The queen who chose not to rule: Christina of Sweden in the play Queen C (first produced at the Finnish National Theatre in 2003, directed by the author, Laura Ruohonen, with Wanda Dubiel in the role of the Queen). Photo: Leena Klemelä

Extracts from ‘Postscript’, published in Kuningatar K ja muita näytelmiä (‘Queen C and other plays’, Otava, 2004)

It’s hard to read plays. I was bitterly disappointed at the age of eight, when I hid in my grandmother’s attic and opened up Romeo and Juliet, a book that seemed to promise lust and appalling acts. But it wasn’t even a real book; it was just talking from beginning to end! Where was the plot, the action, the much talked-about love story?

It’s also hard to write plays. Novels and works of poetry are closed miniature worlds that invite the reader in. A play always serves two masters. It has to be open and porous to allow the actor and the performance to penetrate into it.

For that reason, it’s more vulnerable, it can be more easily distorted into something unrecognisable than the sturdier forms of literature. If you want it to last, a play has to have a strong skeleton that can always be dressed in new clothes as time goes by to fit the fashion.

But it’s hard not to write plays, too. At its best, drama has a unique capability of transforming word into flesh: to evoke a world with many diverging ideas and opposing impulses expressed in vibrant, densely packed dialogue.

My way of writing a play is like an ancient Finnish bear hunt: you need to approach your prey from several directions at once, surround it circuitously, creep up on it sideways, get close to it without ever aiming directly at it. That’s how you have to approach your subject, prowling around it, approaching at a tangent, until you start to understand what’s in it that interests you and how that could form the basis of the work as you write.
As a child I despised Queen Christina. In the story Tähtien turvatit (‘Protégés of the planets’) by Zachris Topelius [1872], she is portrayed as a spoiled princess who grows up to be a capricious traitor to her country, whose selfishness and vanity leads to the ruin of the nation and the death of great philosopher. When I grew up I started wondering what Christina was striving for when she gave up everything she had been born to: status, religion, gender. What made her abdicate her throne? To my surprise, in the broad field of literature written about Christina, I didn’t find a single satisfying explanation.

From Christina’s own writings a picture started to emerge of an ambitious rebel for whom the mere crown of little Sweden wasn’t enough. She wanted something more magnificent, and she wanted to acquire it by herself. At the beginning of Christina’s era, in the 17th century, an idea was emerging of the modern individual, someone who makes of herself what she wants to be. Centrally connected with this idea was an idealisation of personal freedom and independence. In my play Kuningatar K, Queen C, I wanted to examine a person who’s ultimate goal was freedom from all personal constraints, the most demanding of these being love, a person who was ready to go to any lengths to achieve her freedom.

As early as 1996 I wrote to a friend: ‘I plan to write a queen play. [The history plays by Shakespeare are called ‘king plays’ in Finnish.] The main characters are Queen Christina of Sweden-Finland and the philosopher Descartes, whose concept of love and equality will be one of the central themes of the play. [Descartes was invited to Stockholm in 1649, where he gave the Queen lessons in philosophy. He was said to have suffered from the harsh winter, fell ill, and died in February 1650. According to a new study, though, he may have been poisoned.] My aim will be to combine a poetic and comic-book style, with philosophical and spontaneously invented material, to create a play that will bring history almost too close and alive.’

But it was seven years before I finally got to direct Christina on the stage. Why? The most important reason can be seen in the structure of the text. I didn’t want to force historical themes that interested me into the disguise of drama, but I also didn’t want to give up my main character. Although the text loosely follows the events in the life of the historical Christina, it couldn’t advance by means of turns in the plot but instead by intertwining, multi-layered images and ideas.

The solution swam right to me. A Swedish field guide to fish fell into my hands – with recent research discoveries about the lives of eels. Modern natural science is still delightfully baffled when it comes to eels: the more we learn about them, the more mysterious they become. This primeval, mythical water creature, which is always changing its form and gender, was a door into Christina’s world for me. No matter how long the power of the entire modern scientific apparatus examines it, the riddle of the eel is never-ending. The same is true of Christina: the more I knew about her, the deeper the mystery. (Just a few years ago they dug up her grave for DNA analysis to make sure for the umpteenth time that she was a woman.) Among the aphorisms that the historic Christina wrote this one touched me most: ‘In every person there is a room to which only she has the key.’

Queen C (Wanda Dubiel, The Finnish National Theatre). Photo: Leena Klemelä

Queen C in its present form, having been produced in various languages and as a radio play, is above all about the tensions that are fuelled by the pursuit of freedom, by power and the megalomania at the centre of power. Christina is a modern rebel who rejects the roles of woman, mother, and female ruler that are offered to her, and instead lets nothing get in the way of building a new identity that shatters concepts of gender and the limits of acceptability, regardless of the consequences. What happens to a person who places her own freedom above love, loyalty, and friendship?

Translated by Lola Rogers

Ladylike: woman riding sidesaddle (Journal des Dames, 1799)

I have a friend who is an avid reader and who also talks about the books he reads. But being a staunch conservative when it comes to reading habits, I just cannot consider him a true friend of literature. The reason: he only reads non-fiction books. To me, ‘being a reader’ means reading fiction and poetry.

But increasingly it seems that real literature is becoming more and more marginal, whereas non-fiction (self-help, history, travel guides, popular science, popular economics, cookbooks) is what sells and keeps the industry afloat. The recent Finnish ‘essay-boom’ is an example of this development, with young writers like Antti Nylén or Timo Hännikäinen gaining recognition as important contemporary authors solely through their work as essayists; Hännikäinen has also written poetry, but Nylén is strictly a non-fiction writer.

What is remarkable to me is that only twenty or thirty years ago such a thing would not have been possible: essayists were not ‘true’ authors. That honor was reserved, mostly, for novelists (and perhaps some poets). Nowadays it’s not even the lowest common denominator, membership of the Finnish Writers’ Union, which makes you an author. Now every biographer and cookbook-writer can claim that name for themselves, and it seems perfectly natural to everyone.

How and why do people’s reading habits change? The American writer and essayist Edgar Allan Poe once complained that ‘long poems’ were a flat contradiction in terms, since readers could not sustain for very long the excitement which true poetry demands. ‘After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags – fails – a revulsion ensues – and then the poem is, in effect and in fact, no longer such.’ Poe’s essay stands in the middle of a sea-change in our conceptions of what poetry and prose properly are. Before Poe, lyrics (short poems) were only a minor part of poetry, with the epic narrative poem regarded as the most accomplished and revered form; after Poe, lyrics – the short, intense lyrical moment – are what poetry is: ‘an elevating excitement of the Soul’.

