World’s best novel? Sorry, I haven’t got the time to write it

Sven Wifstrand  e-mail: svensays@gmail.com Update: 2008-11-23

Link to Swedish version

I am a super beginner. I have begun lots of things, but hardly one of them has been completed or even carried on for any long time. Living has, to my surprise, been going on for fifty-eight years, given you can count this as one (1) life, all those rags and small notes that lie scattered along various obscure routes where somebody looking like me is said to have been sighted. JE est un autre, Rimbaud says in a letter. It was not me, Shaggy says in his rap, smiling sardonically. That is real self-denial, isn’t it?

Once I believed I was somebody, and if you believe that, you are certainly not satisfied with being who you are, but you want to be something more and more etc. I wanted to be a poet, yes, I wrote poems and wanted people to pay attention to what I wrote. They did not, not very much, and that is no wonder, considering who were my idols: Stagnelius, [Swedish romantic poet], Hölderlin, Vilhelm Ekelund, [Swedish writer of beautiful poems and enigmatic lyrical prose] all of them being known for having written very much for their drawers. I should have stuck to Byron instead. That man with the crippled foot? Yes, one physically or one socially disabled, the one is as good as the other, don’t you think?

"I have always thought", you say, but did you really think so all the time? What you were thinking when you were born can probably be found out through hypnosis, but else, is there any opinion or experience that you have stuck to during all the time you were conscious of yourself? If there is, I think that is what really indicates that it was really me, and not some other undefined beings, who lived through all those happenings. I think, therefore I exist, they claim that Descartes said, but how many of us have really read the work where he says so?

Frequently, I wake up from a dream, having a strong feeling not that it was reality, but that it reflects something I have been through and afterwards forgotten. Could it be somebody else’s experience that came to me while sleeping? Well, how did he say, Rimbaud? The "I" is someone else, at least partly. Being a fifty-year-old man I am still in some sense a child, and in some sense a woman, to the extent that I have learnt from women’s more complicated view of the world. If you are a woman you may be astonished of me saying so. Good! Keep being astonished, and it may end with me becoming a woman in more senses, or with you understanding me.

To be a child, to be like a child. I am not thinking of Jesus now, but I am thinking of the vulgar saying about modern art: a child could do that. Exactly. He who says so, says something about himself: HE DOES NOT RESPECT CHILDREN. In today’s upbringing and education of children you do not work hard feeding the children with lots of grown-up doings and grown-up knowledge, but you pay attention to the ways children experience the world. The artists had this view already a hundred years ago!

To be a woman. Through the history of Western culture, those 2500 years that we have a good view of, there goes a long procession of artists who see woman as a heavenly creature, and another one of law-givers who see her as a piece of property. Occasionally, they march together, like in a hiphop video where boys wear heavy coats and hats and big shoes, while girls wear the smallest of bikinis. Cry out loud that the right to be who you are must belong to both sexes, cry it out loud, over and over again. What does S:t Paul cry out for the Galatians to hear: There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

How did it happen that the Church lost this outright message? A woman who lets herself be burnt because she believes in Jesus, she is a good woman, you may have her as your idol, but a woman who is alive, craving for her rights, she is dangerous even today. To whom? To them, above all, who have something to gain from sustaining the old ambiguous vision of Woman. Then what is the truth about woman? Oh my, I am starting to talk like a preacher. O Woman, create your own truth, I believe in you! End of sermon.

But we have equality, haven’t we, well, it is still a long way to go, but at least we see equality as an ideal, still far away, but we can make it real? Yes, under democracy we talk openly about what must be changed in order to make progress, but the role of a woman, any woman, in this dialogue is for herself to define.

If I, a man, should yet make a statement on Woman, then I am much for the deity thing. Like many other men, indeed. The Venus of Urbino by Titian has far more truth than "the hat gets it and the bonnet gets it not" [much-quoted ruling from a Swedish regional law of the 13^th century, meaning that only men can inherit]. What did I say about a complex view of the world? Woman sees many things in one, like God. I do not believe in God but this is a good substitute, don’t you think? Just joking. Let us have another try: that phenomenon which male thinkers through the ages describe as woman never being able to decide, never to be trusted, etc, it is no fault, it is a potential of hers, I mean. Being a man, I feel free to admire women, not only various individuals for various reasons, but all of them because they are women.

We men who have this feeling also know that women often have a trouble in accepting it, but we cannot decide for them how to interpret us. Our feelings belong to us. Shall women admire men equally, then? Stupid question to put for a man. He must be silent, not trying to make up some stupid answer.

However, you boys who think girls are simply too cruel, and you boys who like boys more, I am your friend too! Never think that I am writing this to persuade anybody in any issue. Still, it is unexpectedly hard to write down lots of thoughts and results that are your own, without loading your text with reasoning, as if you wanted others to agree with you.

I mentioned some literary idols before. Who do you think wrote this:

Whoever will remember the ills he has undergone, those that have threatened him, and the light occasions that have removed him from one state to another, will by that prepare himself for future changes, and the knowledge of his condition. - - - If every one would pry into the effects and circumstances of the passions that sway him, as I have done into those which I am most subject to, he would see them coming, and would a little break their impetuosity and career; they do not always seize us on a sudden; there is threatening and degrees.

 [Translated by Charles Cotton, 1877. The text was put into the web by Oregon State University]

Only a teenager, I already was fascinated by the endless verbosity of Michel de Montaigne. I too could do that, I thought. I filled notebooks with daily entries, I read a lot of books in regular studies or just for myself, and I thought of my reading, walking far in the Scanian plains where I grew up, and where I even today feel good every time I come. But this is a lonely life, living with books! You write as if you are talking to someone, who yet is not there. The modern Montaigne would do good if he went around with a tape recorder, talking to people, but I did not realise it then. Today, modern technology provides us with yet a new way of talking, or should we say a new channel on which you can send and receive, promising new possibilities which are still very little used. You, my reader, would you like to take part in e-mail-philosophy, or will you go for the chatroom Deep Thoughts On Existence?

