February 5, 2020

"August Strindberg once claimed in his profound, deranged seriousness that the stars in the sky were peepholes in a wall."

I'm reading that in "My Struggle: Book 1" by Karl Ove Knausgaard (p. 205).

Knausgaard goes on to other things, but I want the original Strindberg. I find this on the internet...
But that's from a play — "The Butcher's Apron" — by Charles Tidler in which Strindberg is a character.

I can't find the original Strindberg. When I read the sentence in the Knausgaard book, I imagined the stars as peepholes for those watching us from the other side of the sky.

But in that Tidler play, it's the other way around, and we on this side can go up to a peephole and look through to the other side. Maybe I was influenced by "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes":



And here's the post from a few days ago where we were talking about peepholes, including the idea of reversing a peephole.

22 comments:

Seeing Red said...

And now in NY, one needs a permit to peek.

No ID to vote tho.

AllenS said...

A man in shorts!

n.n said...

A man in shorts! ... The peephole has been reversed.

Men playing with women playing with men in swimsuits. Boys and girls just want to be gay, sing, and dance together.

Amexpat said...

I read some of Strindberg plays decades ago. The guy could write. But he was also certifiable insane. Paranoid too. Gave up writing for a while for Alchemy. Almost killed himself trying to make Gold. He was a critic of Ibsen. Ibsen bought a portrait of Strindberg so that he could amuse himself looking at the madman.

Maillard Reactionary said...

You mean they're not?

Separately, Ibsen was pretty weird too. There's a chapter about him in Paul Johnson's Intellectuals.

Maillard Reactionary said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
George Grady said...

"Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit."

--Bertie Wooster about Madeline Bassett

Maillard Reactionary said...

I've got Roger Scruton's Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands queued up after I finish Minnaert's The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air. I cheated and read a bit of the Introduction today and I think it's going to be far more entertaining, much as I like physics.

tcrosse said...

There was once a belief that the sky was a vast sphere with pinholes, through which the glory of God shone as stars.

Jupiter said...

That was better than the halftime show. How old are those gals?

Mea Sententia said...

That video is spectacularly and hilariously AWFUL! (Especially the guy in the blue Speedo.) Thanks for sharing it.

Josephbleau said...

A re-reading of Mein Kampf? The reading on the creation of the elements seems very modern, except for the copulation part.

Josephbleau said...

I watched the scene, and will admit the brunette dancing on the rock is indeed the prime filet. Was probably my mom's age though.

rcocean said...

Strindberg distrusted camera lenses, since he considered them to give a distorted representation of reality. Over the years he built several simple lens-less cameras made from cigar boxes or similar containers with a cardboard front in which he had used a needle to prick a minute hole. But the celestographs were produced by an even more direct method using neither lens nor camera. The experiments involved quite simply placing his photographic plates on a window sill or perhaps directly on the ground (sometimes, he tells us, already lying in the developing bath) and letting them be exposed to the starry sky.

The black or darkly earth-colored pictures that eventually appeared are strewn with a myriad small, lighter dots that Strindberg thought were stars. That they might have been drops of dew, some kind of atmospheric particles, or just some dirt in the developer cannot be ruled out. As soon as the experiments were finished, Strindberg sent both photographs and a written account to the famous astronomer, Camille Flammarion, in Paris. But despite his own mystical inclinations, Flammarion must have considered this photographic method all too absurd and Strindberg never received the official recognition for which he was yearning. Indeed, as a contribution to science or as a representation of nature, these pictures are of course worthless. Their imaginary value, however, is an entirely different question.

eddie willers said...

Bobby Vee!

Man....were we ever ready for the Beatles.

JAORE said...

The stars in the sky are glory holes. If you get close enough....

JAORE said...

FWIW it is painfully apparent those geeks have never ridden motorcycles before.

Ann Althouse said...

For the record, the next sentences in the Knausgaard book are:

“ Occasionally I was reminded of that when observing the endless stream of souls descending the stairs to masturbate in the darkness of the cellar booths as they watched the illuminated screens. The world around them was closed off, and one of the few ways they could look out was through these boxes. They never told anyone what they saw, it belonged to the unmentionable; it was incompatible with everything a normal life entailed, and most of those who went there were normal men.”

Assistant Village Idiot said...

The Eastern Orthodox believe that icons are a window into heaven, which is why they will stare at them and contemplate them in prayer.

Ryan said...

"My Struggle" you say? Gee, that translates into Mein Kampf, in German. Someone else wrote a book with that title.

BUMBLE BEE said...

That video is the ginchiest!

Carter Wood said...

Bobby Vee got his break when Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper went down, February 3, 1959. They were flying to Fargo to perform the next day in Moorhead, Minn. Bobby Velline, born in Fargo, had a couple of regional hits so he was called into perform.

Night has a Thousand Eyes is one of his better songs.