I’ve always thought Poe’s idea was at the same time incredibly daft and remarkably ingenious. At first glance it seems crazy that poetry should be judged by the fickle attention spans of readers; if that were true, advertisers would be the best poets in the business. But the real question raised by Poe’s essay is not whether short or long poems are better. What he does is turn our presuppositions about art on their heads: the success of art is not dependent on the qualities of the work of art, but on our own personal experience of it. Before Poe, this was not the case.

Of course, he was not the only one advocating this kind of idea. But Poe was the first to connect the reader’s pleasure with the reader’s needs as a consumer of literature: literature is a commodity which must meet the demands of readers, and these demands are based on pleasure and entertainment. In the history of literature, this idea has provoked a change that is immense, and we are still in the middle of it. The changing status of non-fiction is only the most recent phase.
What we learn from this is that the nature of things is not fixed. History changes everything. There was a time when no decent lady would ride a horse, or let her daughters near one, because riding astride a horse was considered unbecoming for women. And although some women of status, even before the invention of the modern sidesaddle in the 1830s, did ride horses, horseback riding was more usually a sport for men: in war and at work soldiers, knights, cowboys, fox-hunting aristocrats and couriers rode horses. Women rode in carriages, far away from the brute animals. But after the invention of the sidesaddle things started to change drastically, and riding became the hobby of women as well – and today, at least in Finland, horseback riding is something that is mostly associated with teenage girls: no ice-hockey-playing, sausage-eating, weight-lifting man will ever go near a horse, because horses are for horse-crazy girls, not men.

Surely the invention of the sidesaddle is not the only reason why riding has become a girl’s sport. Another reason might be connected with the way in which developments in technology effect cultural norms. When there were no cars, controlling the wild nature of a horse was a masculine job; when cars were invented, the ‘power’ of the horse was transferred to the engines of these new vehicles, which then became a man’s job to handle. Women were left with the obsolete form of locomotion which, stripped of its utility and power, became a luxury hobby first for upper-class and later for middle-class girls.

What do horses and cars have to do with changes in reading habits? Well, for one, the fact is that fewer and less men seem to read, and literature is becoming more and more a women’s hobby. Is the same thing happening to literature as to horses? Surely not, you say: that is completely illogical. It must be a coincidence.

But history is illogical. Most people, it seems, believe that the things of this world have a fixed nature, and that any and all developments in things like society and the material world happen somehow ‘logically’: that things follow their nature, an order of things, such as up-down, down-up; hunger-nourishment; growing up organically like a plant from seed to flower; growing old; or whatever process our brains and biology and experience of the world has taught us to expect, such as the sun rising every day or the idea that all swans and all lambs are white.

Sometimes politics, markets, technological innovations, reading habits and social customs such as marriage and who rides the horse change in ways which seem illogical or counter-intuitive to those who believe in the fixed nature of things. Suddenly a black swan sails across the familiar pond. Gay marriage challenges the nature of wedlock. Hard work does not pay. The evolution of life on earth, or the creation of technological innovations, or the growth of markets, is found not to be steady growth after all, but a series of reactions to catastrophes, short bursts of creativity followed by long periods of stasis – ‘punctuated equilibrium, as the evolutionary theorist Steven Jay Gould was fond of saying.We cannot see these relationships and the causal structures which control the world, because they are outside our brain’s capacity, and contemplating their irrational nature causes us physical pain. We mostly find ourselves reacting to stimuli, or going the way of least resistance, trusting routine: human decision-making comes after the fact, no matter how well we believe we can predict the future. We live in a nice little fiction of safe roads and gentle horses. This is why the recent hubbub about ebooks changing our reading habits, something I’ve tried to contribute to, is just that: a fiction. Publishers and the industry are terrified of change and seek to control it by any means necessary, mostly by inventing fictions of economic catastrophe, of evil pirates preying on poor authors. On the positive side, consultants, journalists and essayists, like me, find an exciting subject to speculate on (I admit I’m doing this mostly for the fun of it), and gadget fans have new gadgets to fondle.

Ebooks, and ebook reading devices, won’t change anything in our reading habits, if we view them from the perspective of Poe’s theory. To wax a little cynical, books are not art but a pleasurable commodity for consumers with short attention spans. The growing volatility of the literary market, the intensity with fashions change, is testimony to this, but the change which has made our present book culture possible has already happened, long ago. In any case, most reading is already done online; there is already more text in the internet than in all the literature of the world.

What ebooks might change, apart from the economic model of publishing, is our understanding of literature: we might come to understand that literature is not bound to books. Electronic reading proves that literature can be produced, accessed and used in more ways than one – and by changing the technology of reading, ebooks might just be able to make men read again, because using gadgets and mastering technology is what men are supposed to enjoy. After all, ebooks make things easier and faster: like riding cars instead of horses.

When we think of the future of publishing in these times of electronic reading devices, audiobooks, and the internet, when it seems as if the whole material being of literature is about to be transformed, we may ask how the marketing of books will change.

What happens when publishing goes online? How will authors cope with the new culture of the internet?

The internet is a place of fads: often silly, usually forgettable, but sometimes significant inventions and fashions which change the way we interact with each other on a daily basis. Many of these innovations have to do with communities: the much-touted ‘social media’ of forums, message boards, chat channels and the like, where news of bands, books and movies proliferate much faster than through traditional networks such as newspapers and television.

Because communication is faster, fashions are born and die much faster; the cycle of culture is speeding up. At the same time every dead fashion is piling up in some obscure niche of the web. Nothing ever really goes away on the internet. It has simply lost the attention of the general public. Online, it’s the attention that counts: how do you get it, and how do you keep it?

One has to ask how publishing will mutate in accordance with these new conditions. Will we find ourselves in the midst of a new kind of literary culture centered around digitally savvy writer-celebrities and their fan communities? Or will the internet become a vast graveyard of ghosts whispering about their 15 seconds of fame?

An example of the kind of authorial behavior that we may witness in the future is the up-and-coming generation of authors of ‘indie fiction’, such as the Americans Tao Lin, Blake Butler and Shane Jones. Indie fiction is not a literary school or even a set of stylistic similarities shared by a generation of writers, but rather is loosely attached to group blogs and internet literary magazines, such as HTML Giant (which is edited by Butler, the author of two well-received novels). It is an economic and material category: most, if not all, indie fiction is published and marketed by small presses such as Featherproof Books, Calamari Press, and Publishing Genius on or via the internet, sometimes not even in paper format at all.