It is well known that novelists reap lots of stuff from their own lives to build up their allegedly fictitious stories. There is a whole line of literary history, "laundry bill research" they often say, which aims at finding out who is who in fiction compared to reality. Some writers even are dragged into law suits by people who think they are unfairly portrayed in novels. I am NOT Carl–Ivar Rydberg, the obscure brother of Carina Rydberg [Swedish writer of scandal who gained fame by a novel intended to take revenge on a guy who had refused to lend her money]. My method is far more treacherous. You, my friend, may well figure in this story without ever having the slightest idea about it! What evil is in that? Well, I will be the only one to score the points, if there ever will be any. Carina’s Roffe, I think his name was, he too has become a much talked-about person by his unvoluntary posing in a novel, but I will not give you any such prospects. Your only chance is to burst in like Markoolio [Swedish hiphop comedian] shouting: It’s me! It’s me! and taking over the show. Would I really start writing the world’s best novel, it would be a cyber-interactive-documental soap opera whose actors take part in writing it, with hackers trying to break in to influence the work or just to spread manure in it.

I have not brought it that far yet. I always was - well, well, did you say always? – yes, I always was slow. I got my teeth late, started talking late, my baby teeth stayed long in place and so on. A sperm of Montaigne’s over-rich seed stayed on me when I was eighteen, and now at fifty it is time to give birth. I am in some way a woman, as I said before.

If I had been more eager to follow Byron’s trail, would that have made me faster? He was the one who said: I awoke one morning and found myself famous, he was 24 then. He got much sought after in society, and big game for ladies of the highest ranks. Still, all his life he had the feeling of being an outsider, just like me. He was famous instantly, and also it did not take long before he was tired of it. He died at 36, burning himself out. I think it may be healthy to be slow.

I never was close to death, but at least I was near its realm when I was in intensive care, rigged with pipes and instruments. Heart infarction struck me when I was right in the middle of Stockholm city. If this had happened some miles from Grangärde [faintly understandable reference to Swedish poet Dan Andersson, who was born in that village and also died young] I probably would not have been able to sit here writing now. During the first month of the first year of the present millennium eleven days of my life went by in a clinic, in a state of utmost stillness, with a band of nursing angels always near. But Sven dear, I say, you can’t really be that dreamy about lying in a hospital! Sorry, but I often think of how cute the nurses were, and almost all the patients being men, those two facts surely were determinative for the mood of the place. My daily pill, ever since then, looks like a little heart.

Weak men and caring women. A picture often painted, in various kinds of frames. I have seen neglective women too, believe me. The doctor who gave me calming pills when I was already totally passive. Mothers who smoke when they are out walking with their babies. Ladies who spend some evening hour in a gym, having sugar buns with their coffee afterwards. Sisters, brethren, let us not look down upon those who from ignorance and fear abuse their gifts, but will we instead pray for them with all our hearts, that their souls be enlightened now and forever! May all our wrath go against those dark forces who make use of forlorn souls to thrive: the pills industry, the tobacco giants, the prophets of the Cult Of The Body.

The Preacher in me had some more exercise, as you see. I was brought up in a Christian, Lutheran, creed, and on the whole I remained in it up to about the age of 15. Those years, like many adolescents, I started reading and writing poetry and taking interest in many kinds of art and culture. Thus I got into some aestethic "religion", and I can say that I never got out of it since then, even if it has been maturing. Now, like then, I am convinced that art, music, literature etc are not only some decoration for your leisure, but a force active in building your life.

Faith is one such force for many people. Man has a need of seeing more than the eyes see. When we study religion, and I have done that for a considerable time, we look upon the differences between religions. The typical in them, and the struggles between them, mostly root in historical and social contingencies. We seldom inquire the depths that contain what they have in common. All religions (satanism possibly not) want to do the same: show to men that there is more strength to gain beside the forces that they can use on purpose.

I get that strength from the stillness of nature. A wood with rocks and tiny lakes early on a summer morning, like here in Nacka where I live, or a wide sandy beach in Scania, facing the vast open sea, those are places where I worship in my own way. But in winter where do you go? Into hibernation, if I could choose. I do not like winter.

I love spring. To find hepatica near a pile of snow. To sit basking by the lake and see the grey, aging ice breaking up. To have a picnic in a meadow, surrounded by birches clad in fresh pale green.

I love summer. The time near the beginning of June when the oaks have got their leaves and the weather is nearly always fine. The rich jungle-like green in the middle of the summer, with its deliciously shifting shades in the evening sun. The delight, with some tears, of seeing the girls who walk around with their cell phones and water bottles, wearing almost no clothes.

I love autumn. To sit by the sea, just looking, reading some meditational piece by Vilhelm Ekelund:

The sea in chilly days of autumn is stormy, the breaking waves rush in against the rocks like big white animals from the sagas. How wonderfully bright it is to sit down below the lighthouse where the sea aster is in bloom, light and blue in the white foaming clefts. This bright storm of sun, this singing blue and golden flow, cast a spell of symbolic, mighty, earnest and yet so full of joy. This bright clear storm stretches the mind out in calmness of delight …

Winter. No comments.

But spring will come! Do you want a dacapo of our symphony? OK, I lead the band – two, three, four – spring is a jumping vivid allegro! Summer is a slow movement: we lie on the beach or in a hammock. Autumn is a scherzo: we gather tomatoes to throw at each other. And then winter ….. morendo. Is there a symphony which ends with a song of grief? Certainly, the 6^th by Tchaikovsky, but in Russia it is always cold, isn’t it?

Lovely spring! Vivaldi! Quattro Stagioni, not only a pizza but also a happy entrance for me and lots of other people into classical music. But please tell, what is classical? Not so easy nowadays when Louis Armstrong and the Beatles are classics too. Serious music, as if other music is just entertainment? Wrong. Artful music, as if other musicians did not see their work as a work of art? Still wrong. I would like to say "sit still and be silent"-music, because that is the rule of the opera house and the concert hall in our time. But not in Vivaldi’s. For Bach it may have been the rule in church, but clearly not in the coffee houses where he played much of his secular music.

I love many kinds of music, because you need different music for different moods. The blues, I sit rocking, feeling the vibrations of the bass in my stomach. Dixieland, I leap up, wiggling my bottom. The Wiener Walzer, I rotate, feeling like autumn leaves in a whirlwind! I jump and flap with Billy Joel in Uptown Girl, I jest with Shaggy in Boombastic, I long to go far away to Madonna’s La Isla Bonita! But of course there also is a time for the music of "sit still and be silent", by my standards rather a long time. Spending six hours with Wagner’s Twilight Of The Gods is like living a whole life in a comprised version.

