The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood – Youth – Dependency

by Tove Ditlevsen

My relationship with her is close, painful, and shaky, and I always have to keep searching for a sign of love.

I look up at her and understand many things at once. She is smaller than other adult women, younger than other mothers, and there’s a world outside my street that she fears.

and as we leave the school again in utter silence, my

heart fills with the chaos of anger, sorrow, and

I vowed never to reveal my dreams to anyone again, and I kept this vow throughout my childhood.

Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.

You can’t get out of childhood, and it clings to you like a bad smell. You notice it in other children – each childhood has its own smell. You don’t recognize your own and sometimes you’re afraid that it’s worse than others’.

People with such a visible, flagrant childhood both inside and out are called children, and you can treat them any way you like because there’s nothing to fear from them. They have no weapons and no masks unless they are very cunning. I am that kind of cunning child, and my mask is stupidity, which I’m always careful not to let anyone tear away from me.

Childhood is dark and it’s always moaning like a little animal that’s locked in a cellar and forgotten. It comes out of your throat like your breath in the cold, and sometimes it’s too little, other times too big. It never fits exactly. It’s only when it has been cast off that you can look at it calmly and talk about it like an illness you’ve survived.

He has a custom-made childhood that expands in tune with his growth, while mine is made for a completely different girl. Whenever I think such thoughts, my mask becomes even more stupid, because you can’t talk to anyone about these kinds of things, and I always dream about meeting some mysterious person who will listen to me and

understand me. I know from books that such people exist, but you can’t find any of them on my childhood street.

A whore is a woman who does it for money, which seems to me much more understandable than to do it for free.

I know it’s terrible not to be normal, and I have my own troubles trying to pretend that I am.

It’s so strange that my mother has never discovered when I’m lying. On the other hand, she almost never believes the truth. I think that much of my childhood is spent trying to figure out her personality, and yet she continues to be just as mysterious and disturbing.

I had started thinking a lot about death, and I thought of it as a friend. I told myself that I wanted to die, and once when my mother went into town, I took our bread knife and sawed at my wrist, hoping to find the artery – all the while bawling at the thought of my despairing mother who would soon throw herself sobbing over my corpse.

‘America has been called the land of freedom. Earlier it meant freedom to be yourself, to work, and to own land. Now it practically means freedom to starve to death if you don’t have money to buy food.’

Everything during this time makes a deep, indelible impression on me, and it’s as if I’ll remember even completely trivial remarks my whole life.

Even though no one else cares for my poems, I have to write them because it dulls the sorrow and longing in my heart.

It bothers me a lot that I don’t seem to own any real feelings anymore, but always have to pretend that I do by copying other people’s reactions. It’s as if I’m only moved by things that come to me indirectly. I can cry when I see a picture in the newspaper of an unfortunate family that’s been evicted, but when I see the same ordinary sight in reality, it doesn’t touch me. I’m moved by poetry and lyrical prose, now as always – but the things that are described leave me completely cold. I don’t think very much of reality.

Now the last remnants fall away from me like flakes of sun-scorched skin, and beneath looms an awkward, an impossible adult. I read in my poetry album while the night wanders past the window – and, unawares, my childhood falls silently to the bottom of my memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life.

My mother doesn’t say such things to hurt me; she’s just completely ignorant of what goes on inside other people.

It’s difficult to keep a grasp on yourself when things around you change.

My aunt is yellow in the face and her skin is so stretched over her bones that you’re continually reminded of her skull’s existence.

I especially think about how it will hinder me in my vague wandering toward an equally vague goal.

while I think with

sorrow and uneasiness about the darkness that is about to descend over the whole world.

Being young is itself temporary, fragile, and ephemeral. You have to get through it – it has no other meaning.

The remark hurts me and I get furious at my whole upbringing, at my ignorance, my language, my complete lack of sophistication and culture, words I hardly understand.

I want to get married and have children and a home of my own. There’s something painful and fragile about being a young girl who makes her own living. You can’t see any light ahead on that road. And I want so badly to own my own time instead of always having to sell it.

For

me, writing is like it was in my childhood, something secret and prohibited, shameful, something one sneaks into a corner to do when no one else is watching.

Geert Jørgensen

Dr from novel?

Why do you want to be normal and regular? Everyone knows you’re not. I don’t know how to answer him, but I have wanted that as far back as I can remember.

And I realize more and more that the only thing I’m good for, the only thing that truly captivates me, is forming sentences and word combinations, or writing simple, four-line poetry. And in order to do this I have to be able to observe people in a certain way, almost as if I needed to store them in a file somewhere for later use. And to be able to do this I have to be able to read in a certain way too, so I can absorb through all my pores everything I need, if not for now, then for later use. That’s why I can’t interact with too many people; and I can’t go out too much and drink alcohol, because then I can’t work the next day.

It feels like everything is going into me but nothing is coming out again.

and while the deadening effect spreads inside me, I think how it’s springtime, and I’m still young, and there’s no man in love with me.