From an Occult Diary: Marriage with Harriet Bosse by August Strindberg.
Title: From an Occult Diary: Marriage with Harriet Bosse.
Author: August Strindberg.
Genre: Non-fiction, diaries, romance, mental health, occult, health, cancer, religion.
Country: Sweden.
Language: Swedish.
Publication Date: February 21st, 1896 - July 11th, 1908.
Summary: Recounts Strindberg's bizarre relationship with his third wife, Harriet Bosse, 30-years his junior. His obsession with her lasted way beyond their 3-year marriage. She "possessed" him, and in his fevered imagination, he slept with her night after night. The closing pages of the diary, written in early 1908, when Harriet became engaged to a young actor, and Strindberg was feeling the first pains of a fatal cancer, convey an anguish and pathos beyond the scope of fiction.
My rating: 7.5/10.
♥ Going over in my mind what my life has been I wonder whether all the horrible things I have experienced have been staged for me to enable me to become a dramatist, and depict all mental states and all possible situations. I was a dramatist at twenty, but if the course of my life had run smoothly, I should have had nothing to write about.
♥ At 4 o’clock I was overcome by an attack of weeping - wept in general over my own misery and that of mankind, wept without reason, with a dim feeling of happiness, with a premonition of coming disaster.
♥ The smell of incense seems to be coming to an end. Have my three weeks of asceticism made me impervious to her Aura? Or has her Aura merged into mine and become refined through it?
♥ Suppose the whole thing is and remains make-believe? What then? Why, I shall write a poem, a beautiful poem, and the anguish of loss will be transformed into song! Dante never got his Beatrice, and therefore he remained faithful to her, in spite of the fact that she was married to another man!
♥ Forgive me, friend, for spoiling your pleasure yesterday, but there are certain Powers that I cannot control.
When I stay quietly in my home, I am at peace. But if I go out among people, then Inferno is let loose.
That is why I long to have a home!
♥ It was my soul that loved this woman, and the brutalities of marriage disgusted me. For that matter, I have never really been able to understand what the not very elegant act of procreation has to do with love for a beautiful female soul. The organ of love is the same as one of the excretory organs. How characteristic that is!
♥ My past? Can one ever fathom the depths of a creative artist’s life? Has a man any right to repent of his past, from which has learnt and which he did not stage himself? I have lived as I could and not as I should have wished!
♥ Or is it that you feel your bonds are too irksome? If so, then it must be as you wish, though it seems to me that you have availed yourself of your freedom without much regard for your bonds.
♥ I can think of people I have known, good, respectable, popular people, who have said or done things that I have crossed out, things I can never bring myself to mention and that I refuse to remember. Breeding and education seem to do no more than mask the beast in us, and virtue is a disguise. Our highest achievement is the concealment of our vileness.
♥ I recently burnt a play so honest that it made me shudder. Yet I never feel sure that I ought to flatter humanity by concealing what is vile. I should like to write of things as bright and beautiful, but I may not, I cannot. I regard it as my dreadful duty to be truthful, and life is so indescribably ugly.
♥ I am very fond of you - whatever may happen - I love you, perhaps because, through such deep and boundless sorrow, you have infused my life with meaning.