Without Lifting A Finger

In the middle of Act IV. Where Mrs. Sørbye appears in Ekdal’s home and announces that she is going to marry Werle, the merchant, and where Ekdal’s lodger Dr. Relling is present, and he read (himself, instead of asking one of his pupils to do it, which he did at times for the sake of appearances, but he preferred to do it himself): “Relling (with a slight tremor in his voice): This can’t possibly be true? Mrs. Sørbye: Yes, my dear Relling, indeed it is.” As he was reading he felt an unendurable excitement because all at once he thought he was on the track of something to which he had not previously paid any attention when trying to understand The Wild Duck. For twenty-five years he had gone through this drama by Henrik Ibsen with eighteen-year-olds in their last year of high school, and he had always had problems with Dr. Relling. He had not fully grasped what he was doing in the play. He had seen that his function was to proclaim elementary, unvarnished truths about the other character...

 

Relling.  So much the worse for him. Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke. [To HEDVIG, who comes in from the sitting-room.] Well, little wild-duck-mother, I'm just going down to see whether papa is still lying meditating upon that wonderful invention of his.

 

Both before and after this he remains the same, the man who reels off those smart lines, one of which has acquired an immortal status in Norwegian literature: “If you take the life-lie away from an average person, you take away his happiness as well.” * The main problem with such a job was that they were incapable of receiving what he was supposed to give them. * He had even been amused at the thought that his teaching bored the pupils, thinking, Well, such is life, that’s the way it is, and must be, to teach in high school in a civilized country. The very thought of the contrary situation sufficed to make one quickly understand how impossible it would have been if it had not been the way it, as a matter of fact, was. Just try to imagine what things would be like if the cultural heritage awakened an enormous enthusiasm among the coming generation, so that they devoured it greedily because it had both the questions and the answers to what they had secretly been preoccupied w...

Only other novel on Kindle. Hope more are forthcoming.:) Also, to some degree, riffing on Ibsen's The Wild Duck . * Excerpt: Oh, that sun shining in through the municipal curtains on the window of this doctor's office at the Kongsberg Hospital! Those nauseating sunbeams in the window frame. The translucent glass in the rectangular windowpanes, sponged down every day as part of the aura of security a hospital must radiate in societies like ours. He was a bit ashamed of his words, for it offended him that a man past fifty spoke about death, and now he had done so himself, loud and clear. A man of thirty can do so, for his death is a disaster, from whatever viewpoint it is seen, being snatched away from his career in one gulp, but for him, Bjorn Hansen, who had recently turned fifty, death would only be the natural conclusion of a natural process, albeit somewhat early, statistically, and so he simply had to put up with it all, without a whimper, done is done, and the ra...

Interrupted The Woodcutters for the oft-alluded-to The Wild Duck by Ibsen (downloaded a very cheap copy of Ibsen's plays from Kindle). Not sure how much it has to do with Woodcutters (though Bernhard keeps alluding to it re the yet-to-arrive actor), but it was bugging me: knew I had read it but I couldn't remember the story. Anyway, the ending of Wild Duck: Gregers. If you are right and I am wrong, then life is not worth living. Relling. Oh, life would be quite tolerable, after all, if only we could be rid of the confounded duns that keep on pestering us, in our poverty, with the claim of the ideal. Gregers . [looking straight before him . ]  In that case, I am glad that my destiny is what it is. Relling. May I inquire, -- what is your destiny? Gregers . [going.]  To be the thirteenth at table. Relling. The devil it is.