Nordic Fairy Tales
Step into Northern Europe and the sky will be vast. We entered Denmark from Germany, which is geographically adjacent and has different celestial phenomena. Just a moment ago, the forests in Germany were still resisting the cold wind with their gloomy gray-green color. In the blink of an eye, the forests in Denmark had already shaken off all the remaining leaves, leaving only the cold branches. Even the low shrub wall outside the farmhouse had been frozen. Same color as soil. Therefore, the sky is unobstructed, the earth is undecorated, and everything above and below is empty. This is my first time coming to Denmark, and everything is unfamiliar to me. I looked at everything around me in astonishment, because I couldn't tolerate such strangeness, just like I couldn't tolerate the indifference on the face of an elder who had been corresponding for many years when we first met. I have been in correspondence with Denmark for many years, and in the desolate seasons of my life, this place has repeatedly become my spiritual focus. It is true that my spiritual companion in childhood was Andersen, my spiritual companion in youth was Brandes, and in middle age I had many spiritual companions, one of whom was Kierkegaard, and they were all Danish. I wanted to look at this land more, but it was clearly afternoon and it was already dark. The winter nights in Northern Europe are so long and so hopeless. Could it be that those spirits that go straight to the east were born in the darkness and spent the first night in the ancient city of Burg on the Jutland peninsula. It was raining, and the night was darker because of the humidity. Staying up late is worse than watching the night. We followed a watchman at the intersection. The watchman held a lantern in his left hand and a halberd in his right hand. He chanted sentences in Danish along the way, such as "Beware of candles." I was particularly vigilant when I walked to the river. I bent down to observe the water conditions. There was a stone pillar on the bank that engraved that the flood of 1634 destroyed the town. The watchman left the river and returned to the street. Occasionally, there were one or two old birds. His hand gently lifted the curtains, and the insomniac heard his footsteps during the long night. Chatting with the watchman, he said that to live in Denmark, you have to learn how to survive the long nights. Even today's Queen Margaret is trying to adapt. She said: "During the long nights in the Winter Palace, I translated beautiful French prose into Danish as a pastime." Sure enough, she became an outstanding literary translator. In my eyes, she acted like a queen and expressed the relationship between the Long Night and literature through her own experience. The second stop is Odense, Andersen’s hometown. I got up early and walked through the market to find the red-roofed house where he was born. Christmas is approaching again, so I took a special look at the market. The Christmas tree and roast goose that the little match seller had in mind are still green and scorched here. As soon as I turned the corner, I saw the red-roofed house at the other end of the street. He hurried over and stepped in quickly. The room was very small. At that time, this was a slum, with many families living under the roofs. Andersen's family was even more impoverished. His grandmother had been a beggar, his father was a carpenter, and his mother did laundry for others... He had never suffered any kind of sorrow. He swallowed it all, and finally understood that the only person in the world that he could fall in love with was his children. The children’s eyes, which are stateless and best at searching, soon stared at this red-roofed room from the windows of classrooms around the world. However, even the eyes of children all over the world could not help Andersen. Andersen still lacked self-confidence for a long time. Not only did he come from a poor background, but he also wrote in a minority language. Whether he could be recognized by the literary world, he always wanted to become a Danish writer like Adam Oehlenschlager, who was relatively famous at the time, but he was ridiculed by all aspects. He really wanted to gain support from the European literary circles outside of Denmark and worked hard to make friends with cultural celebrities, but in the end he was considered a "slavish beggar". Even though he was finally widely recognized, people only thought of him as an interesting writer who was good at weaving beautiful fairy tales, and did not think of him as a literary giant. Therefore, until his death, he was still eager to meet any visitor, hoping to find some information about his appreciation in their words. He is sensitive and fragile and easily injured. He didn't know that he had already become a great literary master. None of the celebrities he envied, visited, or feared came close, let alone a regional figure like Orenslage. Today, when we have grown up and no longer linger on fairy tales, we are qualified to say: he is an eternal coordinate, examining the extent to which literature of all mankind has shaped the world and people's hearts. He must have shaped the hearts of the world. The evidence is that Denmark, which rarely flies its flag, raised a flag upright on that red-roofed building. The Long Night It was only half past three in the afternoon when our convoy entered Copenhagen, and it was already dark. Local friends said that it will not light up until eight o'clock tomorrow morning. Finally I know what the long night is. Darkness and loneliness can aid reflection. A small country with only five million people has made outstanding achievements in the world's scientific community, especially in electromagnetism, optics, astronomy, anatomy, medicine, nuclear physics, etc. It has even produced many masters. This is probably related to the long night. The short daylight reduces the effective time for superficial labor, but does not reduce the intelligence level of a country. However, darkness and loneliness also have numerous negative effects. People's melancholy mostly disappears in the sunshine and spreads among friends. This possibility is greatly reduced here. Therefore, it accumulates thicker and thicker, creating a group psychological tendency and generating a widespread and strong desire to commit suicide. . In the dark, only the church bells can have a little psychological soothing effect, but this effect has gradually weakened due to habituation.
