Legends: Autobiographical SketchesStrindberg, August
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Legends: Autobiographical Sketches
Strindberg, August
Dramatists, Swedish -- 19th century -- Biography; Strindberg, August, 1849-1912
My last attempt I make in a carriage. This time the street is
barricaded, as it expressly to frustrate my purpose. I get out of the
carriage and clamber over the obstructions, but when I reach the door
of the Swedenborgian chapel I find the pavement and steps have been
taken away. In spite of all I manage to reach the door, pull the bell,
and am told by a stranger that the librarian is ill.
With a kind of feeling of relief I turn my back on the gloomy, shabby
little chapel with its dark window panes soiled with rain and dust.
This edifice, built in the severe barbaric depressing Methodist
style, had always repelled me. Its want of beauty reminded me of
the Protestantism of the north, and it cost my pride a struggle to
bring myself to seek to enter it. I did it as a pious duty towards
Swedenborg, nothing more.
As I turned round with a light heart, I saw on the pavement a
tin-coated piece of iron, in the shape of a clover-leaf, and
superstitiously picked it up. Simultaneously a recollection sprang
to life in my mind. The year before, on the 2nd November in the
terrible year 1896, as I was walking one morning in Klam in Austria,
the sun disappeared behind a wall of cloud shaped like an arch, with
clover-shaped outlines surrounded by blue and white rays. This cloud
and my tinned iron-plate resembled each other as closely as two drops
of water. My diary, in which I made a sketch of the former, can verify
this fact.
What does that signify? The Trinity, that is clear. And further?--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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