Day 4: End of Act I

It's time to leave for the week. I had another productive day working on "Perfume" by Corbett. If you don't know that song by now, you should really listen on his site. In fact, you should do that now while you're reading. I'm almost done with the arrangement, so for now you can whet your appetite on the unadorned version.

I don't have time to say much, but I wanted to leave you with the final piece of the blog title puzzle. A quotation from the introduction of Jens Peter Jacobsen's Mogens:

His characters are not studied tissue by tissue as under a scientist's microscope, rather they are built up living cell by living cell out of the author's experience and imagination. He shows how they are conditioned and modified by their physical being, their inheritance and environment. Through each of his senses he lets impressions from without pour into him. He harmonizes them with a passionate desire for beauty into marvelously plastic figures and moods. A style which grows thus organically from within is style out of richness; the other is style out of poverty.

In a letter he once stated his belief that every book to be of real value must embody the struggle of one or more persons against all those things which try to keep one from existing in one's own way. That is the fundamental ethos which runs through all of Jacobsen's work. It is in Marie Grubbe, Niels Lyhne, Mogens, and the infinitely tender Mrs. Fonss.