[?] When I am drinking heroically, or thinking about booze (as is my wont wnever I'm sober); when I am reading Sterne, or Swift, or Joyce or Burroughs; when I listen to the strains of the Irish fiddle and they lift me through the chimney to the rooftops then sink me into such a dark depression that even plastic bags become a threat; when I think about my furies, my hatreds, my loves, & the seesaw of emotions that fill my soul every day, I know I am Irish through and through.
But when I read the works of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heine, and even more than that when I listen to Bach and Beethoven as I always do; when I want nothing more than to write & work, and work & write and when I don't such a deep feeling of listlessness/ogida comes over me that I can hardly handle myself, let alone others (having been cursed w/ the inability to make small talk, I am wholly crustacean, and avoid my neighbors in the most shameful ways for fear of being pried out of the glory of my shell), I know my German ancestors have their hands in my soul, and are turning my inward glance towards them.
But when I am transposed by the paintings of Edvard Munch; when I am reading Hamsun; when I am overtaken by a feeling of wanderlust and lusting for the ocean, or want to go fishing in a crab boat on the Bering Sea - this last hardly ever happens -
"never having had a fondness for catching fish" -- Turgenev
But when it does I know I am more Norwegian than anything.
I am 2/3rds Irish and German, parts Norwegian, and am just beginning to figure on what came from where, & who is responsible for my particularly sad form of madness.
It was probably the English. I have some of that in me too.
“It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them.” -- D.H. Lawrence
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