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’...

The patient entered with a sigh, shaking his head. It had been a difficult day — nothing had gone to plan, which, in all fairness, seemed to be exactly the kind of plan the day had in mind. Expectations had fallen like dominoes, except that dominoes at least fall in an orderly fashion. His pulse flickered between breaths, rapid but uncertain, as if caught between deciding whether to panic or simply give up and take a nap. Outside, the rain poured relentlessly, its rhythm filling the room, steady and indifferent, the perfect background score for existential crises everywhere. The consulting room, usually a space of quiet refuge, felt different today, as though the storm had followed him inside. The air was thick with the scent of rain-soaked clothes and the unspoken weight of things not quite said. The rain drummed against the window, tracing long streaks on the glass, as if jotting down notes on the conversation yet to unfold. He sat down heavily, his body sagging into th...