But what is this ‘indie’, you might ask, and how does it herald the future of publishing? Well, it is, of course, a popular music term, deriving from ‘independent’, meaning independent of major labels, big money; an alternative to mainstream culture. ‘Indie fiction’ is therefore also a cultural category, and it is true that indie fiction has more in common with the mentality of so-called indie musicians and indie record labels than it has with traditional publishing houses and traditional literary culture – more with social media such as MySpace and Facebook than the institution of literary agents and venerable magazines like the Paris Review or the New Yorker.

As many indie fiction authors also seem to be alumni of creative writing programs, one could almost say: what art school has been for rock music, the MFA (or Master of Fine Arts, the degree awarded by creative writing programs in American universities) will be for literature (the list of significant musicians who went to art school and then changed the face of popular music is quite amazing: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, REM, Radiohead…).

What this means is that indie authors are rooted – unlike mainstream authors, who do not cluster around any such institutions – in the same hotbeds of alternative, twentysomething student lifestyles from which new trends in fashion and music almost always emerge, or which, at least, trendsetters scrutinise in order to find the new ‘it’ phenomena. But what is important is that they emerge independently of mainstream institutions, which can hop on the train only when it is already moving.

‘Indie fiction’ therefore means the subculturisation of mainstream literature: ever smaller niches for ever smaller audiences. This does not mean that indie authors are afraid to ‘sell out’, or that they will not also jump aboard the traditional bandwagon when it comes around. One could even argue that the expertise in self-promotion which successful indie authors accrue is an important skill set for their future careers, since it means that such authors have measured the mental pulse of their demographics and can speak to them on their own terms and through their own channels.

Take the aforementioned Shane Jones, a 30-year-old author who explicitly set himself with the goal of using internet forums to promote his novel, Light Boxes. The novel was originally published by Publishing Genius, a tiny press, and Jones promoted it on the internet by putting up a website, giving interviews to internet magazines, and by sending ‘hundreds of personal emails’ to his readers on the site Goodreads.com, a kind of public bookshelf for people who want to list and review their books. Since the site can also be used to find new books through your friends on the forum, after Jones got himself noticed by more and more people on the site, more and more people recommended the book to their friends.

Ultimately Jones’s marketing campaign was successful, since it got him noticed by the venerable Penguin, who published his novel, and also by Spike Jonze, the Hollywood movie director, who optioned the film rights for his novel.

A more famous example is probably Tao Lin, the self-appointed ‘it boy’ of indie fiction. Lin, who has published two novels, a collection of stories and two collections of poetry, is famous for using the internet in order to get attention for his work. He has, for instance, used his blog to sell $2000 shares in an unpublished novel, each of which would entitle the owner to 10 per cent royalties. This gave him wide coverage by the press in the US and the UK.

Lin is also known for sending relentless amounts of ironically self-promotional e-mail to the editors of almost every major internet magazine having anything to do with literature or culture at large – these messages often detail even his most mundane chores. At one point, Lin and (perhaps, since they all may be Lin) four other authors used Craigslist, the hugely popular internet notice board for classified ads, to shop for interns to promote their books.

But perhaps most famously, he’s claimed to have subsisted on shoplifting and selling the stolen merchandise on eBay, the internet auction house. But since the stolen items were corporate products and Lin used the proceeds to buy, among other good things, organic food, he therefore claims that the thefts were ethically vindicated. He later wrote a book, called Shoplifting from American Apparel, which, to my surprise, I bought from the Academic Bookstore here in Helsinki.

Such antics only work, of course, if the writing is good. And judging by Jones’s, Butler’s and Lin’s novels and short stories, there is good reason to take them seriously. Whereas both Butler and Jones tend toward the surreal, referencing magical realists like Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, Lin’s work brings to mind both Hemingway and Donald Barthelme, writers of surgically precise prose, the one realist, the other fabulist. Lin’s writing, especially in the 2007 novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, combines these two tones into a voice which, when the amalgam succeeds, is at once funny, serious and absurd, imaginative and deadpan, ironic and minimalist.

The voice of these new authors, at its best, uses humor and absurd imagination to isolate and foreground the existential angst of a generation brought up with the bodiless anonymity of digital life, with text messages, chatrooms and blogs. It is a voice depressed by the narrowed experience of modern networked life in the blue glow of computer monitors, but one that is still yearning for moments of imagination, happiness and meaning – even if such things seem to be only the nostalgic phantoms of their previous incarnations.

Secrets: an illustration by Aino-Maija Metsola from Minä ja Muro (‘Me and Muro) by Mari Kujanpää

Books have a tough time in their struggle for the souls of the young: more titles for children and young adults than ever before are published in Finland, all of them trying to find their readers. Päivi Heikkilä-Halttunen picks out some of the best and most innovative reading from among last year’s titles

Nine-year-old Lauha’s only friend and confidant is her teddy bear Muro, because Lauha is an outsider both at home and at school. The children’s novel Minä ja Muro (‘Muro and me’, Otava), which won the 2009 Finlandia Junior Prize, provoked discussion of whether it was appropriate for children, with its oppressive mood and the lack of any bright side brought into the life of the main character in its resolution.

Literature for children and young people finds itself wrestling with the pressures of conflicting expectations: adults think a book is a good one if they themselves genuinely enjoy it, although children often have a much more uncomplicated, hands-on relationship to reading.

It is the task of the publishing marketer to target books to the right readers of the right age. Mari Kujanpää and Aino-Maija Metsola’s Minä ja Muro and Lauri Törhönen’s Sello & Pallo. Vaaleansininen rakkauskertomus (‘Cello & Ball: a pale blue love story’,Tammi) are good examples of so-called crossover literature, intended for a broad target audience.

After an era of taboo-breaking and angst-filled books written for young people, this debut work by  film director Törhönen, Sello & Pallo, is an interestingly odd bird; instead of the teen dilemmas typical of the genre, Törhönen describes first love with a giddiness that teenagers aren’t quite used to these days.

When it comes to fostering enthusiasm for reading, books in series are important. In fact, contemporary publishers swear by books sold in series; nearly 60 percent of last year’s books for children and young adults from the three largest publishers (WSOY, Otava, Tammi) either feature heroes already familiar to readers, or are the first book in a new series. Series are of great value in the beginning stages of reading, but they can also slow down literary innovation. Children’s books that can stand on their own, as they say, are rare nowadays. Picture books suffer particularly from the present proliferation of series. Finnish children’s books also must contend with entertaining translated offerings as they scramble for readers: recently, the successes of Anglo-Saxon marketing have been imitated – whether consciously or unconsciously – and in the case of quality literary offerings, this can be of benefit to Finnish authors.

