Niels Lyhne. J. P. Jacobsen
he found hints of his own most hidden thoughts in everything that was said. Having learned to read in his own heart, he supposed everybody else could read what was written there, and he shunned his elders, preferring to roam about alone. It seemed to him that people had suddenly become very intrusive; he developed a slightly hostile feeling toward them as to creatures of another race, and in his loneliness he began to hold them up for scrutiny and judgment. Formerly the names of father, mother, the pastor, the miller, sufficed to characterize, and the name had quite hidden the person from him. But now he saw that the pastor was a jolly little man, who made himself as meek and demure as he could at home to escape the notice of his wife, while abroad he tried to forget the domestic yoke by talking himself into a frenzy of rebellion and loud-voiced thirst for liberty. That was the pastor as he saw him now.
And Mr. Bigum?
He had seen him ready to throw everything overboard for Edele’s love, had heard him deny himself and the soul within him in that hour of passion in the garden, and now he was always talking about the philosopher rising in Olympic calm above the vague whirlwinds and mist-born rainbows of life. It roused a painful contempt in the lad and made his doubts sleep but lightly, ready to wake in a moment. For how could he know that the very things in human nature which Mr. Bigum called by belittling names were otherwise christened when they appeared in himself, and that his Olympic calm toward that which moves common mortals was but a Titan’s disdainful smile, quick with memories of a Titan’s longing and a Titan’s passions.
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