Mogens and Other Stories

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Sheldon mirrors the sentiment. “More than anything, I would like the episode to just remind people to treasure the small moments because that’s what it’s made of. The entire episode is made of small moments that they have and cherish. It’s not about the big things. We think about life sometimes from a bird’s-eye view of these big things that are happening, but the meaningful small moments in between is what makes up our lives.” But what joy can you take in a tree or a bush, if you don't imagine that a living being dwells within it, that opens and closes the flowers and smooths the leaves? When you see a lake, a deep, clear lake, don't you love it for this reason, that you imagine creatures living deep, deep down below, that have their own joys and sorrows, that have their own strange life with strange yearnings? And what, for instance, is there beautiful about the green hill of Berdbjerg, if you don't imagine, that inside very tiny creatures swarm and buzz, and sigh when the sun rises, but begin to dance and play with their beautiful treasure-troves, as soon as evening comes."

Morten Høi Jensen, A Difficult Death: The Life and Works of Jens Peter Jacobsen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 59. Quoted in Jensen, A Difficult Death, xxii-xxiii in the translation by M. D. Herter of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1954), 24-25. In Two Worlds, a woman makes a charm to transfer her illness to another woman through a curse. It works. It turns out that isn’t good news.

MOGENS

There was a swishing of wind in the gable-windows, in the poplars of the manor-house; the wind whistled through tattered bushes on the green hill of Bredbjerg. Mogens lay up there, and gazed out over the dark earth. The moon was beginning to acquire radiance, and mists were drifting down on the meadow. Everything was very sad, all of life, all of life, empty behind him, dark before him. But such was life. Those who were happy were also blind. Through misfortune he had learned to see; everything was full of injustice and lies, the entire earth was a huge, rotting lie; faith, friendship, mercy, a lie it was, a lie was each and everything; but that which was called love, it was the hollowest of all hollow things, it was lust, flaming lust, glimmering lust, smoldering lust, but lust and nothing else. Why had he to know this? Why had he not been permitted to hold fast to his faith in all these gilded lies? Why was he compelled to see while the others remained blind? He had a right to blindness, he had believed in everything in which it was possible to believe. A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen by Morten Høi Jensen, 2017, Yale University Press (978-0300218930) Do avail yourself of the small book Six Stories by J. P. Jacobsen [the one I am reviewing] and his novel Niels Lyhne, and begin with the first story in the first set, called “Mogens.” A whole world will envelop you…Live awhile within these books. Learn of them…but above all, love them. For this love you will be requited a thousand and a thousand times over…If I were obliged to tell you who taught me to experience something of the essence of creativity, the depth of it and its enduring quality, there are only two names that I can name: that of Jacobsen, the very greatest of writers, and Auguste Rodin, the sculptor. No one among all artists living today compares with them. Jacobsen's short stories are collected in Mogens og andre Noveller (1882, translated as Mogens and Other Tales, 1921, and Mogens and Other Stories, 1994). Among them must be mentioned "Mogens" (1872—his official debut), the tale of a young dreamer and his maturing during love, sorrow and new hope of love. "Et Skud i Taagen" ("A Shot in the Fog") is a Poe-inspired tale of the sterility of hatred and revenge. "Pesten i Bergamo" ("The Plague of Bergamo") shows people clinging to religion even when tempted to be "free men". Fru Fønss (1882) is a sad story about a widow's tragic break with her egoistic children when she wants to remarry.

Around this time, the discoveries of Charles Darwin began to fascinate him. Realizing that the work of Darwin was not well known in Denmark, he translated The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man into Danish. Jacobsen also influenced many other authors of the turn of the 20th century, including Henrik Ibsen, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig, and T. E. Lawrence, who all commented on his work. Thomas Mann once told an interviewer that "perhaps it is J. P. Jacobsen who has had the greatest influence on my style so far." [3] Which is, of course, what lies in the process of directing a play and translating it: it's a matter of making choices. The first choice – and the first indication of the difficulty of rendering any play into another language – is what title to give the play. When Ghosts was first translated into English by William Archer, Ibsen disliked the title. The Norwegian title, Gjengangere, means "a thing that walks again", rather than the appearance of a soul of a dead person. But "Againwalkers" is an ungainly title and the alternative "Revenants" is both awkward and French. Ghosts has a poetic resonance to the English ear. I appreciate a kind of unassuming influence like sitting in someone's presence and being influenced by their experiences. If it's a new world to feel as they feel... And also when it feels bad to do it. I can relate to this Jens Peter Jacobsen.

Jacobsen was an open atheist at a time in which that was a radical sentiment. His works are a testament to the struggle one goes through when trying to live in a world whose moral systems differ from one's own and the difficulty in finding a new place to center one's sense of meaning.

In a letter he once stated his belief that every book to be of real value must embody the struggle of one or more persons against all those things which try to keep one from existing in one’s own way. That is the fundamental ethos which runs through all of Jacobsen’s work. It is in Marie Grubbe, Niels Lyhne, Mogens, and the infinitely tender Mrs. Fonss. Mogens says that her vision is beautiful but prods whether she really sees that, to which Thora asks, "But [don't] you?" and he gives an answer that captures both that wonderful imagery of nature and the conflict of Man in confrontation with that reality: One character, an uneducated man, talks of his upper class girlfriend’s acquaintances: “There’s not a thing between heaven and earth that they can’t finish off with a wave of the hand: this is base and that is noble; this is the stupidest thing since the creation of the world, and that is the cleverest; one thing is so ugly…They all know the same things and talk the same way, they all have the same words and the same opinions.”She did not feel herself younger, but it seemed to her as if a fountain of tears that had been obstructed and dammed had burst open again and begun to flow. There was great happiness and relief in crying, and these tears gave her a feeling of richness; it was as if she had become more precious, and everything had become more precious to her—in short it was a feeling of youth after all.