Climacus reports a scene overheard, seen in a fugitive glance through leaves as he sat on a bench at twilight in “the garden of the dead,” a cemetery, most likely Copenhagen's Assistens Kirkegård. The scene is the grief of a grandfather mourning at the grave of his son, and speaking tearfully of the meaning of that death to a ten-year-old boy, his grandson, now fatherless. The “garden of the dead,” as it is called, is not at the city's center, but at some remove; not out in the wooded parklands, but nevertheless sufficiently alive with nature's leafy shadows and open skies that Climacus can exalt in a kind of minor ecstasy over the coming of night – as if night were an invitation for a “nocturnal tryst,” a beautiful prelude to the more tearful tableau ahead. But what can the night tell us of mood, yearning, and heartache? Night beckons with the promise of a