Soren Kierkegaard

battlement of a castle, waving her veil. No sooner had he remembered
the verse than the conductor again shouted “Sie haben mit der Gardine
gewinckt.” Kierkegaard now sensed that the conductor wanted to talk with
him, and he quickl ytook out his dictionar yin the hope of finding an appro-
priate reply. He was unable to find anything suitable, and with a note of
despair in his voice the conductor now shouted “Um Gotteswillen” [Ger-
man: “For God’s sake!”]. Kierkegaard put his head out the window, looked
up at the conductor, and shouted the onl yGerman sentence he knew b y
heart: “Bedencken Sie doch, Ihre Hochwohlgeboren, dass ein Mann, der
so viele Universita ̈ten.. .” [German: “But you don’t think, dear sir, that a
man with so man yuniversities.. .”]. Then the conductor signaled and the
train started off again, as did Kierkegaard’s train of thought. He vainly
sought to understand the entire scene, and he shuddered a bit at the thought
that when he alighted from the carriage everyone would be able to see that
it was himself, one person, who had been the cause of all the confusion and
delay. It was not until they reached the station in Angermu ̈nde that the
conductor was able to explain the actual situation to Kierkegaard. The con-
ductor had not been shouting to him; there had a been a passenger in the
carriage ahead of him who had suddenl ybegun waving his curtain vigor-
ously, and according to the established railroad procedures this meant that
the train was to be brought to an immediate halt. Normall yone was sup-
posed to use a little flag that was rolled up and tucked under the seats in
each compartment, but in this case the passenger involved had evidently
decided to resort to the curtain. Or rather, he hadn’t done so, because in
fact the curtain had been set waving when the cord that was supposed to
have kept it in place had torn loose. Thus the conductor had misunderstood
the signal, whereupon Kierkegaard had misunderstood the conductor. Just
as he had misunderstood Regine and she had misunderstood him during
vespers in the Church of Our Lady.
On the da yafter his arrival in Berlin, Kierkegaard was close to collapsing
from exhaustion. When he had overnighted at the hotel in Stralsund, a
young girl in a room on the next floor had nearly driven him mad with a
silly piano medley. She had played Weber’s “Last Waltz,” which, strange
to say, was exactly the piece of music that had been among the first things
Kierkegaard had encountered on his previous trip to Berlin, when he had
heard a blind man perform it on a harp in the Tiergarten. Even while he was
still in Stralsund, everything seemed to remind Kierkegaard of his previous
journey, and when he had arrived in Berlin and had once again taken up
lodgings at the Hotel Saxen—at the corner of Ja ̈gerstrasse and Char-
lottenstrasse—with a view of the water, everything seemed like a weird
de ́ja`vu.