There are more new young writers all the time, but well-known writers may also have continued success: the classic Selja family series by Rauha S. Virtanen (born 1931) is an unusual case – its first four parts appeared between 1955 and 1964, its fifth and sixth in 2001 and 2009.

The retro fad, with its interest in the lifestyles of previous eras like the 1960s and 70s can be seen not just in fashion and interior design, but also in children’s book illustrations, the delicate tones of the 70s can be seen both in the visuals and in the earnest didacticism reminiscent of 70s children’s books, emphasising such themes as severe parental neglect in Mari Kujanpää and Aino-Maija Metsola’s Minä ja Muro and societal breakdown in Seita Parkkola and Jani Ikonen’s Usva (‘Mist’, WSOY).

On the other hand, some of last year’s children’s books, and even young adult books, held fast to the idyllic, showing no signs of recent economic decline. In Marja-Leena Tiainen’s easy-to-read Maiju ja Bao (‘Maiju and Bao’), a Finnish girl travels to Vietnam, where she is shocked by what she sees and starts a philanthropic campaign. In Terhi Rannela’s teen novel Goa, Ganesha ja minä (‘Goa, Ganesha and me’), the poverty of India inspires the main character to sponsor a foreign child on her return to Finland. A sense of community is particularly trendy in young adult books – contrary to what you might have read in the news about school-yard bullying, friends in these books aren’t left to fend for themselves.

Folklore is used in books for readers of various ages. The Kalevala and other mythological subjects appear in Louhi, the adventure-packed final book in Timo Parvela’s Sammon vartijat (‘Guardians of the Sampo’) trilogy, in Reeta Aarnio’s children’s fantasy Veden vanki (‘The prisoner of the water’), and in Sari Peltoniemi’s Hämärän rengissä (‘The servant of darkness’), which is an imaginative combination of alternative history and fantasy.

Children’s literature was visible at the forefront of government literary prizes in 2009. Kirsi Kunnas (born 1924), the queen of Finnish children’s poetry, was nominated to the Finnish Academy of Arts, collaborators Hannele Huovi and Soili Perkiö were awarded the State Children’s Culture Award for their work in children’s literature and music education, and Maria Vuorio received the Finland Prize for the Arts.

The grateful frog: stories by Maria Vuorio, illustrated by Virpi Penna

But media interest in children’s literature has waned – it is mainly prizes, publishing successes, and film and theatre adaptations that are considered newsworthy. In spite of the increased selection, it is the rare children’s writer or children’s book that receives public and critical attention.

Translated by Lola Rogers

High-tech: the ultimate gadgets of the 15th century, parchment and pen. A portrait of Jean Miélot, the Burgundian author and scribe, by Jan Tavernier (ca. 1456)

The day will soon come when commuters sit on a bus or train with their noses buried in electronic reading devices instead  of books or newspapers. Teemu Manninen takes a look at the digital future

Most people interested in books are aware of the arrival of electronic reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle, a kind of iPod — the immensely popular portable music listening device made by the company Apple — for electronic books. For a literary geek like me, the Kindle and e-readers should be the ultimate gadget: a whole library in a small, paperback-sized device. However, I’ve been wondering why digital reading hasn’t become as popular as digital listening. I myself have not invested in an e-reader, although I ought to be exactly the desired kind of customer. After all, I read all the time. Even the mp3 player I have is mostly used for listening to audio books.

But the Kindle, and the other e-readers around today, don’t offer everything I want from a mobile reading device. A lot of what I’d like to read is still not available on them (say, digitized 16th-century books). The screen where the text appears isn’t as nice as it could be or doesn’t have as many functions as it could. Perhaps one of the up-and-coming devices like the Plastic Logic reader, a slim device with no buttons that turns pages by touch, will change that in the near future — but then again, my problems with e-readers aren’t exactly problems which the right kind of device will solve. They’re problems with a more fundamental level of the reading experience, about everything material about reading and literary culture.

These thoughts I’ve had about mobile reading are also related to the changes that are going on in the publishing world, where traditional paper media like newspapers and magazines are struggling, and print publishers are eager to come up with new business models. I find myself wondering what the implications are for authors and what they write — for literature itself.

One option is tenacious optimism. The science fiction and fantasy author Michael Stackpole recently argued that authors must take advantage of the new content delivery methods which digital publishing is providing them with. He is the first author to publish short stories through the iPhone App Store, the online store which sells applications, or ‘apps’, for Apple’s mobile phone, the iPhone. Apps are little programs that let you do all kinds of weird and wonderful things, like find restaurants and gas stations, log gym workouts, see where your friends are on digital map displays, and so on. According to Stackpole, digital publishing offers a chance for young writers to reach audiences and create markets for their work without relying on major publishers.

Of course, Stackpole doesn’t take the problem of quality control into account. After all, the ‘job’ of most publishers is not just to deliver content but to find the best writing out there; good publishers are also reliable critics. But he does intuit, and I believe correctly, that digital publishing is already having an impact on the nature of what we read. He cites the example of the ‘commuter market’: people who read one or two chapters on their way to work or home. This kind of reading, Stackpole surmises, could point the way to a return to 19th-century publishing models, such as serial fiction (think of Dickens, whose fame and wealth was based on serialised novels which appeared in literary magazines).

It is important to note that Stackpole is not talking about the death of the novel or some utopian future where we no longer have paper books. I think the dumbest approach would be to believe that digital reading can simply copy paper reading and thereby take over its functions.

Certainly, some new electronic publishing platforms like Issuu and Scribd try to mimic paper books by having animated, turnable pages, but I don’t think this kind of digital publishing will ever replace printed books, no matter how well they mimic paper on the screen. This is simply because they are already something else, a new kind of reading experience which is arranging itself around the idea of the book, but is also being interpreted through social networking media like blogs, Facebook or Twitter, where anyone can share their thoughts with a community of readers.

When reading becomes a part of a social network (just think of Harry Potter fans), reading and writing morphs from a solitary activity to a socially shared engagement: authors connect with readers on a much more immediate basis (through comments, for instance), readers share their reading experiences, write fan fiction, and may even play-act scenes from their favorite books.

