The Hyggelig Journey

There were ten of them — though at times they spoke as one murmuring voice, and at others, like ten distinct silences, each fractured differently by the strain of being. They were not chosen as idols for a shelf, nor as exhibits in some canonical museum. Rather, they happened to me — each arriving, unbidden, during the long, luminous solitude of study. They were not so much read as endured, not so much admired as absorbed. What they gave me was not knowledge, but permission — to question, to unravel, to dwell within the unsayable. Sophocles carved fate into stone. He gave suffering a chorus and lent blindness a voice. In his tragedies, destiny is not an event but a law — impersonal, inescapable. His characters do not fall because they err, but because they exist. He was the architect of inevitability. Through him, I grasped that form can contain anguish without flinching. Dante Alighieri descended, and rose again. His Divine Comedy traced the arc of the soul with a pilgrim’...