3 LAST WORD
3 LAST WORD
PERHAPS you have the same experience with my previous letters as I have: you have forgotten most of what was in them. If so, I trust you are in the same case as myself and able at all times, through shifts of mood, to render account to yourself of the thought and the movement. The expression, the presentation, the embellishment, are the same yet not the same from one year to the next, like a flower, but the bearing, the movement, the stance are unchanged. Were I to write to you now I would perhaps express myself differently. I might even rise to eloquence somewhere in my letters, something I certainly have no pretensions to and which my position in life doesn’t demand of me either. Were I to write now I might perhaps succeed in some other way, I don’t know, for expression is a gift and ‘every age and every year has its own flowering spring’.1 As for the thought, however, it is and remains, and I hope in the course of time the movements will become easier for me and more natural, unchanged even when they are mute because the flower of expression has been shed.
However, it is not to write you a new letter I take up my pen, but the thought of you was brought vividly to my mind by a letter I myself have received from an older friend who is a priest in Jutland. As far as I know you have never met him. My friendship with him goes back to my schooldays, and although there were five or six years between us, we were on a fairly intimate footing. He was a little, thickset figure, cheerful, light-hearted, and uncommonly jovial. Although a serious soul deep down, his outward life seemed to conform pretty well with the injunction not to ‘give a damn’. Learning fascinated him but he wasn’t one for exams, and in his theology finals he managed no better than haud illaudabilis.2 About four years ago he was stuck in a little parish on the Jutland moors. Outwardly he had a stentorian voice, inwardly an originality that made him always stand out in the small circle of my acquaintances. No wonder, then, that to begin with he didn’t really feel content and thought his work too trifling for him. Now, however, he has regained his contentment, and reading a letter I received from him just recently had a really most encouraging effect on me. ‘The Jutland moor,’ he says, ‘is, after all, a good exercise ground for me and an incomparable study. I go walking there on Saturdays and meditate on my sermons, and everything expands before me. I forget my real audience and gain an ideal one, I manage to become totally self-absorbed, so that when I step up into the pulpit it is as though I were still standing on the moor where my eye can find no one, where my voice lifts itself with all its strength to drown out the storm.’
Still, it isn’t to tell you this that I write, but to send you one of his sermons that I found enclosed in the letter. I haven’t wanted to show it to you personally, so as not to provoke your criticism, but send you the manuscript to let it make its impression on you in tranquillity. He has not given it yet, but means to do so next year and is confident he will make every farmer understand it. You are not to sneeze at it for that reason, for the beauty of the universal consists precisely in everyone being able to understand it. In this sermon he has grasped what I was saying to you and what I would have liked to say; he has expressed it more felicitously than I find myself capable of. Take it, then, read it; I have nothing to add, except that I have read it and thought of myself, and thought of you.