Excerpts from
Niels Lyhne
By J. P. Jacobsen
It was a spring evening; the sun shone so red into the parlor, just about to set. The vanes of the mill up on the city ramparts drove their shadows across the windowpanes and the walls of the room, appearing, in a monotonous alternation of shadow and light - one moment of shadow, two moments of light.
Niels Lyhne sat at the window staring through the dark bronze elms along the embarkment toward the fire of the clouds. He had been outside the city, beneath newly budding beech trees, in the gren fields of rye, through flower-sprinkled meadows; everything had been so bright and care free, the sky so blue, the sound so sparkling, and the promenading women so unusually beautiful. Singing, he had wlaked along the forest path; when the words vanished from his song, then the rhythm faded, the notes died away, and silence came over him like a dizziness. He closed his eyes but still could feel how the light seemed to seep into him, flickering through every nerve, while with every breath the cool, intoxicating air sent his oddly excited blood with wilder and wilder force through his veins, quivering with powerlessness, and a feeling came over him as though everything teeming, bursting, budding, multiplying in the springtime nature around him was mystically trying to gather inside him in one great big shout; and he thirsted after that shout, listened until his listening took the form of a vague, burgeoning longing.
Now, as he sat there at the window, the longing awoke again.
He longed for thousands of trembling dreams, for images of cool sensitivity: pastel colors, fleeting scents, and fine music from tensely streched, tautly streched streams of silvery strings; and the silence, into the innermost heart of silence, where the waves of air never carrid a singled scrap of sound, where everythig rested to death in the still glow of reddish colors and the expectant warmth of fiery fragrance. He did not long for this, but it emerged from the other and drowned it, until he turned away from it and recaptured himself.
He was weary of himself, of cold thoughts and interlectual dreams. Life a poem! Not when you pepertually went around inventing your life instead of living it. How meaningless it was, empty, empty, empty.This hunting for yourself, slyly observing your own tracks - in a circle, of course; this pretending to throw yourself into a stream of life and then at the same time siting and angling for yourself and fishing yourself up in some peculiar disguise! If only it would seize him: life, love, passion - so that he wouldn´t be able to invent it, but so that it would invent him.
Involuntarily he made a deprecating motion with his hand. Deep inside he was affraid of that mighty thing called passion. That windtorm that whirled away with everything established, everything authorized, everything aquired in a human being, as if i were all withering leaves! He did not like it. That thundering flame that spend itself in its own smoke - no, he would burn slowly.
And yet - this living at half force was s o pathetic, living in still waters with the coast in sight; so if only it would come with currents and storms! If only he knew how: he would fly with all sails set, racing toward the Spanish sea of life. Farewell to the slowly dripping days, farewell to the happy small moments; farewell you dull moods that have to be polished up in poetry in order to shine, you lurkwarm feelings that have to be dressed up in warm dreams and yet freeze to death - og on as you must! I am steering for a shore where emotions fling themselves like lush vines up every fiber of the heart - a primeval forest. For every withering vine there are twenty in bloom, for every blossoming vine there are a hundred buds.
If only I was there!
From J.P Jacobsen: Niels Lyhne
Fjord Press, 1990
Translated by Tiina Nunnally
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