Free Kerrigan in Copenhagen by Thomas E. Kennedy Page A

all, and welfare to all those who need it. Three sine qua nons of a true civilization, purchased with taxation.
    Turning from the sausage wagon, he realizes he has to relieve himself, considers stepping down into the Café Under Uret , the Café Under the Clock, an old establishment he sometimes visits on a fair afternoon when the tables are out front just at the rounded corner of Silver Square. It was established in 1883, the year Franz Kafka was born, originally as Café Roskilde, but a watchmaker moved in to the rooms above the café in 1906 and hung a large illuminated clock in the corner window above the café. When the watchmaker died, the owners of the café left the clock in place and changed the name of the café in its honor.
    Instead he makes use of the green wrought-iron pissoir just across Stockholmsgade, facing toward the National Museum of Art in the square named for Georg Brandes (1842–1927), commemorated there by a bust sculpted by Max Klinger in 1902. Brandes was the influential Danish literary critic who raised the work of Søren Kierkegaard out of international obscurity some twenty years after the philosopher’s death, writing about him and lecturing on his work in Germany, making it possible for the remainder of Europe to know his writings and for Frenchmen like Sartre and Camus, studying in Berlin half a century later, to fashion, of its basic tenets, braided with those of others such as Nietzsche, modern existentialism:
existence precedes essence
. And that made it possible for Camus to write
The Stranger
the year before Kerrigan was born, and for Kerrigan to read the novel twenty years later andunderstand from it that while each person is sentenced to death and might die at any moment, by leaping across the brook between reason and faith he could attain an hour’s peace, “and that anyhow was something.”
    Kerrigan stands over the zinc trough, eyes closed with pleasure, his water sizzling on the residue of leaves there, pleasantly redolent of Boy Scout outings in New Jersey of years gone by, as he thinks these things.
The Stranger
saved Kerrigan’s sanity, such as it is, when he read it in 1961 as a soldier stationed at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis, undergoing a security investigation for a top secret clearance where the investigators became acutely interested in the fact that he replied honestly to the question of whether he had ever had normal sexual relations with a woman. The investigator expended many hours over many months involving polygraph machines to explore the reasons for his virginity and to determine whether he had ever had abnormal sexual relations with a woman, whatever they were, or sexual relations with another man or with a beast.
    Finally they were satisfied with the obvious explanation: He was eighteen years old, had been educated by Irish Christian Brothers at all-boys schools for twelve years, and was shy. But in the meantime, Kerrigan had learned to identify intensely with the fate of M. Meursault in Algiers and with Josef K in Kafka’s
The Trial
.
    One scene from
The Stranger
continues to resonate in him more than thirty-five years later, straight out of Kierkegaard: Meursault sits in his prison cell considering all the things that might happen to him, one by one, all the way through to the possibility that they might come in that very day and execute him, and once he has run through the whole list of terrifying possibilities, he wins for himself an hour’s peace and thinks, “And that anyhow was something.” A reflection of Kierkegaard’s “Leap of Faith,” by which one runs through all the arguments for and against the existence of God, reaches the end point of final utter ignorance, then chooses the only way forward—the leap across the gap of that ignorance to the embrace of faith—be it a faith in God or the pleasure ofsensual existence or the simple assertion that although one dies and