personal life less than inspiring. Kierkegaard inherited a modest fortune from his dad and, due to the lack of any need to work, found himself with a lot of time on his hands to brood and write. He fell in love with a 14-year-old girl (Regine Olsen) and then broke her heart. (Note that Elvis Presley also fell in love with a 14-year-old girl, Priscilla, but followed through with a marriage seven years later.) This exposed Kierkegaard to ridicule from contemporaries, such as P.L. Møller who wrote “[Regine] cannot grasp the fact that I both want to be engaged and also to break up, that I both want to break up and also not break up, both get married and not get married. She cannot grasp the fact that my engagement is dialectical, in that it both represents love and an absence of love.”
Cool photo from inside the Black Diamond. I ran a conference in the theater there several years ago – great space. (Here’s an amusing video from the event.) Very beautiful city.