Bernard Jan's Blog - Posts Tagged "sweden"
Pagliacci: Collages from the Swedish Tale
When everything is gone, memories remain. Snapshots of the moments your soul feeds on. And craves for more. Even when it's over. Because all good things come to an end.
Not the craving, though. It's insatiable. It wants more. It wants to suck on your good memories, rip your heart to pieces. Devour it in a few bites of the crazed, starved beast, making you bleed on the inside as you go on with your life with a fake and pathetic smile on your face. Like a clown.
Pagliacci.
No one sees your tears. No one smells your longing. No one licks your wounds. No one hears you cry.
No one picks you up and holds you under your arm as you stumble to take another breath and blink away your blurry sight while you grope for a familiar memory in a very distant future, trying to make it alive. Trying to make it omnipresent. Trying to relive it – now.
Except for those who know you, except for those who have shared it with you. The moments, the images, the laughter, the smells, the walks, the ice creams, the sounds, the games, the thoughts, the experiences, the dreams, the feelings, the recollections, the foolishness. Knitting them into collages that will stay with you forever. Those are your people. Your friends.
That is the beauty of it. The beauty I will try to share and portray here for you. Because when the words fail, pictures continue to tell our story.
Thank you, Växjö, for everything. Really.
BJ
www.bernardjan.com
Original blog post - images from Sweden
Related posts:
Summer in Sweden
Sweden in My Mind
In Between Places
My other blogs
Not the craving, though. It's insatiable. It wants more. It wants to suck on your good memories, rip your heart to pieces. Devour it in a few bites of the crazed, starved beast, making you bleed on the inside as you go on with your life with a fake and pathetic smile on your face. Like a clown.
Pagliacci.
No one sees your tears. No one smells your longing. No one licks your wounds. No one hears you cry.
No one picks you up and holds you under your arm as you stumble to take another breath and blink away your blurry sight while you grope for a familiar memory in a very distant future, trying to make it alive. Trying to make it omnipresent. Trying to relive it – now.
Except for those who know you, except for those who have shared it with you. The moments, the images, the laughter, the smells, the walks, the ice creams, the sounds, the games, the thoughts, the experiences, the dreams, the feelings, the recollections, the foolishness. Knitting them into collages that will stay with you forever. Those are your people. Your friends.
That is the beauty of it. The beauty I will try to share and portray here for you. Because when the words fail, pictures continue to tell our story.
Thank you, Växjö, for everything. Really.
BJ
www.bernardjan.com
Original blog post - images from Sweden
Related posts:
Summer in Sweden
Sweden in My Mind
In Between Places
My other blogs
The Girl of Millenium
The Girl in the Spider's Web by David LagercrantzMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Girl of Millennium
The girl with the dragon tattoo. The girl who played with fire. The girl who kicked the hornet's nest.
And the girl in the spider's web.
I love the Millennium series. I love this brutal, raw, dark and violent Swedish saga, cold and ruthless as the Swedish weather. And I love that this story continues.
Even though the first opening pages of The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz stroke me as slow and a bit lulling in building the plot, soon new pages are turned and stick to your fingers like frost sticks to the frozen windows in December Stockholm. The Girl in the Spider's Web sets with vigor and thrill into an action worthy of its literary predecessors, continuing Stieg Larsson's series with dignity and justified trust. Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander continue living, and that is what's most important.
I didn't pick this book by chance to read it during my vacation in Sweden, although I had a few more other books in store to chose from. I took The Girl in the Spider's Web on a flight with me and read it until I reached my final destination; as well as on my way back via Copenhagen and Frankfurt to Zagreb. However, while staying in Växjö I chose to live my own personal Swedish story, a story of hundreds of unwritten pages no one will be able to read but me.
As for Lisbeth and Mikael, they kept me company for ten more days upon my return, making that intoxicating feeling of Sweden linger linger linger and last throughout my whole conscious being.
I look forward to our reunion. We are alive and Sweden is ready and waiting for us.
BJ
www.bernardjan.com
View all my reviews
Things I didn't Tell You
I wasn't thrilled on the morning of my A World Without Color book launch. Even though I was up until 3.40 am waiting to see when it would be live and available for purchase I fell asleep before that happened. In the morning, I continued with my daily activities: vacuum cleaning, dusting, texting with my friends who were more excited than me that my book was live on Amazon, tweeting.
I felt calmness holding onto the vacuum cleaner. Focused on sucking in the dirt, I felt enormous relief that one part of this long journey was over. Yet I have to finish the paperback book and then collect as many good reviews as possible, but in the morning of my book launch I left myself to calmness.