Why did the dangerous doctor think I needed a sedative? She felt that I was afraid. Afraid of what? Afraid of the unknown. I had no idea of what was wrong when I hardly kept my balance, my stomach ached, I slept very little and I had the feeling of wearing a cap inside my skull instead of on top of my head. No test showed anything that could explain. No real lack of balance, I always was able to keep it when the doctor was there. No infection. No sore stomach or other internal damage. I dragged myself along the streets of the town of Lund, hoping that if I kept moving I would finally break down and be taken into a hospital, and … well, I didn’t meditate so much on what would happen then.

I returned to my lonely chamber, pulled the blind and put a knitted cap on my head to see if the warmth would be soothing. In the disc-player: symphony no 2 by Anton Bruckner. That music is like sun shining through the lifting mist and a light wind among the trees. I thought: YOU MUST BE KIND TO YOURSELF!

(and here the scholiast prudently has added: "because you cannot trust that others will")

Next day I went to the fourth or fifth doctor, can’t remember, I had quite an argument before they consented to letting me in. And he found out what was wrong: I had tensional headache. I did not even know there was a suffering thus named, and apparently some doctors did not know either. How eased I felt when I knew that I on the whole was not particularly ill. The mere knowledge of this became the cure!

I was not afraid when I sank into an easy chair to wait for the ambulance, not when they drove me in the ambulance, not when I lay as a packet in Intensive Care – there was a Danish nurse, I could speak a little Danish to her, it was nice – not when I lay on the table with local anaesthesia hearing the unnecessary chattering of the staff during the cardiac operation. I was just irritated that they had to move me into another hospital for the operation. The orderly who was with me in the ambulance lives in the same block as me. When I met him in the streets later, he told me that he had thought: "that guy who is standing, he surely is not so sick that we must drive him", and I had risen at just that moment because it felt quite as bad to sit or to lie back, but I was never afraid.

I am not afraid today. I shall not be afraid. You shall not be afraid. People who are afraid hurt each other, believing that thus they will be less afraid. _ _ _ _ _ and . . . . . . keep firing at each other because they are too afraid to sit down and talk. I could take my banjo and sing like Pete Seeger: WE ARE NOT AFRAID! You are afraid of me, because you fear that I may be quite different from what I look like, but I am not afraid of you, only sad. You do not understand what I say, and I do not understand you, because you are looking away while you talk. You are not looking at me, but at a monster picture of me that you have painted from your imagination. It is never too late to look one another in the eyes, instead of looking at a ghost which only one of us can see. Do not be afraid!

Can I walk with my eyes wide open

through the world full of cross-eyed withhold?

Yes I can, but I know there will be times

when it feels easier to go blindfolded.

Many decisive answers are given

by those who did not hear what was asked

and the deepest wounds can never be seen

least by the knives.

The weak make life hard

to get hard themselves.

The sombre sneaking thoughts

cover your face with slimy hands

but disdain will hurt no one

no one but the disdainful.

Our will is a blunt weapon.

In dreams all happens by itself

therefore dreams are better than life.

Life slips away from our hands

but dreams were never there.

Dreams were never there!

In the night, near to the sea

the counsel of strange powers is heard

on all that our distorted will and infected thought

the stinking drains of a starving mind

has struggled to ruin during day.

Yet in the morning we know nothing more

of the strength that somewhere beyond is still there:

the darkness, the eye, the dreams.

You there who choose an odd road

not wanting to meet me:

it is true that I walk straight, with a steady eye

but everything else in me is truly unmartial

- hope to see you some time!

 This was me, a quarter of a century ago. I told you I wrote poems, and this is one of them. I tried to enter into a manner of speech similar to Friedrich Hölderlin or Vilhelm Ekelund, but today I can discern the Preacher being there too as a co-worker. At that time I was unaware of it, but actually I once had this and some other poems on a recital programme in the Lund Cathedral, invited by a curate that I knew. Did she see my spirit with a sharper eye than I did myself, then? Also today I feel unsure about my flair for witty endings. It seems to me now that I had trouble in handling the tension between my fear of feelings and my attempt to form my own style of address.

 The Preacher has an old mate, let us call him the Platonic. Plato was, as many people know, a classical Greek philosopher who is said to have a "theory of Forms". The Platonic is that guy who claims that Soul is more worth than Body. Everyone who says "beauty comes from within" is in some way familiar with him. I, who have known him close for a long time, actually now am tired of him, because he can not give me an acceptable answer to one important question: If there really is Soul and Body, and Soul is the important part, why do we then care so much about superficial things like neat clothing, good food and flowers in the window? The ladies who think of what jewelry to wear while they are decorating themselves, looking in the mirror, is it in fact unnecessary for them to do that? The world would be terribly dull, wouldn’t it, if all mankind were clothed in old sacks and all houses were painted in the cheapest-to-find colour, but when that old buddy is up and running, he really thinks this is the way it should be!

 You also can call him the Ascetic, from a Greek word meaning "exercise", and the aim of his exercise is to raise the power of the Soul and castigate the poor Body. After all these years that I have been meditating on these ideas, reading millions of pages, I think we should grant this old friend a medal and a pension, and we will hire the Preacher to give him an eulogy - …. some time.

 The poem starts and ends with the image of walking along a road. That’s me. In the past, and in the present. Always was, always will be. Nunc et in aeternum. If you believe in reincarnation, then I am an eternal wanderer. The nirvana thing, to coagulate for ever, I think it is nothing for me. Yet when I call myself a wanderer I do not think in the first place about christian and romantical symbols of life as a path to follow, but I think of the mere physical activity of walking! My energetic parents were successful in handing this habit over to me: the whole family made long walks, to sites of interest when were on holiday, or Sundays to some little church in the countryside.

 Like many before me, I have found that walking outside is good for thinking. Jogging is not that good, because it makes you hot and tired. Cycling or driving a car, you must be observant of the road and the environment. Going by boat, I cannot tell, being no sailor. Train is obviously good since I started writing this piece when going by train back to Stockholm from Scania. But best of all is walking!

