SÖDERBERG, Hjalmar

Doctor Glas

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Now I sit at my open window, writing—for whom? Not for any friend or mistress. Scarcely for myself, even. I do not read today what I wrote yesterday; nor shall I read this tomorrow. I write simply so my hand can move, my thoughts move of their own accord. I write to kill a sleepless hour. Why can’t I sleep? After all, I’ve committed no crime.

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We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.

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For youth the moon is a promise of all those tremendous things which await it, for older people a memento that the promise was never kept, a reminder of all that broke and went to pieces….

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We want to have everything, want to be everything. We want to know all the pleasures of happiness, and every depth of suffering. We want the pathos of action and the peace of the onlooker. We desire both the desert’s stillness and the uproar of the forum. At once we wish to be the thoughts of the thinker and the voice of the crowd; we want to be both melody and harmony. At once!

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...there are three sorts of people—thinkers, scribblers, and cattle.

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The old Finnish myth says: He who sees God’s face must die. And Oedipus. He solved the enigma of the Sphinx, and became the unhappiest of mortals.

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