August 3. Yes, the moon. There it is again.

I recall so many moons. The oldest I remember is the one who sat behind the windows in my first childhoods winter evenings. It always sat above a white roof. Once upon a time my mother read “Tomten” by Viktor Rydberg to us children: then I presently recognized it. But it didn’t yet have any of the characteristics that it later got, it was neither gentle nor sentimental or cold or ghastly. It was just great and bright. It belonged to the windows, and the windows belonged to the room. It lived with us.

Later, when they had realized that I was musical and had permitted me to take piano lessons and I was so far ahead that I was able to fiddle little about with Chopin, then the moon became new to me. I recall one night, I was approximately twelve years old, I laid awaken and couldn’t fall to sleep, because I had the twelfth nocturne of Chopin in my head, and because it was moonshine. It was in the countryside, we had shortly ago moved out there, and no windows blind was yet in the room were I laid. The moonshine streamed like a large white flood into the room and above the bed and the beds head pillows. I sat upright in the bed and sang. I had to sing that lovely tune without a word, I couldn’t get away from it. It became one with the moonshine and in both of them laid a promise of something remarkable, that once would fall to my lot, something I don’t know what, an unblessed luck or an misery that was more worth then all the luck on earth, something burning and sweet and great that awaited me. And I sang until my father stood on the doorstep roaring to me to go to sleep.

It was the moon of Chopin. And it was the same moon that later trembled and glowed above the water in the evenings of august, when Alice was singing. I loved her.

Then I recall my Uppsala moon. Never have I seen a moon with such a cold and reluctant face as that. Uppsala has a quite different climate than Stockholm has, an inland climate with dryer and clearer air. One winters evening I went on and off with and older friend in the snow-white streets with their grey buildings and black shadows. We talked philosophy. By my seventeen years I hardly believed in God: but I opposed the Darwinism: with that everything seemed to me to be meaningless, silly, vulgar. We went in under a black tunnel arch and up some stairs and stood closely under the walls of the Dome. With its scaffolds it looked like a skeleton of some tremendous animal from dead formations.

My friend talked to me about our relationship to our brothers the animals; he talked and proved and yelled with a shrill and uncultivated voice, which echoed between the walls, and he spoke with a foreign accent. I didn’t answer much, but I thought to myself: You are wrong, but I have yet read and thought too little to be able to contradict you. But wait - wait just one year, and I shall walk with you the same place, in moonshine as now, and I will prove to you how wrong and how stupid you were. For that what you say cannot, must not in any circumstances be true; if it’s true, then I don’t want to be anymore, in such a world I have nothing to obtain. But the friend talked and gesticulated with a small German booklet, in his hand, and which had equipped him with his argument. Suddenly he stopped in the middle of the moonshine, opened the book at a spot, where there were some illustrations in the text and handled it to me. There were the pictures of three craniums, fairly similar-: the sculls of an orangutang, one australnegroe and Immanuel Kant. With disgust I threw the book far away from me. The friend got angry and attacked me, we wrestled and fought in the moonshine, but he was stronger and got me under him and “washed” me in the old schoolboys way in the face with snow.

One year passed and more to come, but I never felt grown enough to convince him; I found out that I had to let that task rest. And though I couldn’t rightly understand what I in this world hade to obtain, still I stayed.

And many moons I have seen since then. A gentle and sentimental moon between birches at the edge of a lake...The moon hastening through the mists above the sea...The moon on the run through teared autumn clouds...The moon of Love, that shined at the garden window of Gretchen and on the balcony of Julia...

A not longer young girl, who with pleasure would be married, said to me once, that she had to cry when she saw the moon shine above a small cottage in the wood...

The moon is lecherous and desirous, a poet says. Another tries to put an ethical-religious tendency in the moonbeams and compare them to threads, which by dear deceased spinned will be to a net to catch a lost soul into...

The moon is for the youth a promise of all the tremendous that is waiting ahead, for the elder a s a token of the promise betrayed, a reminder of everything that shattered and broke ...

And what is the moonshine?

Sunshine in second hand. Weakened, faked.

??

This moon, which is now creeping out behind the church tower, has an unhappy face. It seems to me as the features were disfigured, dissolved, eroded, by a nameless suffering. Poor man, why are you sitting there? Are you condemned as a falsifier have you forged the sunshine?

Hjalmar Söderberg 1905; 3 augusti i Doktor Glas

http://runeberg.org/drglas/0803.html

Eva MCA engelsk översättning 2011-04-26

Chopin Nocturne - No 12 in G Major Op 37-2 (klickbar länk):

Played by Moura Lympany, f. Mary Johnstone, 1961:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24hCTvlN2Nc

en annan inspelning:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGiarONRuhA

Jag vill ha en egen måne..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAh1szE3uQw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rwy_65tJAo

 Min egen "måndikt" från 1980-talet..:)

http://www.poeter.se/viewText.php?textId=1212172