 One of the many: Friedrich Nietzsche. He got sick leave from his professorate in Basle, and for the rest of his life was touring around to places where he felt just a little little better. Walking all by himself in the Alps or along the Mediterranean, he thought of the learned work he had produced in the academic chambers, and then he thought of what he just had scribbled in a note-book or typed out sitting in his hotel (must have been one of the first typewriters, I think), and then he told himself: only those thoughts you have gained by walking are anything worth. And I, roaming the Scanian plains, the alps of Alto Adige or the rocky shores of Malta, carry these words through the decades as a mantra or a benediction:

Nur die ergangenen Gedanken haben Wert.

Through all these years, I never ever put the question that occurs to me right now: Are you sure that all these thoughts really have worth? Couldn’t you walk yourself into bad thoughts as well? Surprised as I am, that this comes forth only now, I can give just a partial answer. It is obvious that if you sit at home, by yourself, looking at the wall, or if you are doing some tiresome household work while brooding over your problems, it must be destructive. Then, if you call someone on the phone or see someone outside to talk a little, it can be useful, but if this person is not available or does not understand you, I think you will feel still worse afterwards. When you are out walking, sooner or later you step over something that distracts you, making you change your line of thought, but can you really know immediately whether the new line is a good or a bad one?

I really ought to be sure of this, having been in this sport for so long. Sincerely, I can not find in my memory any moment when my walked-into thoughts were bad. Is it because you are not sufficiently critical against yourself in your inner talks?

And now for some self-criticism. Household work is not always that dull. What do you do on a rainy day, yourself feeling low? Read a book? Which book, I’ve read them all. Hear music? Not so easy to choose, and probably will help only for a moment. I know: make a dough and knead buns from it. This small amount of exercise at the baking table, and the satisfaction you get from smelling the newly baked bread, will heighten your mental state with megahearts!

Those many wandering thinkers were all lonely people, but is it necessary that you walk alone to capture the good thoughts that come flying? Isn’t it really like this, you go on meditating on ideas that you already have come to through reading and conversations? Often when I was out, I asked myself, wouldn’it be a treat to walk together with some befriended soul and think out loud? It is a pity that I never could try this, because no soul of that kind ever showed up. The woman I shared a life with for 20+ years was the kind who rather sit talking inside somewhere, and she used her superior intelligence and mastery of the spoken word to keep me down rather than to favour a sincere talk. Am I bitter about this? Bitter because of myself, then, who could not find a way out of this narrow den. Instead I got into a state of nearly lameness which increased the damage. It can take twenty more years for me to understand how this can happen, you try to be earnest and end by being seen as a dangerous person!

A little more than a year after the heart attack I visited the town where I was born, Lund in southern Sweden, to take part in an academic event which was held to celebrate the memory of my father who was a professor in classical Greek. Many people whom I hardly had seen since my student days were there. While sitting on the train back home, with mixed feelings about old recollections and ghosts, I naturally thought of what had become of me since then. Speaking in terms of career and success I am a failure, since I have had so many great plans and hardly fulfilled any of them. I always felt strong about what I chose to do, and then I followed my feelings quite as much in deciding to quit. But then, I thought, this too can be something good, not having stuck to one trail, but to feel that much is still left to be tried? Thus, somewhere along the line, near Tranås or Mjölby, the title of a Super Beginner came up.

What I am doing now, on and on, still going on if I may point it out (*s*), is in some way what I always wanted to do, but also part of a wholly new attempt. I explore the world outside the narrow den, and I discover new worlds within me. The words I write serve as a map, a log book and an album of photos, but it is a somewhat doubtful record, because while I write on, paragraph after paragraph, the parts already written somehow change themselves. In other words: when I go back and re-read what I wrote I notice how the thoughts transform, comparing to when they only were in my head. Yet since I started, I have not changed anything except some small slips. Who reads this may see still more than I do myself of the alternate universe which moves inside and behind the visible one.

THE alternate universe, said I, as if there just were one such, and one that is regular. No, no, no. There is only one universe, or there is an infinite number of them. The particles of thought can be named and observed, but I never can be sure that I have found all of them, or that they will act the same way the next time. I can describe Body and Soul as body only, or as one emanation of a purely spiritual power. Body and Soul, form and contents, good and evil, catholic or protestant, all those ruptures I can mend, and their being ever broken can be seen as a completed experiment. Now what did Descartes say? I think, therefore I exist. Do you think that he thought that he proved something thereby? No, but you need a starting point, he said. I did look up that passage.

Trivial knowledge is good, I think, if you want to play Trivia or to have an interesting conversation, but there is a less useful side of it, too. Through it many sayings that are only half true or even quite misunderstood are kept going for a long time, until some bright researcher does a TV show on them. How many have read the whole Discours de la méthode and considered what Descartes wants to say? I haven’t, I just looked into it to check that the famous phrase really was there: je pense, donc je suis.

Why this talk of René Descartes once more, or Renatus Cartesius as he is called on the massive monument by Johan Tobias Sergel in the Church of Adolf Fredrik in Stockholm? Just because. To a Swede like me, this French free thinker is kind of a fellow countryman, since he met his end while enduring a winter in Sweden. That piece of trivial knowledge is correct. Even in our days one is sensitive to new germs when changing one’s habitat. It is no wonder that poor Descartes rather soon got pneumonia in cold and dirty Sweden about 350 years ago!

He should have remained in Paris, even though the Jesuits were hard on him. Myself, I would gladly have remained in Paris. Oh, to dream that the 8 days I spent there in 1999 would have changed into the horizontal eight! Early in Easter morning I sat in an obscure café, seeing the Notre Dame beyond blooming cherry trees, and remembered a lady friend who would have been 50 that week, if she had lived. But she died some weeks before her 25^th birthday from taking to much painkillers combined with alcohol. Then I thought: "You should not be alone in this city", and burst into tears.

Never say "don’t cry" to someone who is crying. Say: "cry, you will feel better afterwards". You can get into tears for a lot of different reasons, but the relaxation that follows is always good! The sentimental poets of the 18^th century who claimed that tears were sweet rather than salt, they knew what they were talking about.

