On the Seaboard. August Strindberg
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throats could set atmospheric air in vibration, above the heads of the mutes down in the water, was heard an accordant sound, from the reptile's first faint trial to utter wrath by hissing, up to the music from the harmonious vocal organs of man. There hissed his mate as a viper when the eider duck would bite her neck and trample her under the water, there quacked the goosander as a frog, and the terns shrieked and mews cawed, the gulls emitted childlike cries, the eider ducks cooed as male cats in rut time, but highest over all and therefore the most charming, sounded the long-tailed ducks' wonderful music, for as yet it was not a song. An untuned triad in major, sounding as the herdsman's horn, no matter how or when it struck in with the three notes of the others making an incomplete accord, a canon for the hunting horn without end or beginning, reminiscences from the childhood of the human race, from the earliest ages of the herdsman and the hunter.
It was not with the poet's dreamy fancy, with gloomy and therefore disquieting feelings and confused perceptions, that the contemplator enjoyed the big drama. It was with the calm of the investigator, the awakened thinker, that he viewed the relations in this seeming confusion, and it was only through the accumulated vast material of recollections that he could connect all these objects viewed with each other. He searched for the causes of the mighty impression of especially this nature, and when he found answers, he experienced the immense enjoyment that the most highly developed in the chain of creation must feel, when the veils are lifted from the occult, the bliss which has followed every creature on the infinite course toward light, and which perhaps constitutes the driving power forwards to knowledge from dreaming, a bliss which must resemble that of a supposed conscious creator who is cognizant of what he has done.
This landscape took him back to Primeval Ages, when the earth was covered with water and the tops of the highest mountains were beginning to rise above the surface. These islands around him still retained their primeval character with the earliest formed crust of granite up in daylight.
Down in the water, where the algæ of the period of cooling appeared, swam the Primary Age fishes and among them their oldest descendant, the herring, whilst on the islands still grew carboniferous ferns and lichens. Farther in on the mainland, but first on the largest islets, the Secondary Age's pines and reptiles would be found, and still farther in, the deciduous trees and mammals of the Tertiary Age, but out here in primeval formation whimsical nature seemed to have leaped over the stratification periods and thrown seals and otters down in primeval times, casting in the ice period on the morning of this day in the quarto period, just as soil on primitive rocks, and he himself was sitting as a representative of the historical times, undisturbed by the evident confusion, enjoying these living pictures of creation and raising the enjoyment through feeling himself the highest in this chain.
The secret of the fascination of the landscape was that it, and only it offered a historicized creation with exclusions and abbreviations, where one in a few hours could roam through the series of formations of the earth and finally stop at oneself; where one could refresh himself with a resume of perceptions, that led the thoughts back to the origin, resting in the past stages, relaxing the fatiguing tension to win higher degrees on the scale of culture, just as to relapse into a wholesome trance and feel one with nature. It was such moments that he used as a compensation for the past-away religious enjoyments, when thoughts of heaven were only an exchanged shape of incentive forward and the feeling of immortality was disguised uttering of the foreknowledge of the indestructibility of matter.
How serene to feel oneself at home on this earth, which was delineated to him in childhood as the valley of lamentation, which was only to be wandered through on the way to the unknown; how firm and full of trust to have gained knowledge of what was unknown before, to have been permitted to have seen into, to have looked through God's hitherto secret counsel, as it was called, all those events which were regarded impenetrable, and therefore at that time could not be penetrated. Now man had reached perspicuity about human origin and purpose, but instead of becoming weary and going to rest as one cultured nation after another have done when they have thought until destroyed, the now living generation had taken its part and acquiesced in finding themselves to be the highest animals, and exerted themselves in a judicious way actually realizing the heaven idea here, therefore the present time was the best and greatest of all times, it has carried humanity farther forward than centuries before had been able to do.
After these moments of devotional exercise in thoughts of his origin and destiny, the commissioner let his mind run over his personal evolution, as far back as he could trace it, just as though to search for his own self, and in the past stages read his probable fate.
He saw his father, a deceased fortification major of that undecided type of the beginning of the century, mixed as a conglomerate, and cemented of fragments from preceding periods, picked at random after the great eruption at the end of the past century, believing in nothing because he had seen everything perish, everything taken up anew, all forms of state tested, greeted with jubilee at reception, worsted within a few years, brought forth again as new and greeted over again as a universal discovery, he had at last stopped at the existing state as the only palpable, it may have come from a leading will, which was improbable, or from a combination of chances which was tolerably sure, but dangerous to say. Through study at the university his father had come into the pantheism of the young-Hegelians, which was a feint at turning the current which had then reached its height, and individuals had become the only reality and God became the comprehension of the personal in humanity. The living idea about the intimate relation of man to nature, that man himself stood highest in line in the chain of the world's process, characterized an elite corps of personalities, who silently despised the repeated attempts of political visionaries to place themselves above the governing laws of nature, trying in an artificial way to make new laws for the world through philosophical systems and congressional decrees. Unobserved they passed on of no use to either high or low, above they saw mediocrities through natural selection amassing around a mediocre monarch, below they found ignorance, credulity and blindness, while between these two classes the burghers were bent on business interests so positively that those who were not merchants themselves were unable to work together with them. As they were qualified, prudent and trustworthy they were occasionally promoted to positions of influence, but as they could not join with any party and had no desire to make a useless individual opposition and were not numerous enough to form a herd, besides as strong individualists would not follow a bell-cow, they remained pretty quiet carrying their discontent hidden under big crosses and decorations and smiled as augurs when they met at the councilor's table or in the house of noblemen, letting the world pass as it might.
The father belonged to certainly not a very old noble family, but one which through civil merits in retrieving the mining business and not: through doubtful exploits of war gained by the help of nature's chances or an enemy's false step, had been rewarded by a coat of arms and moderate privileges, such as to wear a nobleman's uniform and unpaid to participate in one-fourth of the ponderous administration of the country. He counted himself therefore a meritorious noble and was conscious of having come from talented ancestors, which acted as a spur down to their now living representative. Property legally acquired through the qualities and labors of his ancestors gave him the opportunity to perfect himself in his calling. He became a prominent topographer, and had participated in the building of Gota canal and in the first railroad constructions. This employment at a whole kingdom, which he had become used to look at from above and to take in at one glance on the map spread over a writing table, gave his mind gradually the habit of seeing everything on a grand scale. There he sat with a rule opening communication lines which would change the whole physiognomy, of the landscape, leveling old cities and creating new, changing the prices of products, seeking for new resources. The maps should change, the old water ways be forgotten and the black straight lines which indicated the new roads would be the determinative. The heights should be just as fertile as the valleys, the combat of the rivers should cease, frontiers between realms and countries should no more be observed.
There followed a strong feeling of power through this handling of the fates of lands and peoples, and he could not escape gradual seizures of the propensity accompanying power, to overestimate himself. Everything miraged in a bird's-eye-view, countries became maps and human beings tin soldiers, and when the topographer in a few weeks ordered the leveling of a height, which would have needed thousands of years to be denuded by natural