So, there are all kinds of new possibilities for reading and publishing. But at the same time we are living in a world where traditional paper forms of publishing are dying. Some media ideologists, like Richard Eoin Nash, believe that this is a good thing. Nash points out that ‘reading increasingly is writing — readers are writing back in all sorts of ways, commenting on books, re-mixing books as in fan fiction, or creating from scratch, and publishers, rather than barring this activity, or hiding from it, need to embrace it and find ways to serve it.’

In a way, though bombastically overstating the case, Nash is right. Literary communities coming together and doing things seems to be the trend for many of the numerous book-related events and happenings on the net, from a community annotating Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook online to a joint effort to ‘map’ Thomas Pynchon’s Los Angeles, to a recent technology start-up offering a service for making your own newspapers.

With such community efforts we come to my central argument — it’s not (or at least not only) the well-designed device which will make digital reading popular, but everything it’s connected to. The computer company Apple is a good example. Most people know it makes computers, but in the last ten years it has been mobile devices like the iPod and the iPhone which have made it really popular. What makes the iPod and the iPhone so great? The fact that the iPod is easily connected to iTunes, the fancy-looking online music and video store, which also helps you catalog your music in visually appealing ways.

The iPhone, for its part, was certainly a fancy phone with its touchscreen and all, but what made it a hit product was the App Store, which gave the phone thousands of new uses in everyday life. As Richard Ziade, an American web consultant, has pointed out, ‘The iPod/iTunes ecosystem is testament to the fact that people are willing to pay for a quality experience, even if there are fringe alternatives out there for free… Content is part of the experience.’

Now think about it from this point of view: what makes books so great? Libraries and book stores, and beyond them, literary magazines and newspapers and publishers and critics and book fairs and book readings and everything that makes up literary culture. A book is never just a book, a mere platform or an interface; it’s a part of a reading experience which stretches out from the immediate moment to something more universal.

So what I’m arguing is that digital reading will become a success when the devices become not only screens that let you read, but extensions of digital libraries and bookstores and whole reading communities. The Kindle, made by the online department store Amazon, is certainly a step towards the right direction. It offers a constant wireless connection to Amazon’s virtual shelves, and its growing popularity is testament to my argument.

At this point one might ask why the ailing, traditional publishing companies haven’t embraced digital reading yet. One reason could be the fact that paper publishing is still tied down by its own material nature, the literary print culture that has developed around it. They cannot envision reading as anything other than paper reading, and therefore cannot grasp that digital reading is a different kind of experience, demanding a different approach.

As the author Seth Godin has argued, ‘the new business isn’t the same as the old business, just with computers’, and Richard Ziade makes the same point when he claims that in the digital realm, ‘the physical constraints of content’ which traditional media publishers still often cling to become a ‘nuisance’ for digital users.

To reiterate, in order for digital reading to become more popular doesn’t simply entail scanning books and making them digitally available on any device that can display them. It means that one needs to build a new way to interact with and experience content. As an example, digital music publishing has done away with the idea of the traditional album. People now buy individual songs, and make their own collections or ‘play lists’ as they are called. Here, digitality simply means the ability ‘to pick and choose’ what you want to listen to in a way which traditional, material forms of music publishing made difficult.

In conclusion, I’d like to come back to the idea proposed by Michael Stackpole: that we might see a resurgence of serial fiction in the future, because digital reading makes it easier to collect such ‘play lists’. Personally I agree. I’m constantly annoyed by the fact that there are so many good stories hidden in paper magazines which I either never see or don’t want to buy because the rest of the content is rubbish. A delivery system that would allow me to download stories by authors I like would be marvellous. If a similar service were to be implemented for poetry, I would be in reading heaven.

But I’d like to believe that the digital reading revolution will go even further in inventing new ways for literature to exist in the world; most simply I’d like to believe that digital reading will make literature more available, and make people read even more. Books are, after all, cumbersome, and we are becoming more and more mobile.

Again, this does not mean, as the designer and marketing guru Russell Davies has argued, that we’re in an age where books are about to disappear (although environmentally speaking that would be a good thing!). Paper and ink will never go away, but only change in function as they become embedded in new ways of being in the world. Paper books might once more become luxury artefacts, as they used to be in the age before printing began.

Mind-map: using the papernet to produce books just for you. - Photo: Brian Suda

Just as Books from Finland finally goes online, the brightest minds of the internet are forecasting a return to paper. In the first of a series of articles, the poet and scholar Teemu Manninen celebrates the second coming of the book

Last week I did something I’ve never done before. I uploaded the manuscript of my third book on to the website Books on Demand, an internet print-on-demand (‘pod’) service, chose the format (a large 19×22 cm size with a hard cover), selected a picture for my cover, copy-pasted a poem by Clark Ashton Smith – an American science fiction and fantasy writer – on the back flap and ordered a copy.

The project is a private one; no one else can order the book. You might ask why I would do something like this – however, a more interesting question, I think, is why it feels entirely natural and logical to do it.

These days everyone is talking about the way that traditional print media are dying because of the internet. But the internet itself has not stopped developing, and where it’s going in 2009 is surprising. The tech-wise and internet savvy are suddenly interested in plain old paper. What the most avid minds are talking about now is something called the ‘papernet’: the extension of the internet on to traditional paper media. But what would a papernet be like? Specifically, what would it mean for a Finnish poet working today?

Let me give you some examples. In 2005–2006, I became acquainted with some Finnish poets who were publishing their work on the web. Janne Nummela had been using search engines to trawl up bits of language from the internet to compose his imaginative, superbly funny surrealist collages. Karri Kokko had a project called ‘Varjofinlandia’ (‘Shadowfinland’), where he had been collecting sentences and bits of discourse concerning depression and anxiety to make a ‘confessional’ short novel. Inspired by these poets, I thought, could we go a step further and make the process of writing a poetry book ‘live’: an ongoing, public event available for comment?

My second poetry book, Lohikäärmeen poika (‘The dragon’s son’, 2008), evolved from a blog into a printed book published by Tammi, a traditional publishing house. In the process, many things changed; working with an editor, a graphic design department, and a publishing house with its own ways of doing things inevitably does that. I feel that the book lost some of its immediacy and resonance once it was taken off the net; it lost contact with the sustaining conversation that had produced it.

I do acknowledge the values of traditional methods of publishing. A good working relationship with an editor is integral for me, not to mention the resources for marketing and publicity, which the poetry scene, as a culture defined by an economy of scarcity, tends to want to downplay. Poetry is, after all, a bad investment for publishers. Then again, the amount of poetry this economy of scarcity makes available is only a tiny slice of what could be out there. Also, do we really want a handful of people (the editorial boards of publishing companies) deciding what’s worth publishing?