Since that day in Paris I never cried that much in an instant, but my eyes get wet at least once a year around the day of S:t Lucia, when I hear children in white sing the traditional songs. [The Feast of S:t Lucia, December 13, a very old catholic celebration which survives and flourishes in ’’protestant’’ Sweden]. How come that, after all these years, me having three children, I haven’t got suited to it? I feel no need of an explanation. I just cannot resist it.

Last time I had fallen in love at work, I was crying every night in bed, lying beside my peacefully snoring wife. A young woman was appointed in the middle of winter, and at first I hardly noticed her, but then came summer and holidays, and then I thought of her all the time!

Those tears were tears of tenderness, not really of sorrow, or perhaps I cried for joy over new feelings that I had not known of before. There is a prejudice about redheads being vivid and whimsical, but this very redhead was shy and introvert, like me, a sister soul I thought, and I felt she had secrets within her which I longed to discover. Apparently she did not appreciate the little attention I tried to show her, so there were no discoveries made. Besides, at that time I still believed that my marriage could be saved, but anyhow two years later it broke up. Que sera sera.

"What happens, happens". Or, in my slightly aggressive version: Whatever happens, I face it. Not that I am a tough guy who can stand everything, but I am prepared when it comes. I may be crushed, or I endure and come out of it, maybe stronger than before, and most likely with some new knowledge. I was down many times, and stood up again.

"We need to talk", my wife said to me one night. I said: "Yes, what about?" She said: "Divorce". That was by far the worst bomb that ever went off right in my face, but I had felt some fuse burning for a while. During two months after this, I hardly could distinguish days from nights, because of overheated thoughts that spoilt all my calm and all my concentration. No sleep at night, and in daytime I somehow endured in the office, thanks to tolerant fellow workers. Since then I never thought back of what could have happened if I had not managed to keep up my work. There were some people I could talk to confidently, and with their help I toiled on.

Once in a lunch break I met a woman in the food store who had been my boss some time before, and a good boss, one of the best I had. Let’s call her B. She was about my age and born in Scania like me, so we had something in common beside work. After her being transferred some year before, we had encountered every now and then in the corridors and spoken a few words. I thought: "She is sensible, I could have a talk with her", so I suggested to her that we would meet for a walk and a cup of coffee or something like that, and she agreed at once, apparently she had no doubt about it. Somewhat later we met at a rather peculiar time in a plain coffee-shop which luckily enough was open. I told her what was the matter with me and thanked her for coming to see me early in the morning on a work-free day. She said she had thought a good deal about why I wanted to see her, and she also told me that once it had been near a divorce for her too, but the step had not been taken and the marriage had been repaired. After that talk, we met a second time for a walk, and a third time visiting a museum. In the morning of the very day we should have met next time, she phoned, to say not only that she could not make it, but also that she did not want to see me any more!

Cold, weak, appalled, floored. What words do I use to describe how I feel when I, already in a hurt condition, get such a stunning announcement in an issue which I consider simple? What reason did she have, you wonder? Her husband had muttered at her for "abandoning" her family to go to a museum with me on a Sunday, so now she did not dare any more. I answered that I, being a gentleman, certainly respected her feelings, but I asked if I could at least see her once more to say good bye sincerely and not just so plainly on the phone, but even to that she could not agree. I never yet went by crutches and fell because somebody hit a crutch for me, but I think that would be similar to how I felt in this moment. The question also is, did she tell me whole truth about her decision, but I surely will never get to know that.

Where you are not, there is happiness. Dort wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück. Thank you, Franz Schubert, that you with your song Der Wanderer have saved for us this exquisite line of the otherwise totally obscure poet Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck! There is no better way, at least no shorter and clearer way, to explain what is meant by ROMANTIC. You long to go to some other place, but you cannot tell why or how that place would look, you just long for the unknown because it is unknown. You imagine various things that disappear in the same moment, and lead your life in a double picture of dream and reality. Certainly it is sickly always to yearn for something indefinite, always to be a wanting soul, but isn’t it still worse to feel the bitterness when you fail to make a dream come true? And is it not this marvellous ability to discern something more beautiful and sublime than the eyes can see, that makes us strong enough to live through the darkest times of our life? Happiness is where I am not, can mean that I simply abstain from trying to make my dream real, because then at least I have the beautiful dream still with me and can dream it on! Dream being better than life, because you lose control of your life, but in the dream there never was any control to lose.

All dreams are not beautiful. How romantic is your life, if in your inner world you encounter creatures with teeth in their bottom, like in a Dali painting? I do not know. My knowledge of human soul does not cover that. Of course I have had nightmares, everyone has some time, I think, and sometimes I felt outcast and worthless, but I never was afraid of myself, and I never struggled to keep awake for fear that the nightmare would come back. Sometimes I say to myself, I could be a good psychologist since I have much patience, but quite as often I doubt that I have the empathy that is needed too. I think that many who like to watch horror films are as ignorant as me; that is why they watch, they want to be fascinated by unknown worlds. The so called "horror romantic" is genuinely romantic, just as much as those sweet feelings that are generally thought of, when you use the word romantic.

Someone does or says something that is horrid and incomprehensible to you, but to him it is obvious because he has a hell within him which he can see much better than he can see what is around him, those things we others see. He is as helpless as you, but he is not so willing as you to admit it. I think Nastasia and Rogozjin in Dostoevsky’s Idiot are two such people, and they must destroy each other when they come near. The idiot, who is that? Not only the silly benevolent Prince Myshkin, but all of us, who stand beside watching, unable to do anything.

I read Idiot the first time when I was 18, just having finished school, the second time when that bomb I talked about had blasted, and the third time while writing this. It is a bit like revisiting places where you have been before: you are a little unsure of what has changed and what you have simply forgotten. Does a book change, you can’t mean that, oh yes I mean it, when I read it and re-read it I enter a world that I do not know thoroughly, neither then nor now! For me, it feels like the doings in Idiot take place on a more or less dark stage, and out of the shadows a figure suddenly appears whom maybe I have seen before, or have not noticed up to now. Dostoevsky often describes minor figures in a way like they nearly, but only nearly, act on their own, as if there was a supplementary novel within the main one.

