Dark waters

Before I had time to really reflect, I had impulsively bought a plane ticket to Krakow. It didn’t cost very much, thanks to the new low-cost airlines that have taken over the market, and it was a direct flight, with no annoying stopovers, to the airport named after the Polish Pope John Paul II. An …   ►

I had just come home from work. My new job, which I liked more and more, especially for the regular hours and the secure monthly salary. The work itself was not dissimilar to that of the average inner-city bureaucrat – typing, Excel sheets, reports, emails and phone calls interspersed with a few meetings and client …   ►

I walked briskly along Jungfrugatan with the manuscripts in a light leather bag, which I found to be very elegant and with just the right patina. The gate revealed itself to me, sometimes it was difficult to find the strange door, but not this time. The late summer winds had hastily taken hold of the …   ►

Can be read as a stand-alone, or as a continuation of the previous article.   I swept the glass, took out the pad again, and Archibald Iratus began to dictate: Older historians and archaeologists had a penchant for dividing epochs and events into different themes. One such theme is the idea of rise, heyday, decline …   ►

This time I was about to give up, after an endless wandering through the gates of Jungfrugatan; how could it be so difficult to find an address that I had visited so many times before? Finally, with a trembling hand, I opened the unnumbered gate that led up to the Count’s floor. The old elevator …   ►

I rang the bell several times, but no one answered. Sometimes he would listen to his old 78s and it would take him a while to get to the door. Just as I was beginning to despair and thinking of going home, the Count appeared in the stairwell. Dressed in a dark gray coat, elegant …   ►

Archibald Iratus lived in an austere turn-of-the-century house along Jungfrugatan in Östermalm. A curious peculiarity of the address was its diffuse location. I could wander around for a long time before I found the unnumbered gate, and once last winter I even gave up and went home. It was as if the house itself or …   ►

The Orient, and India in particular, has long been regarded by us Westerners as a remote and mysterious place, steeped in ancient wisdom and millennia-old traditions. Indian culture stood unbroken for over 5,000 years. They had no Christian religious conversion or disruptive Protestantism to change course significantly. Indian civilization is more like a slowly flowing …   ►

What is this modernity, which forever reshaped our society after the Great War of 1918, and guaranteed that architecture with a Corinthian order or flowering facade ornaments would never again be built, and where art, poetry and culture would no longer reflect the beautiful? From now on society would be functional and modern. Even at …   ►

More and more people are seeking to escape the distorted worldview of our times. An increasing number do not feel like they belong. Above all, it is people outside the system, those who are being parasitised by the nobility and its clients, i.e. the plebeians. Ordinary people who work and pay taxes. They are not …   ►

When we begin to realise that our three most celebrated ideologies are all driven by various fears, and that all these fears should be taken into account, then we can move on to examine the respective weaknesses and failures of the beliefs. The preservationists Let’s start with conservatism. If fear of change is the driving …   ►