Zones of the Spirit: A Book of ThoughtsStrindberg, August
Religion
Zones of the Spirit: A Book of Thoughts
Strindberg, August
Swedish literature
=Exteriorisation of Sensibility.=--The pupil continued: "I
happened once, when watching a spider in a web, to see her 'exteriorise
her sensibility,' or in other words reel out a nerve-substance for
herself with which she remains in touch, and by means of which she
becomes aware when flies come and when the weather changes. Raspail,
who in his masterly works has cast many a far-reaching glance
behind the curtains of nature, has in one place philosophised over
the spider's web. In other works dealing with transcendent natural
sciences, one finds the doubt expressed whether the object of the
spider's web is only to be a fly-trap. I myself have counted four and
twenty radii in the web of the garden-spider resembling an hour-circle,
and have asked myself whether, besides being a barometer and trap, the
web is also a kind of clock.
"Now it seems as though I had myself in a similar manner exteriorised
my sensibility. I feel at a distance when anyone interferes with my
destiny, when enemies threaten my personal existence, and also when
people speak well of me or wish me well. I feel in the street whether
those I meet are friends or foes; I have felt the pain of an operation
undergone by a man to whom I was fairly indifferent; twice I have
shared the death-agonies of others with the accompanying corporeal and
psychical sufferings. The last time I went through three illnesses
in six hours, and when the absent person with whom I suffered was
liberated by death, I rose up well. This makes life painful, but rich
and interesting."
=Telepathic Perception.=--The pupil said: "While I lived in the
most intimate relations with a woman, I arrived, like Gustav Jäger, at
'the discovery of the soul.' I was always in communication with her,
often through obscure sensations, but very often through the sense of
smell; these were subjective however, as other people were not aware
of them. When she was travelling I knew whether she was in a steamer
or on a train; I could distinguish the revolutions of the screw from
the vibration of the railway carriage and the puffing of the engine.
She used to make her presence felt by me at a certain hour of the
day, _i.e._ five o'clock in the morning. Once, when she was in Paris,
this time changed to four o'clock. When I consulted the table of time
variations, I found that it was four o'clock in Paris when it was five
o'clock with me. Another time she was in St. Petersburg, then our
meeting took place an hour later; that also agreed with the time-table.
When she hated me, I was conscious of a smell and taste like that of
mortalin; this happened one night so distinctly that I had to rise and
open the window. When she thought kindly of me, I perceived a smell
of incense and often of jasmine, but these scents sometimes changed
into sensations of taste. When she was in society without me I felt
that she was away, and when the conversation turned on me I was aware
whether they were speaking good or ill about me."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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