Nastasia is a real bitch. Even though I travelled so much in the world of Idiot, I am still unsure of what she really does to scare everyone so much. She is a 25-year-old smashy chick who comes out of nowhere, as it seems, with lots of money by which she can lead a luxurious life on her own and subdue all the men who want her and/or her money. Dostoevsky’s picture of her is so shadowy that the monstrous features dim the more subtle details of her personality. Monstrous or not, she herself is scared when she meets a man who, although a bit scared himself, is not imposed by her, but treats her with the respect a gentleman always shows to a lady, Prince Myshkin I mean.

Rogozjin then, what label would we put on him, if he appeared among us? Is there a male equivalent of "bitch"? Or is an egocentrical and arbitrary behaviour so natural to a masculine that we do not need to categorize it? A clinical category perhaps, like incestually abused? I do not know. A fourth reading of the novel will be necessary to find out about this.

Myshkin is far more easy. He is no real idiot, although he has been in mental care for a long time, on the contrary he is more intelligent that most other people in the novel. By today’s standards he is a ninny.

The others call him an idiot a couple of times, because he is inept in social life, but through the whole story he does nothing worse than this: he misunderstands some dealings so that the others present are embarrassed, and he gets a little hot during a party and smashes a valuable vase. Around him, there are people who cheat and mock at each other, make scenes, fight, drink, and steal. Myshkin is as polite to the upstart mademoiselle with a dubious past, as he is to noble ladies, and he stays by the murderer’s side comforting him until the police come to get him. He has an inner self-confidence that does not compell him to assert himself at the cost of others, but it helps him to cope with troubles that come by. However, even if he does what he can, he cannot avoid the final catastrophe.

Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing, says Luther in his hymn. God will forgive you, if you believe in God, but if you believe in mankind, will men forgive you then? You should not count on that.

When I think more of this, it feels like time to read the novel again for the fourth time, but no, that can wait. I just look up the scene where Prince Myshkin proposes to Nastasia the first time, or more accurate, offers to marry her. How can the ninny come up with such a surprising idea after he has met her only twice, both times in company, never alone? It is hardly even his own idea, since he is provoked into saying it by another gentleman present. Nastasia of course is rather put out when she understands that she can not tame this man with all her rage and all her money. At first she seems to accept the offer, and she makes good use of it, teasing the rivals, but finally she insults Myshkin and leaves the place together with Rogozjin, the brute.

It is the heat of these confrontations that, above all, makes me come back to Idiot again and again. Speaking generally, I like to read tragic books to strengthen my belief that this is not what always must happen. We can make a better life, I am sure!

But dear Sven, now you are back into "aesthetic religion". Can you really say definitely that your life has been better from reading Idiot three times? Better than it would have been if you had spent your time chattering in pubs?

Such a question could be awkward to me, because I cannot easily say no and admit that it really does not matter what you do, but if I say yes it would feel like I boasted and praised myself, and I do not want to do that either. Therefore I can give no answer except to myself, so what, I am no preacher and have no need to make you think like me! Religion you can call it indeed, since I refuse to dispute it. This is simply my way of life, and has nothing to do with valuing works of art according to moral standards, or with any other such clever theories.

Come vivo? – Vivo! I could sing with Rodolphe in Puccini’s La Bohème. How do I live? Well, I live! All questions of "would have been" are annoying to me, for what has happened can never be changed, and what am I supposed to do with the conclusions that could be drawn from it? One thing only: ask the Preacher. He has been quiet for a while, but now he strongly feels it’s his time again. The wise Preacher (P) will talk to the unsure Dreamer (D) who dwells in another chamber of my heart.

P: You already know, since a long time, what is most important. Be sincere. Tell what you feel. Express your thoughts immediately, not preserved or fermented. Never think of acting a part in order to influence others, and do not try to direct what others do by deciding for them how much they need to know! Even the most well-meant manipulations can go very wrong.

D: Certainly, but your wise instructions, do you know what I think they are, they are preserved, just as you said! When I am in the middle of things happening and have to decide in every moment what to do now, then it is not at all sure that reality is formatted so I can run philosophy-of-life.exe on it. And in my dreams it is the same thing, what I see in dreams has colour and form and words as if it were really happening, quite as difficult to grasp. I can dream of something I want from future, but it is inevitable that the dream also calls back what I did want once, in spite of your jolly phrases like "what’s done is done, now we want to look forward".

P: Yet, occasionally it can be that the dry principle comes to life in a way to show that it is not always so very dry. Think of what happened recently when you were going by underground, reading one of your train books as usual, and in the book there was one single sentence that scorched you, so that you could not read any more for a long while:

Tout l’art d’aimer se réduit, ce me semble, à dire exactement ce que le degré d’ivresse du moment comporte, c’est à dire, en d’autres termes, à écouter son âme.

"The whole art of loving is, I find, contained in your saying precisely what you are filled with by the moment, or in other words, in listening to your own soul."

PD unisono: This is SO true. What Stendhal says in De l’amour will be another mantra or benediction, for sure. That work, with its lenghty documentation and reasoning, can be seen as somewhat parodious, but this sentence alone is more worth than several whole books!

Lots of poems and songs tell things like "you are my whole world", "all this and heaven too", and many novels and films deal with the devastating compromises that necessarily occur when anyone tries to lead a life in a such spirit. Art is lying all the time, or speaking with a double tongue. The holy scripture of aesthetic religion is not there, but can be written only for me, by me only.

Is that what I am doing now? I doubt. To promise such a thing would be precarious, after so little work done. On screen it can seem to be lengthy, but on paper it is not more than a skilled writer would produce in some hour.

One of the many who thought about aesthetics and religion two hundred years ago, in the romantic era, was Friedrich von Hardenberg who called himself Novalis. He took a degree in civil law while thinking and writing, and thinking and writing, and was in love with a teenager named Sophie. Often he called her Philo-Sophie, a good pun, since the Greek word philos means loving, a philosopher is one who loves wisdom:

If the spirit sanctifies, every true book is a Bible.

The only real temple in the world is the human body. - - When you touch it, you touch heaven.

Most people do not know how interesting they are indeed, what interesting things they tell. If one could truthfully render and consider what they are saying, they would be astonished by themselves and feel inspired to discover a new world within them.

Just some fragments from a life which too turned into a fragment, since he died at 29, and then Sophie was dead already. The toil of mourning is intense in his writings of the last years, numerous letters and long manuscripts.

