Zones of the Spirit: A Book of ThoughtsStrindberg, August
Religion
Zones of the Spirit: A Book of Thoughts
Strindberg, August
Swedish literature
=A Whole Life in an Hour.=--The teacher said: "I had a strange
experience, which I have not understood, but which I must remember.
I woke up one morning feeling cheerful without any special reason.
Obeying an impulse, I went into the town. As I wandered about at
random, I came into the quarter where I had been born and brought up.
I saw the kindergarten and school I used to attend, and my parents'
house. I went through narrow streets and passed by the national school
in which I was worried as a student-teacher. I saw two different houses
in which I had suffered as a private tutor. I went northwards and came
to another school in which I had been tortured. In a market-place
I passed another house in which, during my childhood, our only
acquaintance lived, and twenty years later in the same dwelling there
lived my worst enemy. I passed by a house in which my sister had been
married thirty years before, and another house in which my brother had
had a hard struggle. Then I came to a third school in which I was a
student; in the same house lives still my first and last publisher. I
passed by a house where, forty years ago, I was accepted as an aspirant
for the stage, and where I offered my first drama; also by the house
where I was married for the first time. Then the meaning of it began
to grow clearer. I saw the furniture warehouse whence I ordered my
furniture the last time. I passed by the house where my wife and child
lived three years ago.
"In the space of one hour I had seen the panorama of my whole life in
living pictures. Only three years were wanting to the present time. It
was like an agony or a death-hour when the whole of life rushes past
one.
"Then I felt drawn northward where my last child and her mother live.
An instinct told me to bring perfume for the mother and school-fees
for the child, as that day it was going to the kindergarten for the
first time. Then I began to hunt for the perfume; it ought to have been
lilac, but I had to take lily-of-the-valley. I also wanted flowers, but
could not find any.
"So I continued northwards and came to their house; the sun shone
in, the table was spread for coffee; there was an air of comfort,
homeliness, and kindness over all. I was received in a friendly way,
felt in a moment that the whole of my black life lay behind me, and
realised the happiness of merely being alive."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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