An answer to these questions came in 2007–2008, when the Finnish poetry publishing scene changed radically. First, the poetry organisation Nihil Interit began publishing poetry books with the pod publisher Kirja kerrallaan (‘A book at a time’), under the imprint poEsia. These books are available as downloadable ebooks or normal printed versions. Then the poet Leevi Lehto established his own pod publishing company, ntamo, with the aim of publishing more poetry than all the traditional publishing houses put together. The visual and conceptual poet Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s Ankkuri is a similar company.

And then one day I saw Karri Kokko, who had made an experimental ‘version’ of his unpublished poems using the internet pod publisher Lulu. We talked about the possibilities inherent in pod publishing, some of these being rather practical, as in simply making a collection of everything you have written to take with you to readings.

But other ideas soon became apparent: what would ‘podism’, the DIY publishing revolution with its new forms of production, circulation and consumption of printed materials, really mean for literary culture?

Enter the papernet: the internet as a platform for producing, on demand, paper products (maps, organisers, notebooks, social travel guides and the like). Imagine, for instance, that your printer had its own email-address, and instead of your newspaper delivered to your door each morning, your printer would print it out for you. Depending on what kinds of feeds you are currently following, your morning paper could be a mix of the best of New York Times, Helsingin Sanomat and Le Monde, for instance. (And I’m not talking about the kind of printers we have now, but much better ones; ones that could print out not only newspapers, but paperback books or broadsheets or even glossy magazines.) Imagine, also, that books were no longer tied to the cost-heavy machinery of traditional publishing houses, which can only produce one book in one edition at one moment of time. If the audiovisual industry is already changing because of electronic distribution, imagine when the same thing happens to books.

Except that these things are not imaginary. They are already happening. Perhaps the most interesting is the current idea of the ‘unbook’. The concept was invented by Jay Cross, an internet consultant known for his work on informal learning and systems thinking, and Dave Gray, the founder and chairman of XPLANE, a ‘visual thinking company’, although both imply that they are only describing practices which already exist.

Whereas a traditional book is published in editions whenever it gets revised (or it has sold out), an unbook is released in versions (1.0, 1.13, 2.0 etc) which are never finished but always open to feedback from readers. Both Cross and Gray have written books by bringing the readers along into the process of editing their content even before publication. As Gray says, ‘the dialogue is critically important to the development of the ideas, and now that I have tried this approach I can’t imagine doing a book any other way.’

An unbook is, then, more like a community project between authors and their readers than the traditional one-way street of author->publisher->reader. Gray claims such a re-envisioning of the book-making process can change many things: ‘The author can engage readers earlier and respond to criticism faster. A publisher becomes an option rather than a necessity.’

It should be clear by now that my own unbook is not a self-publishing or vanity project. Rather, it is an un-book only in the sense that is un-done (I also happen to think that the name ‘unbook’ is a little too coy). What’s central to me is the idea of experimenting with the composition process, but also of taking more control over the material existence of what I write, of trying out ways of graphically representing my work in the best possible way. We writers aren’t usually very good at that; the history of the book trade is a history of outsourcing everything that’s material about writing to everyone else except the author. In the past, this has been necessary, because the technology simply could not be owned or mastered by one person. Now it can be, and you don’t even have to leave your house to be able to do it.

I don’t know if this experiment will lead me to new ways of making books. Poetry is, after all, very different from the kinds of things Cross and Gray are writing: books on visual culture and ‘e-learning’. Sometimes it seems to me that the most I might achieve is an understanding of how to design a book so that it can communicate something by its material form. But all this is so new. We don’t know where the papernet will go.

Sometimes I like to imagine that the papernet could represent a return to pre-print ideas of written communication, where important texts were compiled into ‘commonplace books’, or personal, annotated anthologies. They were singular objects made by their users to fit their personal needs. Text and authorship were malleable, pliant, and much more organic than in our time. What if the poetry books of the future were like that: ‘paper ipods’, or anthologies that readers could themselves compile and print?

Sometimes I’m simply reminded of the aura of singularity and originality surrounding authorial manuscripts as artefacts, something Walter Benjamin, one of the most important literary critics and philosophers of the early twentieth century, argued art lost when the age of mechanical reproduction began – but the manuscripts, I think, still retain that aura. Perhaps the unbook could be a way to let the printed book share some of the hand-written aura of manuscripts?

We must constantly invent new containers for books to burst out of, because they exceed their material form: books are never finished. And that’s a good thing for us readers.

Edith Södergran and Hagar Olsson. – Photos: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, Åbo Akademis bildsamlingar.

Almost one hundred years ago, a remote Karelian village close to St Petersburg, near the Finno-Russian border, saw the birth of a fearless new form of modern poetry.

The Finland-Swedish poet Edith Södergran (1892-1923) began writing her burning lines inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideal of the new man and his philosophy of creativity. Södergrans’ poems were free of any traditional pattern and full of strong images.

Her work, which ran to six collections of poems, later achieved classic status in the modernist traditon that she presaged.

In 1919, after the publication of her second collection of poems, Septemberlyran (‘The September lyre’), Södergran found a soul sister in the Helsinki writer and critic Hagar Olsson (1893–1978). (See Books from Finland, 4/2008.)

Living in poverty, Södergran died of tuberculosis at the tragically early age of 31. Olsson, who deeply mourned the loss of her friend, returned to their exchange of letters 22 years later, in her book Edith’s brev (‘Edith’s letters’, Schildts/Bonniers, 1955).

We publish some of their correspondence as well as some of Södergran’s poetry here. The extracts from the correspondence of Olsson and Södergran are from The Poet Who Created Herself. Selected Letters of Edith Södergran (translated and edited by Silvester Mazzarella; Norvik Press, 2001).

See also Damned nihilist, an article by the social scientist and philosopher Kalle Haatanen, in which he takes a look at Nietzsche, a philosopher more often than not misinterpreted.

Edith Södergran to Hagar Olsson:

Raivola, Jan 1919

….Nietzsche says: Ich ging zu allen, aber kam zu niemand. [‘I approached everyone, but reached no one.’] Will it happen to me now to find someone? Could we reach out our hands to one another? You are now the object of my offensive, I want you to see me as I really am and show yourself to me as you really are. Could we become divine companions, so that all barriers fall away? I am still speaking to you in a tentative and humiliating foreign language. Nietzsche is the only human being before whom I would not be afraid to open my mouth. Are you that sea of fire I want to dive into? If you laugh you are my own. If you don’t laugh you must even so be mature enough to achieve the highest form of friendship Nietzsche in his wisdom warns his own people against.