Sophie and Friedrich – two who died young in a time when infectional diseases were still highly mortal. You might think that she must have been an extraordinary girl, being attractive to a man ten years her senior who was already making a career as a writer and a civil servant. Scholars say that her letters and diary tell only of simple everyday matters, but how do they know how much she herself may have destroyed during her illness, or if her family did dispose of such things that a bourgeois girl should not properly write down?

All that he left, lots of poems and reflections, and an unfinished novel, was published in print, but only connoisseurs read it nowadays. However, there is one famous item. The hero of the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen sees a blue flower in a dream, and he believes the flower to exist somewhere in the real world, so he wants to find it.

The blue flower of romantic! A symbol of yearning that is well-known. But what was Novalis trying to find through his enormous writing activity, and what did I want long ago when I read it all and made notes of it in a black book?

I think it was vague to him, as it was to me. While in quest for the flower, Heinrich finds an illustrated book with himself in many of the pictures, and the pictures show things that have not yet happened, but the text is in a language that he does not understand. That maybe is what I am doing now, I see pictures within me and try to decipher the yet unknown text that comes with them. When I have done that, you can understand what I have written, but how do I know what strange pictures may appear to you when you read it?

It is not easier to imagine what you would encounter if you could see me in real life. Who I want to be, or who I think I am, can be someone who nobody has ever seen. And vice versa, I would probably not recognize myself in your picture of me. A confused sentimental old man who does not know his place, but tends to assert himself quite unnecessarily? That sentence about listening to your own soul keeps scorching me all the time. Now I read another book by Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, much more mysterious since there are imaginary personalities to discover. The young private teacher Julien who is flirting with the mother of his pupils just to exert some masculine power, and the mother who tremblingly falls more and more in love with him, I need only a few pages during an underground ride to feel like in another world. Julien, with so far-flying thoughts within him and so frightfully scarce means of letting them out, this could have been me at 20 years. But I surely would not have done like him, if there had been such a lovely woman of 30 so near me, so near to my soul.

There wasn’t. Now we turn age upside down, and suddenly get into real life. Did I wrong to declare my love for G S (Gorgeous Soprano), a member of the same church choir as me, me being old enough to be her father? As a gentleman, I can tell myself that I ought not take the risk of embarrassing a woman or make her angry, but how much does that take? How would I feel, just giving her looks and making some little tries to show her some attention? Would it not be better to tell the truth? And what happened when I really did? I must say I felt so released in that very moment. I understood I could have no hope, but I proved to myself that I am not afraid of my feelings.

Ha, you are curious! What did G S say? It seemed she took it quite nicely, she rejected me of course, but in a way which was not contemptive or shameful. However, it is evident that she got embarrassed after thinking it over a bit, because we hardly talk to each other since then, although we are still in the same choir, seeing each other regularly. Through telling my love, I lost a friend. Sorry, I did not mean it that way, I want to whisper, but how can I make her hear me?

I can only hope to be able to hear my own inner whisperings, it seems. Let me seek comfort in song:

I spend a lifetime waiting for the right time

Now that you’re near the time is here at last!

I think Elvis was terribly nervous every time he was near the microphone, and thus he got that wonderfully trembling voice. I am never nervous, so I can never be that good, but still I love to sing. When you try to be who you are in ordinary life there are social conventions to stop you and your own inhibitions to block you, but when you act, like singing someone else’s text and trying to carry the message of it, then you can give all you have!

Can this be the reason why many people choose to act a part instead of being themselves, in common life where you think common people are just common? Hold it, it is not that simple. You put it very roughly when you mean there is one unique "self" and a lot of possible "roles". Look at the ways of life among young people today, and you will find that "finding yourself" is quite like "creating a role" or even "swapping roles", and the idea that binds all this together is that if you are invisible you are nothing!

This idea of life also is spreading to more mature ages. My friend Platonic, heigh-ho, where are you? Gone. He has nothing sensible to tell those who are convinced that fitness, beauty box and heavy muscles are the core of human dignity. The Preacher sends word that he is working on the eulogy, but soon maybe it will not be needed, because no one will understand what he says?

Why then do so many feel for sure that they must act their lives, instead of living spontaneously? The fear of what will happen if the real You comes into sight is so strong, that you must build a character which you feel able to control since you have consciously created it. Someone among these frightened actors even takes on as a tyrant director, forcing upon the others the scripts of the parts they must play, in order to prevent the terrible …

Whatever it may be. The truth is, sooner or later the involuntary co-actors discover that they are in somebody else’s play, and so they in turn are frightened, and they wonder what level they have reached in the Playstation of Life.

There are other roles acted in common life, more openly, sex roles for instance. In Sweden in the sixties, during my teens, this term came into everyday language with the rise of feminism. I was sceptical then, thinking: it shouldn’t be difficult to treat humans like humans? It is more difficult than that, of course, as I realised later on. But the debate of sex roles is much older. Stendhal, whom we already know, is critical to those rulings of society which put limits to the opportunities for women to gain knowledge and work. He deals with such questions both overtly in De l’amour and through the mind of Julien in Le Rouge et le Noir.

Not only men play roles, words can do too. We talk about symbol or allegory. A house is not always a house. Quite often words are used to say not what the dictionary orders them to say, but to represent something else. Meaning rolls away towards the edge, and often overturns totally.

Those words we call abstract were originally concrete. We may think this is a modern phenomenon, to change the function of terms already existing, but then we are wrong.

In the Old Testament they talk about face, meaning personality, or about spirit, physical breath, meaning inner life. "To lose one’s face" we say even today. So I believe that when Jesus says that the bread is his body and the wine is his blood, he too is telling something else than he seems to. In my opinion, the tedious debates of theologians around the creepy sorcery of the communion, the bread and wine turning into flesh and blood of Christ in that very moment, are quite unnecessary!

The bread is the body of Man, I think, the very base of basic food, an everyday source of carbohydrate, protein and minerals, and the wine then is Man’s own blood and a basic supply in the sense that a form of human culture without any drugs has not yet been found. What is Jesus called, the others call him Lord or Master or Saviour, but what does he call himself: Son of Man!