Nobody knew how hard it was and how well I faked it. I can be a great Pagliacci. A perfect pretender. Screams and cries and tears and sobs I killed within me, because if I gave in to my emotions even for a second longer, I would be done. I would be catapulted back to the day when Marcel died... when we killed him.
It is such a thin line between grief and happiness, an invisible flight of a grain of dust from one part of the room to another.... Do you also know how hard it is to be happy when your heart wants to bleed into nothingness?
Two days later after the Saturday of July 1, 2017, I returned to my daily job full time. Four months during which I worked only part-time were over, not that I was too happy about it. But hard days at work are before us and I have to leave my baby, right after its birth, and tend to other things. I can only hope it won't suffer too much, that I will get it a decent life and exposure.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Yeah, I know I can count the days of the week, but the point is that after those super-crazy-busy days at work came Friday. And my trip to Sweden. A comforting thought of my land of refugee that has lived in the back of my mind for a couple of months already came to life. I barely had time to think of it, let alone rejoice it, between my daily work and my self-publishing efforts.
Now it is here. Sweden and my book together. Even if I planned it that way....
Not even the best marketing plans and experts can predict the future. No one can guarantee things will happen that way, the way we want them. No online lectures and marketing gurus can prepare us for the twists and turns that will happen when life decides to shows us who directs the order in the universe and where our role is in a bigger plan. We can only try, do whatever we can and hope for the best.
Sweden is on my plate now. I will breathe it with every pore on my skin. Its smells, its beauty, its calmness and order. Two weeks I will live by the order of another universe and I am determined to be happy. My down-to-earth and supercool friends Claire and Tommy are with me and they will make sure I recover from the accumulated stress and remember again that there is life outside of constant work and that it can be beautiful.
Like Sweden, like my book, like you my friends. I will be on a summer vacay on the north of Europesummer vacay on the north of Europe, but I won't forget you. This is where tweets, texts and e-mails prove their worthiness. Maybe that is the greatest value of social networking.
Bernard Jan
For images from Sweden please click here.
Join my mailing list, subscribe to blog Muse!
Bernard Jan
I felt calmness holding onto the vacuum cleaner. Focused on sucking in the dirt, I felt enormous relief that one part of this long journey was over. Yet I have to finish the paperback book and then collect as many good reviews as possible, but in the morning of my book launch I left myself to calmness.
Nobody knew how hard it was and how well I faked it. I can be a great Pagliacci. A perfect pretender. Screams and cries and tears and sobs I killed within me, because if I gave in to my emotions even for a second longer, I would be done. I would be catapulted back to the day when Marcel died... when we killed him.
It is such a thin line between grief and happiness, an invisible flight of a grain of dust from one part of the room to another.... Do you also know how hard it is to be happy when your heart wants to bleed into nothingness?
Two days later after the Saturday of July 1, 2017, I returned to my daily job full time. Four months during which I worked only part-time were over, not that I was too happy about it. But hard days at work are before us and I have to leave my baby, right after its birth, and tend to other things. I can only hope it won't suffer too much, that I will get it a decent life and exposure.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Yeah, I know I can count the days of the week, but the point is that after those super-crazy-busy days at work came Friday. And my trip to Sweden. A comforting thought of my land of refugee that has lived in the back of my mind for a couple of months already came to life. I barely had time to think of it, let alone rejoice it, between my daily work and my self-publishing efforts.
Now it is here. Sweden and my book together. Even if I planned it that way....
Not even the best marketing plans and experts can predict the future. No one can guarantee things will happen that way, the way we want them. No online lectures and marketing gurus can prepare us for the twists and turns that will happen when life decides to shows us who directs the order in the universe and where our role is in a bigger plan. We can only try, do whatever we can and hope for the best.
Sweden is on my plate now. I will breathe it with every pore on my skin. Its smells, its beauty, its calmness and order. Two weeks I will live by the order of another universe and I am determined to be happy. My down-to-earth and supercool friends Claire and Tommy are with me and they will make sure I recover from the accumulated stress and remember again that there is life outside of constant work and that it can be beautiful.
Like Sweden, like my book, like you my friends. I will be on a summer vacay on the north of Europesummer vacay on the north of Europe, but I won't forget you. This is where tweets, texts and e-mails prove their worthiness. Maybe that is the greatest value of social networking.
Bernard Jan
For images from Sweden please click here.
Join my mailing list, subscribe to blog Muse!
Bernard Jan
