Niels Lyhne
J. P. Jacobsen (1847–1885), 1880
★ 3.97 from 3.2k ratings on Goodreads
A young Dane tries to live without God, without illusions, and without turning his own life into literature—and keeps failing in ways that feel embarrassingly familiar. A slow, lyrical haze of melancholy, art, love, and wonder surrounds a young Dane testing honesty against faith and passion.
Feels like melancholy and wonder. About art, love and faith.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you are drawn to inward, lyrical novels about art, love, faith, and living without God. Its steady melancholy and reflective middle may not suit you when you want a lighter, more eventful read.
Why read it
It gives you a close, unsentimental look at how a person tries to live without illusions, written with lyrical precision by an author who knew he was dying.
Pages from the book
The fear of people who feel too much, and the wish to burn slowly.
Involuntarily he made a gesture as if to ward it off with his hand. After all, he was afraid in his inmost heart of this mighty thing called passion. This storm-wind sweeping away everything settled and authorized and acquired in humanity as if it were dead leaves. He did not like it! This roaring flame squandering itself in its own smoke—no, he wanted to burn slowly. Love as a chemical waiting for one small particle to become solid.
But love was in their hearts, and was not there, as the crystals are present in a saturated solution, and yet are not present, not until a splinter or the merest particle of the right matter is thrown into the solution, releasing the slumbering atoms as if by magic, and they rush to meet one another, joining and riveting themselves together according to unsearchable laws, and in the same instant there is crystal—crystal. What would change if the sky stopped watching you?
“But don’t you see,” exclaimed Niels Lyhne, “that on the day when men are free to exult and say: ‘There is no God!’ on that day a new heaven and a new earth will be created as if by magic. Then and not till then will heaven be a free infinite space instead of a spying, threatening eye. Then the earth will be ours and we the earth’s, when the dim world of bliss or damnation beyond has burst like a bubble. The earth will be our true mother country, the home of our hearts, where we dwell, not as strangers and wayfarers a short time, but all our time. Think what intensity it will give to life, when everything must be concentrated within it and nothing left for a hereafter. J. P. Jacobsen.Jacobsen was a botanist who translated Darwin into Danish; he wrote Niels Lyhne while dying of tuberculosis and died at thirty-eight.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Niels Lyhne for me?
- You may like it if you are drawn to inward, lyrical novels about art, love, faith, and living without God. Its steady melancholy and reflective middle may not suit you when you want a lighter, more eventful read.
- What is Niels Lyhne like?
- A slow, lyrical haze of melancholy, art, love, and wonder surrounds a young Dane testing honesty against faith and passion. Feels like melancholy and wonder. About art, love and faith.
- What should I read after Niels Lyhne?
- If you liked Niels Lyhne, try Poetry (John Keats), Shadowings (Lafcadio Hearn) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce).
A taste of the feed
A song that makes one night feel as old as the species.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Poetry · John Keats
The night sea does not look like water; it looks like a mind.
THE moon had not yet risen; but the vast of the night was all seething with stars, and bridged by a Milky Way of extraordinary brightness. There was no wind; but the sea, far as sight could reach, was running in ripples of fire,—a vision of infernal beauty. Only the ripplings were radiant (between them was blackness absolute);—and the luminosity was amazing. Most of the undulations were yellow like candle-flame; but there were crimson lampings also,—and azure, and orange, and emerald. And the sinuous flickering of all seemed, not a pulsing of many waters, but a laboring of many wills,—a fleeting conscious and monstrous,—a writhing and a swarming incalculable, as of dragon-life in some depth of Erebus.
Shadowings · Lafcadio Hearn
The thing first love promises that it cannot deliver.
Whether he kissed her once or several times he could not afterward remember, though it must have been an hour that they sat there close together and he held her hand. What surprised him most about making love was that it seemed to have no element of wild passion—regret, desire, despair—but a delirious promise of such happiness in the world, in living, as he had never known. First love—this was only first love! What must love itself in its fullness, its perfection be. He did not know that what he was experiencing then, that unreal, undesirous medley of ecstasy and peace, would be unrecapturable forever.
Short Fiction · F. Scott Fitzgerald
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