It is Easter now, I do this to his memory, which consequently here means to remember my own fate: I take a glass of wine in one hand and some snack in the other. But then a word comes into my mind, not from Jesus but from Nietzsche:

Wenig macht die Art des besten Glücks.

Little is needed to be really happy. So little, and so hard to get. Solitude is much in my thoughts, because I am mostly alone. You can very well live alone, there are substantial advantages in it, and it is convenient to be able to decide always for yourself in details of your life, but you should never be alone in your mind.

Never ask what will happen, to know is dangerous

It may be written in the stars but stars do not care for us

Try to think like this: whatever happens I will face

This winter may be our last

Or there are more winters to come

But please, close that gate

And pour a glass of wine

While we are here talking time goes by

Try not to answer today the questions of tomorrow

But take care of this day

I think Pilate had read Horace’s poems, and talked with his sensible wife about them. Take care of the day, carpe diem, is known to friends of poetry as Horace’s trade mark, and many who do not read poetry have heard that phrase and know what it means.

Horace must have been rather much like me, then? Well, yes, I did not try to make a true translation, but I wanted to steal into his mind, to be Horace. Most important here is the phrase "whatever happens …" which I have had as a motto for many years without really knowing its origin. One summer, long ago, I read most of his work because it was in my course of Latin, and that was a fine summer with a great reading experience. But everything you read can not remain in the uppermost part of your consciousness. I think I have been Horace since then!

Here I would have liked to say some more words on Horace, but all of a sudden it feels too hard to discern him from myself! He was not fond of glamour, and did not seek adventure, but he wanted a quiet life, just like me. Wounded by passion, like me, he did not dwell in bitterness, licking his wounds, but went looking for what could be of comfort.

Go not to the crowd to learn from them if you have the right to live. Go to the sea and the moorlands and the deep western storm.

The sea, the woods, the air, clouds, trees – all of them tell you: yes!

This is not Horace, not me, but another of Horace’s grateful readers, Vilhelm Ekelund, born in Scania like me. When he wrote these lines about the sea in 1922, he thought of the wide open sea along the Scanian coast, and not of the cosy inlet near my home where I often go for a morning walk. However, later in life he came to Saltsjöbaden, near to Nacka where I live, and found himself very well at home in that region. I sometimes go to see his grave by Baggensstäket.

In Ekelund’s world the graves are alive as the flowers and the trees. He wanders in open air with writers of other ages and talks to them, as if they were walking beside him, and the literary scholar finds it difficult to describe who of them is who, but how much does that matter? Ars longa, vita brevis, art is long but life is short, the saying is, and I want the sense of it to be this: if I can learn some knowledge, some tradition, and use it for my purposes, I can also bring it on to someone who will use it long after my voice stopped talking.

Now I suddenly came forward, walking beside, oh yes, this is about me too, and you, and our friends, and it does not concern literature only but all things that we cherish. Have I a great zeal, do I see myself as one of those walking thinkers whose thoughts will walk on, like Horace, like Kierkegaard, like Nietzsche? Yes and no. In one way this is for me only, I write down my thoughts to ensure that they do not only spin around inside my head, and I save it in a website in order to have a copy not only in a machine that can stop working or be stolen.

In another way I want you, who sit somewhere else in the society of dead poets, to know that here another one like you is to be found. If YOU really are to be found.

One way of investigating I have already tried. Into the search window of Google.com I write the famous names that are in my text, at first only a couple, and then more and more. The search engine finds collections of quotations and educational reading lists, still fewer after every added name, and finally there is only one hit, to my own site that is. If there is another one who keeps writing this kind of thoughtful diary with literary reflections, he or she is doing it in private, not in the web. I am unique in the whole world.

In 1978, I wrote in Lundagård, the magazine of the students’ union in Lund: Rightfully all novels should be endless or unfinished. I thought that a novel must be finished because it is wanted for print. A TV series can go on for a long time, but in the end the actors and producers do not want to do it any more. But life goes on! I can tell you which is the world’s best unfinished novel, one that kept on until the writing hand got forever stiff. It must be Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil. But the big novel that is getting bigger still, where is it? Probably somewhere in the dark, for reasons of copyright.

When I first thought of this, surely some military and scientific people already used means of storing and reworking text without writing it on paper, and now all people can use these methods! Most wonderfully, it never has to stop! I can give my password over to my children, so they can keep on thinking when I am finito.

Soeren Kierkegaard walked by a while ago. He had no children, at least not recognized, but he could have had some if he had not turned Regine off. It is well known that he broke up the engagement and commented on it in his many heavy works. Regine once said that she wanted to be with him so much, even if she were compelled to live in a cupboard. Soeren then ordered from the carpenter a cupboard in a size fit for her to get into. He wrote in earnest and lived in irony, you could say. I make the opposite, no not really, I try to avoid irony in my writing, but sometimes I simply cannot. Many people in all the world read those books, and the cupboard is on show in the City Museum of Copenhagen, but who gives Regine a thought any more?

It is probably as well for her to be forgotten. Many women who were near the so-called great men got into mischief or were harshly judged by posterity. The men around the much fewer famous women seem to have got more luckily away, partly because those women probably could manage well without them.

And yes, even I must confess being guilty of some time having lived ironically, and at times I also was used in somebody other’s ironical life. Long ago I loved a girl, found myself in bed with another one, and very soon was courted by a third. What happened? Nothing more happened. Suddenly they were all gone. They did not know of each other, so any jealousy was not near, but I did not grasp what was going on, so I just quitted. My career as a casanova took an end before it started. But for a Super Beginner it is never too late, is it?

And here I tell for true that the spirit of my life, which dwells in the most sacred chamber of my heart, began to tremble with such a force that was felt in my finest veins, and in trembling uttered these words: BEHOLD, A GOD IS HERE, STRONGER THAN ME, TO TAKE POWER OVER ME.

Dante felt thus, when he for the first time saw Beatrice, "she who makes happy". He tells about it in his wonderful little book Vita Nova, New Life. In my young days I made a Swedish translation of this passage in a deliberately bloomy old-fashioned way, to be ironical. But that is wrong doing, as I have later understood. If you jest with feelings, you are truly afraid of them, and there are better ways to deal with that fear, as I know now, having got rid of it after a long time.