Kerrigan in Copenhagen by Thomas E. Kennedy Page B

Jørgens Sø, St. George’s Lake, stands Andreas Kolberg’s sculpture
A Drunken Faun
(1857)—a smiling boyish satyr drinking wine from a horn held high over his head so the wine runs down his face. He has feet rather than hooves and drags a half-empty wine sack along the ground behind him. His stick is discarded at his feet and his lion skin has slipped back, exposing his sex. Carl Jacobsen, the Carlsberg brewer, gave this faun to Copenhagen—a laughing, happily drunken lad, and, this being Copenhagen, there is no moral intent beyond the moral pleasure of joy.
    Yet as Kerrigan crosses the little park on the bank, he stops to consider a sculpture cut from the stump of a dying elm tree, infected by the epidemic that hit Copenhagen’s elms in the 1990s. This sculpture is by Ole Barslund Nielsen—a naked woman rises from the center of the broken double-trunked stump, a child to one side, and below, a seated figure in a hollowed arch in the trunk itself. It is entitled
In the Beginning Was the Word
. And in the end this tree sculpture will be worn away by the elements, like everything and every story.
    He loops across Gyldenløves Street to Ørstedsparken , can see from the street the statue of the great man himself: H. C. Ørsted (1777–1851), discoverer in 1821 of electromagnetism as well as of aluminum, comforterforter of Hans Christian Andersen. Kerrigan enters the park and his feet carry him further along its paths, past rows of antique bronze sculptures as his present moment melts continuously into his past and the present adds one increment of the future to itself, beneath the willows and beeches. He comes upon
The Dying Gaul
, a bronze made from a two-thousand-year-old Roman cast, itself made from an even older Greek one. The Gaul is wounded, naked, dying, balanced on hip and hand, head lowered, mouth in pain, eyes meeting death, his sword discarded on the bronze earth alongside his bronze hand, the warrior’s gold braid about his neck. What, Kerrigan wonders, is meant by the quiet agony of that face? And the response is from Chaucer, the dying White Knight’s song:
    What is this life
    What asketh man to have
    Now with his love
    Now in his cold grave.
    He turns back toward the lake.
    Kerrigan is exhausted. His wet shirt sticks to his back as he reaches Peblinge Sø , the lake bank where Hans Christian Andersen wept. He sits on a bench, closes his eyes, and remembers the lake two winters before, skaters and strollers on the frozen water before the Lake Pavilion on a freezing sunny winter Sunday.
    In the darkness behind his eyelids, his thoughts turn back to Kierkegaard and Johannes the Seducer and Goethe’s
Young Werther
. They are both dead, Goethe and Kierkegaard, two men from two centuries, sharing a part of the nineteenth, writing about the same thing from different angles. A Dane and a German. And an Irish-Danish American contemplates another aspect of the same thing that has very nearly undone him.
    The Sorrows of Young Werther
inaugurated a life of fame for Goethe atthe age of twenty-five. It is the story of a young upper-middle-class man of foolish sentiments, quick and self-centered, who falls in love with another man’s woman and commits suicide. W. H. Auden has said that the book made Goethe the first writer or artist to become a public celebrity. Auden opined that it was not a story of tragic love at all, but a portrait of a totally egotistical young man who is not capable of loving anyone but himself. There are other views of young Werther, however—speculations that Lotte strung him along, bewitching him with touches and glances to his destruction.
La belle Lotte sans merci
.
    If Werther killed himself in frustration over being unable to have Lotte, Kierkegaard’s Johannes sets about with incisive determination to have Cordelia, and he
does
have her via the fact, at the source of his strength, that he always has the idea on his side, a secret, like