I enclose a new letter I’ve written to the paper. If you think it could be a great help to the cause please let them have it or write and tell me to send it to them.

Address: Raivola                            Edith Södergan

Hagar Olsson comments (1955):

I cannot describe the joy I felt when I received this letter. It was a joy which reached deep inside me to where I felt most lonely. I understood at once that I was being approached by a sister-spirit. In his Södergran monograph [Gunnar] Tideström [Edith Södergran, 1949] makes some rather far-fetched attempts to explain why Edith called me ‘sister’ and what this could have meant. To a woman nothing could be easier to understand. I felt we were ‘sisters’ as soon as I read Edith’s first letter. A ‘sister’ is someone who speaks the same language as you do, who understands things implied but not stated, and for whom you feel intimate affinity regardless of whether or not the two of you otherwise share views and feelings.

In those days I was a sociable person; life bustled around me as it does when you’re young, and I was full of activity. But I never opened my inner self to anyone. I felt other people spoke a different language, that even my friends were on a different wave-length. I longed for sister-language. I thought it must be possible for people to understand one another intimately and know they shared one heart and soul. Not just couples but many together, a group or large family. I constantly dreamed of this. It may have been because in childhood I’d never had the opportunity to experience close family intimacy but grew up under psychological pressure: this kind of thing generates a hunger that can hardly ever be satisfied. But I also felt people were too dull and sluggish in their thinking and reactions and in their relationships. It seemed to me my own psychological make-up and consciousness were unlike those around me, and that I lived on two separate planes: one plane where I was surrounded by friends and one where I was alone and unable to share my intimate life with anyone….

….when I read Edith’s first letter, I knew immediately that here was someone who was conscious not only superficially but also deep inside, someone I’d be able to approach on the plane where I’d always been completely alone. She wrote in this first letter of ‘the highest form of friendship’ and asked ‘could we become divine companions?’ This was music in my ears. I opened myself at once and wrote an answer from my heart.

Edith Södergran to Hagar Olsson:

Raivola, 26 Jan 1919

My delightful young thing! Can’t come. Insomnia, TB, empty cashbox. (I live by selling furniture and household utensils. Capital tied up in Ukrainian and Russian bonds, salvation depends on fall of Bolshevism). If I can manage to sleep a bit better I’ll try and come in a few months, but I can’t be sure. I’ve found what I need now: your objective eye, and your brain is big enough for both of us. May one ask? Do you work for the cause in a general sense or are you anxious to meet particular individuals? Give me a list….

I share Severyanin’s view that if a talent is a trifle dull it isn’t brilliant enough. Igor Severyanin is Russia’s greatest lyric poet of the present day. I’ve seen him at a poetry reading, never talked to him. But I’ve felt confidence in him the way I feel confidence in you. He’s a very powerful force and bound to be receptive to our ideas. But first we’ll have to train him properly, he has trashy manners and doesn’t know how to look after himself. He can be our bridge to Russia, through him we’ll get the best of Russia on the move. How about Sweden? Will it work there? We’ll reach the rest of Europe one fine day. Do you speak to individuals? Is that something you plan to do? You should read Severyanin’s best poems, it would refresh you even though he’s obsessed with the boudoir and so far hasn’t aspired to our heights.

….I suddenly felt with utter certainty that a stronger hand had grasped my painter’s brush. How old are you? Health? Nerves? I want you well and strong. Send me a short CV! Mrs or Miss? Level of education? As for me: residence: Raivola, educated at Petrischüle, TB at 16, sanatoria at Nummela and Davos, induced pneumothorax, waiting for someone to discover a cure for TB.

We’ll be ruthless with one another and sharp as diamonds.

It’s horrible for me to address you in this virtual journalese, I want to use only beautiful words, our real mutual language, but in any case who wants to waste hard-won strength on letters? We have a beautiful dilapidated old place like something in a fairy tale. Come in summer (for several days at least) if we haven’t already been forced to sell it by then. We could lie on the grass and sunbathe and talk and gossip. We have a great ancient ramshackle house, uninhabitable in winter but in summer it would make a fabulous meeting place for our people from Finland and Russia, we could have a heavenly party with drunken speeches. I once spent an evening with Hemmer and Grotenfelt and it’s one of my happiest memories. I long to have congenial company now and then. We could run riot here just as they do in Gösta Berlings saga [a classic Swedish novel by Selma Lagerlöf, 1891], just think what a blessed place this is – hard to get hold of a copy of H:bladet [Hufvudstadsbladet, a Helsinki daily paper] and our nextdoor neighbours have only just discovered that I can even write….

Oh, it’d be such fun to come to you, I’d rush up the stairs.

I have a sister and I’ve never heard her wonderful voice – I’m determined to see deep down inside you, you holiest person of all….

I shall write my love-letters to you, Hagar, when I’m in the mood. Now I’ve got someone of my own, for the rest of my life. Two years ago I wrote a poem. Each stanza began ‘I want a playmate’ (of course I was thinking of a male one) and it ended ‘I want a playmate who can break forth from dead granite and defy eternity’. Now I have my happy playmate, after waiting two years….

I’ve kissed your letter countless times. I do so desperately want to come. I’ve been sleeping better at night, it’ll give me the courage to become ‘reisefähig’.

Hagar Olsson comments (1955):

Edith asks whether I ‘work for the cause in general’. That’s exactly what I was doing, and I was often disconcerted when she demanded precise tasks from me as if we were taking part in a carefully planned and organised operation. Edith loved a concrete, hands-on approach. During the autumn I’d written a good deal in my articles about the ‘cause’ (she must have got the word from there) and living ‘for the sake of the cause’. This simply meant not being egocentric, having nothing to do with art for art’s sake, and keeping an elevated concept of humanity in view in all one’s activities. To live for the ‘cause’ was to fight for a higher consciousness, and to appeal in all circumstances to the free creative spirit which alone is capable of raising us to a level where true fellowship can become a reality. It was in this spirit that in one of my first articles I cited Nietzsche’s words, ‘Man is something that must be conquered’. Edith was on the same wavelength, which is why she talks about the ‘cause’ and ‘our ideas’ as though they were to be taken for granted.

