Is it possible that despite discoveries and progress, despite culture, religion and world-wisdom, one has remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that one has even covered this surface, which might still have been something, with an incredibly uninteresting stuff which makes it look like the drawing-room furniture during summer holidays?

Yes, it is possible.

[...] On his way to the damsel Hilleborg Krafse, he dreamed he was given a naked sword instead of his bride, and he took it to heart and turned back and began his brief and foolhardy life, which ended with the plague. [...]

Nothing whatever had been agreed upon between us, but when the carriage turned into the park I could not refrain from getting out, perhaps simply because I did not want to drive up to the house like any stranger. Summer was already at its height. I headed into one of the side paths and toward a laburnum tree. And there was Abelone. Beautiful, beautiful Abelone.

I shall never forget how it was when you looked at me. How you wore that gaze of yours, holding it up, like something that was not fixed, upon your back-tilted face.

Ah, did not the climate change at all, did it not grow milder round about Ulsgaard with all our warmth? Do not certain roses bloom longer in the park now, even in December?

I shall tell nothing about you, Abelone. Not because we deluded one another: since you loved someone, even then, whom you have never forgotten, you lover, and I loved all women; but because only wrong is done in the telling.

How sumptuous her raiment is.

[...] You felt how your heart intensified unceasingly toward an immense reality and, frightened, you tried once more to take people's gaze off you like long gossamer threads --: but now, in their fear of the worst, they were already breaking into applause: as though at the last moment to ward off something that would compel them to change their life.

As he thinks this, the recluse in his night, thinks it and understands, he notices a plate with fruit on the window-seat. Involuntarily he takes an apple from it and lays it before him on the table. How my life stands round about this fruit, he thinks. Around all that is finished that which has still to be done rises and takes increase.

Here he rises from his meditations and goes to his window; his high room is too close to him, he would like to see stars, if that is possible. He has no delusions about himself. He knows that this emotion fills him because among the young girls of his neighborhood there is one who matters to him. He has wishes (not for himself, no, but for her); on her account he understands, in a nocturnal hour that is passing, the exigence of love. He promises himself to tell her nothing of it. It seems to him the utmost he can do is to be alone and wakeful and on her account to think how right that lover had been: when she knew that nothing can be meant by union save increased loneliness; when she broke through the temporal aim of sex with its infinite purpose; when in the darkness of embracing she delved not for satisfaction but for longing. When she disdained one of two being the lover and one beloved, and at her own self kindled to lovers that left her those feeble beloved ones whom she bore to her couch. By such lofty farewells her heart became part of nature. Above fate she sang her last year's favorites their epithalamia; exalted their nuptials for them; magnified the coming bridegroom, so that they should prepare themselves for him as for a god and survive his splendor, too.

The soft and opiate Venice of their prejudices and demands disappears with these somnolent foreigners