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Mogens and Other Stories

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He meets Thora and gradually is able to come to terms with Camilla's terrible death, allowing himself to fall in love again. Life does not become easy for Mogens as he continually has to confront the fear of losing another one of his loves—love which he had stopped believing in but is now finding a redeeming thread of meaning within it again. He is slow to open himself ("one never can wholly escape from one's self" states the narrator) but eventually is able to overcome his fears: The weight of his influence was felt even in his own lifetime but took on a greater wave for the generations immediately following his death. Thomas Mann claimed that Jacobsen had the greatest effect on his early style and Jacobsen's works were praised by James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Musil, Stephan Zweig, Hermann Hesse, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka among many others. Perhaps the strongest influence was made upon Rainer Maria Rilke who found Jacobsen's works to be "indispensable" in shaping his life:[2] Jacobsen's study of botany gave him a unique view of the world around him. During his childhood and time at the University, Jacobsen spent hours observing plants, wading in bogs to study algae, or cataloging new species of newly discovered plant life. For Jacobsen, there was a mystery simply in the natural world itself without the need for allegory or the supernatural elements often imposed during the Romantic period. Nature itself, observed fully and without recourse to embellishment, was sufficient as Alrik Gustafson writes of "Mogens:"

During his lifetime, Jacobsen was, like Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche, a figure that inspired new ways of thinking about what it means to be human. He began as a botanist who was the first person to translate Darwin's works into Danish and, through a series of articles, illuminated Darwin's ideas to a budding Scandinavian generation. Conflicted between science and poetry, he eventually published his short story "Mogens" in a literary journal, taking Denmark—and later Europe—by storm with his pioneering of a new style of natural realism and the confrontation with what it means to be modern. Oh, more than enough sometimes—much too much! And when shape and color and movement are so lovely and so fleeting and a strange world lies behind all this and lives and rejoices and desires and can express all this in voice and song, then you feels so lonely, that you cannot come closer to this world, and life grows lusterless and burdensome."[6] Friedrich Nietzsche, "Second Essay, Section 24," On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of NIetzsche, trans. and ed. with commentaries by Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1992), 532. Jacobsen was a Danish author (1847-1885) who sometimes took a month to write a couple of paragraphs. He insisted that the whole nature of the title story, “Mogens,” would change if the three opening words were switched to the usual “It was summer” instead of “Summer it was…”Overshadowed by the later generations that were influenced by him, Jacobsen's works have fallen out of our literary consciousness. To counter this, I am launching my AU Series on "Weaving Jens Peter Jacobsen into the Fabric of Literary Consciousness" with this essay. He had changed, it is true, and he found it difficult to understand what he himself had been. But one never can wholly escape from one’s self, and what had been surely still was there. And now this innocent child had been given him to guard and protect. He had managed to get himself into the mire till over his head, and doubtless he would easily succeed in drawing her down into it too. No, no, it shall not be thus—no, she is to go on living her clear, bright girl’s life in spite of him.

Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikisource reference 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.The best passages from this story describe nature scenes and it was evident Jens Peter Jacobsen was a botanist. Yes, I can't explain it, but there is something in the color, in the movements, and in the shapes, and then in the life which lives in them; in the sap which rises in trees and flowers, in the sun and rain that make them grow, in the sand which blows together in hills, and in the showers of rain that furrow and fissure the hillsides. Oh, I cannot understand this at all, when I am to explain it." Jacobsen's canon consists of two novels, seven short stories, and one posthumous volume of poetry—small, but enough to place him as one of the most influential Danish writers. Jens Peter Jacobsen writes like no other author I have read from his respective time period or country – not that I can think of another Dane that I’ve ever read. Yes there is great charactization and an interesting look at the time & place in which he lives but it’s the level of detail to which he is dedicated in describing things that really sets him apart. Atmosphere and having the place or setting be a character, if not the main character, is what really sets his work apart. Unlike many of his colleagues Jacobsen did not take much interest in politics, his main interests being science and psychology. He is primarily an artist: his ability to create "paintings" and arabesque-like scenes both in his prose and his poetry (which has sometimes been criticized as "mannered") is one of the secrets of his art. It has been said that his novels are a presentation of various snapshots rather than tales of action.

This event sent Mogens into a period of despair and debauchery. He lost all belief in love and refused to let anyone get close. Those that tried, he would simply tolerate for a little while before running off, never letting them capture his heart. His days were dark and lonely: All text from the above passages of "Mogens" are taken from Anna Grabow's 1921 translation of Jacobsen's short stories: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6765/6765-h/6765-h.htm Jacobson was a botanist as well as a poet. "She was a botanist so I believed her." - Lee in Sam Shepard's True West. And a poet, it goes without saying.

There is in his work something of the passion for form and style that one finds in Flaubert and Pater, but where they are often hard, percussive, like a piano, he is soft and strong and intimate like a violin on which he plays his reading of life. Such analogies, however, have little significance, except that they indicate a unique and powerful artistic personality. The longest of the stories, I found this one the most challenging to read because the syntax was off. I do not know if this is because of the translation or the style of the author. I really enjoyed the dialogue between Mogens and Thora about nature, specifically the form of animism she describes: But far down the road the blue one turns round once more toward the balcony, and raising his barret calls: "No, you are happy!"

Mogens" was [Jacobsen's] first attempt to show the lived experience of this disorientation on the small scale of a single human life.[9] Another major conflict that runs through Jacobsen's works—related to Mogens's expressions of loneliness "that you cannot come closer to this world"—is the feeling of isolation between the self—the individual—and society, a theme that would become ever more prevalent in European literature, especially that of Paris. 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:What Goes without Saying: Collected Stories of Josephine Jacobsen, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Down there home stood beside home. My home! my home! And my childhood’s belief in everything beautiful in the world.—And what if they were right, the others! If the world were full of beating hearts and the heavens full of a loving God! But why do I not know that, why do I know something different? And I do know something different, cutting, bitter, true... Enter elusive investigative journalist Scott King, whose podcast examinations of complicated cases have rivalled the success of Serial, with his concealed identity making him a cult internet figure. In a series of six interviews, King attempts to work out how the dynamics of a group of idle teenagers conspired with the sinister legends surrounding the fell to result in Jeffries’ mysterious death. And who’s to blame… He went from believing "in everything in which it was possible to believe" to descending into complete nihilism, refuting every bit of happiness in one's life as "a huge, rotting lie." Looking down from the mountaintop he states:

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