Those who are young now may find it difficult to imagine the excitement we felt. Nowadays we are rushed round so fast on a merry-go-round of change that it’s difficult for us to grasp what’s happening to us. But in the First World War period, when these ideas first took root, it really was possible to understand what was going on if one had one’s ear to the ground. We took a deep breath and realised the world was being turned upside down and that the future lay before us like virgin earth so that all we needed to do was sow seed. And who better to do the sowing but young poets and artists who had repudiated the old contaminated values and who carried within themselves an inspired vision of a new humanity, something higher and more sensitively organised and conscious of its mission. That’s how we felt, Edith and I; each of us had reached this point independently by her own route which is why we were so happy when we found one another.

Out in Europe and Russia there were many who felt the same way, and it was Edith’s constant dream that one day we would make contact with our  soulmates in the great world. She was to sacrifice much of her strength for this dream, only to see her hopes bitterly dashed. Of course this was not a question of ‘ideas’ developed by theoretical thinking so much as a spiritual impulse which was in the air at the time. It was something one was instinctively aware of, a longing or cry in one’s nerves and blood that was constantly in one’s thoughts as a tremendous opportunity. When one reads the view of learned literary historians that Edith’s ‘commonwealth of the future’ was ‘a metaphysical, even religious idea’ and other such grandiloquent stuff, one can’t help being reminded of Faust’s words to his assistant Wagner, that prototypical academic pedant: ‘You’ll never understand what you haven’t experienced’.

Edith writes that with Severyanin we’ll be able to get the ‘best of Russia’ on the move. By this she means quite simply the best spiritual forces in Russia and not at all, as Tideström claims, the old Russian ruling class. One can do a writer no greater injustice than load her words with opinions and judgments that can’t possibly have been relevant at the time her words were written. It was a time when no one knew what would eventually become of Russia or what form Russia’s relations with Finland would take in the future. Everything was still in a state of flux. In his monograph, Tideström is anxious at all costs to detect a hostile attitude to revolutionary Russia in Edith’s words….

She hadn’t committed herself either for or against anything definite. To her the whole course of events was a process of creation like childbirth; beyond this, like the keenly aware person she was, she thought it best to wait and see. When she writes as she does in this letter, ‘salvation depends on fall of Bolshevism’, she’s clearly not expressing a carefully thought-out political attitude. She’s just explaining why she and her mother are now destitute, and giving her opinion that if Bolshevism were to fall they might get their money back. She wasn’t one to let her personal economic problems influence her political views. I’ve never known anyone so completely indifferent to horrible circumstances in their own life as she was.

Edith Södergran to Hagar Olsson:

Raivola, 9 Feb 1919

Dear Sister!

Welcome to Raivola. I’ll be at the station and from there it’s 2 kilometres to our place. My mother’s very happy you’re coming. Cat Nonno and dog Martti will also be very pleased to see you, as will our Punikki Aino.

The night before your malheur-letter came I dreamed a magnificent black horse broke loose and rushed at me. The night before my S. letter to the paper I dreamed a herd of cows came after me with clanging bells and I also dreamed I was walking in the street in a red cap, and a pedantic person I know nodded to me from the church tower – which you will see.

Just got your travel-letter. In my letter I said nothing except that after 24 hours I’d come to see there could have been a misunderstanding so I retracted my harsh offended letter. But surely you’ve already had that letter, or has there been some muddle? Bring a piece of soap with you. Come but be careful, don’t jump off the train! Don’t hurt yourself.

Hagar Olsson comments (1955):

The whole family was waiting to welcome me, even the cat and dog, a sign that even these high authorities presumably approved of my coming. ‘Our Punikki Aino’ was a maid who slept in the kitchen. Punikki is derived from the Finnish word for red and has long been used as a traditional and honourable name for cows though during the civil war it gained political overtones as a term for the Reds. But in the present context it is of course teasingly affectionate.

Edith met me from the train with horse and sleigh as she had promised but I have no visual memory of our first meeting. I can no longer see her in my mind’s eye standing as she must have done in deep snow on the station platform at Raivola that cold February day thirty-six years ago, watching out for me with her characteristic half-cheerful and half-melancholy but always expectant smile. I was much too deeply affected by the dramatic aspects of the situation to take in any external details. I was also shy and perhaps a little afraid. The only thing I can be certain of is that from the first moment I was drawn into a field of energy that made quite different demands on my inner resources from anything I’d experienced before. And no one should be under any illusion that I’d found favour through writing nice things about Edith in a newspaper! She made it absolutely clear from the first that she was no sort of mystic medium but a realist of the most uncompromising nature, indeed a pagan. I felt pretty crushed and realised there would be no point in trying to get her to understand that it was necessary for tactical reasons to emphasise the elevated passages in her work in an attempt to neutralise the effect on the general public of the vulgar ridicule she‘d been subjected to.

I was able to stay only a few days; naturally I had to get back to my editorial work on the paper, and the long journey from Helsinki almost to the Russian border, involving a change of trains at Viipuri [Vyborg], took time. But it was a rare experience. The word ‘fairy tale’ springs to mind when I think of it: the little low-roofed wooden cottage where the Södergrans lived near the Orthodox church with its cheerful bells, the two delightful women in their old-fashioned clothes – one with the bold profile of a young hawk and the other with her rosy cheeks the image of a beaming little mother troll – their merry mutual banter, their eccentric manners and wonderful capacity to accept whatever life might bring them quite independently, it seemed, of the material side of existence over which they had no control; all this contributed to the impression that they were living in a fairy tale, far from the familiar realities of everyday life. This impression was reinforced by the spell that bound Edith to me. I can’t use any other word: it was simply a magic spell that held us in its power, creating an atmosphere in which one felt everything was possible and anything could happen.

The future burned in us, making us long for the tempting but terrible crown we expected it eventually to bring. As we sat at dusk in the little old-fashioned living-room with its view of snowbound garden and lake, chattering of this and that, reading poems to each other, daydreaming and looking through Edith’s many delightful albums full of pictures of cats, this was the predominant atmosphere and it filled everything with implicit significance.

‘Did we not live in a fairy tale, where all impossible things become possible….’ Today’s young people may perhaps find it difficult to understand the magic power the future held over us then. We were poor and unknown and lived in a distant corner of the world yet we felt like royalty. Our wealth was buried in hopes which hovered like the hands of angels over a shattered world pointing the way to a new human society. At that time the elite of Europe still had the self-confidence to dream a great dream, that it would become possible for every individual human being to share in one single spiritual community. Being young, we felt we had been given a tremendous opportunity on the threshold of a new world.

This mix of emotional intoxication, intellectual delight and secret excitement together with our impulsive girlish enthusiasm made of our being together a celebration as gentle and full of dreams as spring itself….