Zones of the Spirit: A Book of ThoughtsStrindberg, August
Religion
Zones of the Spirit: A Book of Thoughts
Strindberg, August
Swedish literature
=Secret Judgment.=--When one sees a fact repeated regularly and
under defined conditions, one believes one has discovered a law. I
think I have discovered a law, and consequently a tribunal whose
decisions we see, but whose inner working we can only guess at. I had
a relative who had reached a certain age without "ever having time" to
think of death. On the 18th January of the year 18-- he had a stroke
and fell. That was the first warning. Then he began to think about
death and the life after this, and occupied himself thus for six years;
then he died exactly on the same day, on the 18th of January. The
fact of the interval being six years made me think of Bismarck's six
years in Sachsenwald, when he sat alone and brooded on the transitory
character of greatness, and curiously enough injured his reputation
through being betrayed by vanity into making incautious revelations.
Then it occurred to me that Napoleon was six years on St. Helena, and
finally became so well "prepared" that he received the sacrament on his
death-bed. Whether Heine lay on the ground for exactly six years, with
his body wasted to the size of a child's and tormented by the fear of
losing his wife, I cannot say definitely; but it was about six. It is
well known that the pious Linnæus had to spend his last years seated in
a chair, lamed by paralysis; nor did even he escape being worried by a
quarrelsome wife, God alone knows why!
Our great and glorious Tegner received his first warning in 1840. It
was accompanied by a condition like that described in my _Inferno,_
during which, among other things, he saw his whole poetical work in a
depreciatory light, and even at last wished to cancel it all. After
just six years' preparation he died on November 2, 1846, in a cheerful
state of mind, the sky being lit up at the time by a splendid aurora.
Goldschmidt mentions that and still more remarkable things in his
excellent _Nemesis Divina_. I read lately how Fersen was murdered in
his carriage on June 20, 1810. I recalled to mind that it was the
same Fersen who drove the carriage in which Marie Antoinette fled to
Varennes. I referred to the _History of the World_, and found that the
flight to Varennes took place on June 20, 1791. The question arises:
"Was it a crime to wish to save the queen?" The author of the article
in the _Biographical Lexicon_ mentions the crime by name; but it was
something other than the attempt to further her escape.
=Hammurabi's Inspired Laws Received from the Sun-God.=--The laws
of Hammurabi occupy fifteen quarto pages. That is the whole find! And
these pages are to nullify the Bible, which is so unsearchably rich
and possesses such mysterious depths that everyone in trouble, who
with humility seeks for counsel and comfort there, finds it forthwith,
although he may first receive some blows which strike the nail on the
head!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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