Eveline´s Arche: “Savta, man muss erst Schalom mit den Deutschen und denen dann erst über das Judentum lehren”
Páll Melsteð about the school at Bessastaðir: At Bessastaðir the body grew strong and healthy, thanks to wrestling, football, swimming and plenty of nourishing food, while the soul became archaic and half-classical. We thought about little else than the heroic ages of Greece, Rome and ancient Scandinavia. Plato, Xenophon, Homer, Virgil, Horace, Caesar, and Cicero were read in the classroom; Njáls saga, Grettis saga and Egils saga in the sleeping lofts.
Note: Jónas Hallgrímsson wanted to follow Tómas Saemundsson to Copenhagen and continue his studies there, but he had no money. Indeed, poverty would god him all his life. At first he thought he had found a solution to this problem: he persuaded a wealthy fellow-Icelander to lend him enough money for the trip – but the death of the man´s wife caused the arrangements to collapse.
Strange, astounding things, I found to stare at! Mér við brá hér mörg að sjá í fyrstu
Wonders to amaze the mind --- Allra handa undraverk
Marvels there of every kind! Óteljandi furðu merk.
(J.H. poem at his first sight of Copenhagen)
Note: I am beginning to work why does this have to be, that literary or artistic genius is always coupled with the most absolute lack of the basic material resources to lead a comfortable life. It seems to me as if the price of aesthetics is never achieving to have enough money to actually indulge in the aesthetics.
For some reason I think I don´t like poetry anymore
J.H.´s mind was plagued by the idea of death
I think J.H. is a lot more superficial than W.B., I could easily identify him with the German Romantics. Had I been a little more educated, I suppose that I could say I were just reading the story of my own life but backwards, but at this point I can no longer harbor such high spirited ambitions. My life is a lot more miser and mediocre, lived in parallel chapters, without lovers or friends to share the wantonness with. My only treasure is my memory… My ability to remember the most naturally embellished moments of my life, to which I hold onto with zeal; but I´m getting older, less able to study, less able to stand out and certainly depressed in a way that I hadn´t experienced before, since I just no longer care whether I live or how I live. My anxiety is all centered upon the same old issue: I definitely would like to die too often, but not without publishing one sole book, but even that seems a project as far-fetched as a visit to the moons of Saturn. I want to be a very distinguished literati, but yet I sleep under a stairway, never wash my clothes, sleeping through the mornings and write only at night. I had some expectations about what life could bring by necessity of chance when I spent long nights outdoors in the most reckless and superficial consumption of alcohol, but no such luck now, since I´m so poor that I can´t afford to buy alcohol even and yet now I am so deluded into thinking that a few weeks of writing will take me willy-nilly and for free to the Hollywood of philosophies and literatures. I know this is way far from the truth, but I have to delude myself into believing it because if I stop believing it, even if for a brief moment, I will definitely have to take my own life at that very moment; there will be no more reason to stand aright and it would definitely have to end with death because there´s nothing I find so unbearable as the physical pain I experience when I don´t get up from bed; even death without publishing a book seems easy in comparison to the prospect of the bed. It´s early morning now, the time when I should begin to enjoy the release from the unrest of the night, but yet I have to anchor myself in bed now, otherwise I will have to put up with the ugly faces of human life, breakfasts, dishes, children, morning news and any other kind of pathetic Sunday endeavors that are proper of godless people such as this vermin society to which I belong. Either I turn the balance upside down and empower my dream life of books and writing in order to make it real or I will have to end with my real everyday life in order to stop this suffering. Never before had I talked so crudely about suicide, which doesn´t mean I´m any more willing to do it than I had been until now; it could simply mean that I´m reaching a threshold with my own hand and perhaps the first I will have ever crossed, at least in terms of my own intellectual development. In a few weeks I will be twenty-six years old and yet I can´t manage even to buy my own cigarettes or to convince old men to be intimate with me, but alas! I write very nicely.
At some point I wrote to Sandra Lehmann that I don´t like the stuff I write for the most part, because I think it is a bad translation of yet something much bigger that is inaccessible to me.
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