The Lost Musicians by William Heinesen

Author:William Heinesen [Jones, W. Glyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781910213629
Publisher: Dedalus
Published: 2017-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

The rest of the day passed in the usual way, as though nothing had happened. But in the twilight, when the last pupil had gone and quite contrary to his own wishes, Magister Mortensen slipped back into the strange feverish condition he had experienced during the morning. In his thoughts, as in a vision, he saw the dreadfully big, quite unmanageably big fortune that now, contrary to all reason, had fallen to him … bundles of banknotes, pile after pile, a snowstorm of ten kroner notes, of hundred kroner notes, of five hundred kroner notes … he felt dizzy and had to throw himself on to the chaise longue, where he fell into a restless, dream-filled sleep. He dreamt that he had bought himself a new telescope, a real telescope through which he could see the planet Saturn so near that it covered the entire sky.

When he woke up again, it was dark. Atlanta was not at home. He was suddenly taken by a fear that she might not return, but that she had left him for good and surrendered him to a void he could not bear. “Atlanta,” he groaned to himself as he wandered restlessly around the empty flat.

He went into the bedroom, where Vibeke was asleep. The sleepy little bedside lamp was on the chest of drawers by her bed. The poor child almost looked like a human being when she was dozing. She ought really always to be dozing.

He kissed her forehead and suddenly burst into tears, and he laid himself on the bed, sniffing as he did so.

Before long, he bounced up, lit the table lamp and set about reading what he had written that morning before all this confusion had begun. Before the deluge. Before the Flood.

“As an intellectual type in the broadest sense, Kierkegaard thus belongs to the Mephistophelian category.Like the Devil’s chargé d’affaires in Goethe, he is in possession of a superior intellect that he applies with the same deftness and tirelessness. Each in his own way, they are both at once witty, impudent and dazzling. Indeed, Kierkegaard is in fact more than a match for the Devil in that he is unsurpassed in the art of attacking reason with its own weapons. He is not only Mephistopheles, but he is at the same time Mephisto’s victim, Man, Faust. He not only directs his weapons at others, but he finally turns them on himself, without mercy, standing there like a mortally wounded flagellant, whereas Mephistopheles dissolves himself in a miasma of brilliant conversation. And Kierkegaard suffers horribly under his own Satanism. He is what one might call the tragic Satan…”

There was someone coming upstairs now. Atlanta, presumably, coming home.

Mortensen pushed the manuscript aside. Yes, it was Atlanta. She was in her best clothes, but looked infinitely sad. She sat down hesitantly on the chaise longue. There were fresh raindrops forming pearls on her overcoat and in her heavy head of dark hair. She looked at him, pleading, as though she had something she had to say to him.

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