‘Our office is on Rolighedsvej,’ I said, during a casual conversation with a colleague after a seminar. ‘Rolighedsvej?’ she replied, ‘H. C. Andersen died in Villa Rolighed’. I shivered. What a strange coincidence. The building next door to my office is called Villa Rolighed, an elegant eighteenth-century villa in what was once rural Frederiksberg and which is now part of the campus of the University of Copenhagen. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘I thought he spent his last years in Nyhavn?’ I knew this, because, at the time, I was living in one of the buildings in Nyhavn, a well-known seventeenth century canal in the city centre, where H. C. Andersen was known to have resided. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but he died in Villa Rolighed!’ What a surprise. A double nearness. I rushed home and looked it up. Yes, indeed, as is well known, H. C. Andersen lived at many addresses in Copenhagen in general and in Nyhavn in particular. The high volume of tourists gathering on the pavement outside several houses in Nyhavn every day, seeking a somewhat uncanny sense of closeness to the famous writer, is a constant reminder of this fact. Yet while Andersen spent his last years overlooking the canal in Nyhavn, where he was given two rooms by his benefactors the Melchior family who owned the first floor of number 18, he also partly lived in their summer villa, Villa Rolighed. This is where the Melchior family brought the famous writer on 12 June 1875 to nurse him during the illness from which he died on 4 August 1875. Yet, their summer house was Villa Rolighed on Østerbro, not the Villa Rolighed on Frederiksberg I can see if I lean out my office window. The double movement of nearness thus became a double movement of alienation, once again distancing H. C. Andersen’s mysterious ghostly presence from that momentary feeling of proximity in spatial terms, despite the undoubted temporal distance of the long dead writer to my everyday life.