The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood – Youth – Dependency

by Tove Ditlevsen

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

Oh, Granny, you’ll never hear me sing again. You’ll never spread real butter on my bread again, and what you’ve forgotten to tell me about your life will now never be revealed.

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.

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.

Death is not a gentle falling asleep as I once believed. It’s brutal, hideous, and foul smelling. I wrap my arms around myself and rejoice in my youth and my health. Otherwise my youth is nothing more than a deficiency and a hindrance that I can’t get rid of fast enough.

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

They’re foreign creatures, it’s as if they came from another planet. They’re not in touch with their bodies. They don’t have any tender, soft organs where a blob of slime can attach itself like a tumor and, completely independent of their volition, start living its own life.

I don’t regret what I did, but in the dark, tarnished corridors of my mind there is a faint impression, like a child’s footprints in damp sand.

I always experience things after they’ve happened; I’m rarely in the present.