I am reminded of Kierkegaard. Copenhagen was almost a natural hell for him. His father's panic, depression and misbehavior almost shattered his entire childhood. There were constant disasters in the family and he was in poor health. In order to be freed from hell, he chose theology, but his choice of theology forced him to give up his first love. "She chose to cry, I chose pain." But what is touching is that his lifelong writing was to build a monument to commemorate love. All of Kierkegaard's actions are related to this city. More importantly, of course, was his thinking in the dark. His most familiar thinking result is to divide the realm of life into three stages, one is the aesthetic stage, the second is the moral stage, and the third is the religious stage. From shallow to deep, there are layers of denial, and the end point is the third stage. In fact, the aesthetic stage he refers to is more accurately called the perceptual stage, that is, the stage of pursuing sensory satisfaction. Many people stay at this stage throughout their lives, but some people realize the boredom and immorality and rise to the moral stage. In the moral stage, people have a clear distinction between right and wrong, and their behavior is perfect and flawless, but this is mostly due to an external norm, a kind of self-restraint, so they must fall into pain due to suppressing their nature. It is possible for those who are aware of this pain and are willing to seek relief from a higher level to enter the religious stage. Kierkegaard believed that at that stage a person would be free from material temptations, not afraid of the pressure of public opinion, break away from the earthly network, be indifferent to moral judgment, just stand alone in the wilderness and talk to God, and feel bliss in the pain of repaying life's debts. . In my opinion, the most wonderful thing about Kierkegaard’s theory is not his description of the third stage, which he considers to be the highest state, but his exposure of the problems existing in the first and second stages. In fact, the so-called aesthetic stage and moral stage are very close to the perceptual stage and rational stage that Western philosophers have repeatedly discussed, but he extended them to life and became a philosophy of life. Western philosophers have long pointed out the one-sidedness of sensibility and rationality, and he elaborated on it in the context of life, effectively illustrating the fatal shortcomings of those two states of life. Therefore, what he calls the religious stage is really just a clearing pointed out for those who have fled from those two states of life. This vacant land should no longer have its original ills, but what it is can only be described lyrically and longingly. It is not easy to free up such an open space. We cannot demand what kind of theological or philosophical building he builds there. What is more worthy of our appreciation than this is that Kierkegaard pointed out people's "optional state" in front of these three stages. The three stages are not arranged sequentially and step by step for everyone, they are only for selection. And this choice exists all the time and everywhere. A person jumps into different realms of life due to differences in choices, and the distance between them can be worlds apart. It is not difficult to see that his proposition has already given birth to the seeds of existential philosophy. Therefore, later generations of existential philosophers always regard Kierkegaard as their predecessor, and even call him their "spiritual father." Unfortunately, when he was still alive in Copenhagen, everything went very wrong. The great philosopher only lived to be forty-two years old. In the last and most important years of his life, he was really exhausted both mentally and physically. He was a devout Christian, but the more devout he became, the more tired he became of the many shortcomings of the Danish church, so he finally broke with the church. Ordinary citizens only believe that the church is where their faith lies, which subsequently causes his relatives and friends, including his only brother, to break with him, leaving him unprecedentedly lonely. Another thing is that the great philosopher had the misfortune to have friction with an aggressive tabloid that no one in Copenhagen could afford to offend. Of course the philosophers refused to give in, but the tabloids were eager to have such a scholar tangle with them, and a melee broke out. Unfortunately, ordinary citizens only believed in the rumors and slanders hurled by the tabloids, so he became the "first-rate villain" in the minds of the citizens. I looked at the dark Copenhagen under the window and thought, Kierkegaard met two specific opponents, one was the church and the other was the tabloids, but in the end it was the general public who became the real opponents. The citizens will never side with the master, so I have to say that this city is really unfair to its master. On October 2, 1855, the exhausted philosopher fell down while walking and his lower limbs were paralyzed. However, he refused treatment, visits, and Holy Communion. He died on November 11. The most dazzling philosophical constellation of the 19th century was extinguished in the too long night of Copenhagen.