Soren Kierkegaard

on closer inspection, it is an even more definite misdescription, inasmuch as
no person, of course, no matter how thin he tries to make himself, can enter
directly through a corner—one must look along each of the sides in order
to find an entrance. What an advantage for you, and what a difficulty for
the person who would enter! If the prospective entrant thinks he will find
you in Rosengaarden [Danish: ‘The Rose Court,’ a nearby street erron-
eously cited by Nielsen] you are sitting concealed in the shadows of Torneb-
uske. And when he then seeks you among the thorns, yes, then you have
moved to the sunny side, to live among the myrtles and roses.”
The philosophy professor, who here took great pains to imitate Kierke-
gaard’s style, apparently knew that in more ways than one, Kierkegaard was
a difficult person to pin down, and between the lines Nielsen implied that
he suspected Kierkegaard of having concealed himself at the opposite end of
the great angular apartment. Kierkegaard’s reply made it clear that Nielsen’s
suspicions were perhaps not wholly unfounded: The letter was oddly apolo-
getic and also informed Nielsen in no uncertain terms that visits prearranged
in writing were far preferable to those that were unannounced.
Although Kierkegaard could hardly complain about lack of space, there
of course also had to be room for servants. And there were more than a
few. From the 1850 census it can be seen that Frederik Christian Strube, a
thirty-nine-year-old journeyman carpenter from Iceland, his wife, and their
two daughters, plus Kierkegaard’s personal servant Anders Christensen
Westergaard, age thirty-one, lived in the apartment, which thus came to
resemble a sort of collective. Indeed, after only half a year the apartment
proved to be unsuitable, and they had to move to an even larger apart-
ment next door. If, one day, Rasmus Nielsen had managed to slip inside
that apartment he would have observed the following: Three of its five
windows illuminated the so-called salle[French-Danish: “grand room,
parlor”], and the remaining two an adjacent room. The plastered ceilings
were adorned with cornices. The walls had wainscoting below, above
which they were divided into panels covered with linen to which oil-
painted wallpaper had been glued. The inner edges of these panels were set
off by strips of gilded molding. Each room was supplied with a columnar
woodstove. The dining room, which had a four-chambered woodstove,
had windows facing the courtyard at an angle. The best parlors and the
dining room were connected by a hallway with two built-in closets, and
from there the apartment extended along the side of the house, first to a
two-windowed room (probably a bedroom), then to a room with a double
window, and finally to a kitchen with a chimney, a cookstove, a serving
table, cupboards, an iron sink, shelves, and racks for dishes. Off the kitchen,
there was a simple chamber for the servant, with rough plastered walls, and