To Repeat or Not To Repeat: That is the Question

Abstract

I had never been in Copenhagen before, yet this was my second visit to the city. The purpose of my travel was to inhabit, at least for several days, the urban environment that once contained the peripatetic musings of Søren Kierkegaard. I went to Denmark’s capital in order to get closer to a vanished writer, a person now gone and replaced by his textual remnants. Words incite motions: I was there, standing right in front of the Vor Frue Kirke, in response to certain pages once read and pondered. My trip was a tribute to the affective consequences of libraries- books can be-come maps, passions, curiosities, displacements, attractions, resistances, temporalities. Ink in-flects life. In addition, after being in Europe I was planning on spending the upcoming summer back in the United States, learning the Danish language at the Kierkegaard Center in St. Olaf Col-lege, Minnesota. I’d reached the point where translation was no longer enough- I demanded a direct acquaintance with the original sound of Kierkegaard’s multiple voices. After many years of conversations and reasonings and debates, our friendship had turned into a relationship.