“VENERDÌ RE-VERSO”
“[…] the infinite depth of the dream behind the stars.”
Without getting too esoteric, it must be said that sometimes the coincidences that connect us to books have a certain oracular quality, like when the random player plays the exact song you were thinking about. And we’ve been thinking a lot about dreams lately. Will we classify it as suggestion, or will we choose to believe in that bit of magic that makes being in the world bearable? So be it.
The Royal Guest is a work written in 1908 by the future 1917 Nobel Prize winner: it recounts a surreal encounter, in which a Luciferian figure appears in the night to a young (and happy) married couple in the form of an unexpected guest. Amid suspicion and reticence, a carnivalesque dinner is served, at the end of which the uninvited guest leaves the house, disappearing into the darkness, just as he had appeared. He says or does nothing truly extraordinary, yet the peace that once inhabited the hearts of the two spouses is lost forever.
Mind you: peace. It’s almost easier to imagine a happiness being destroyed; indeed, it’s easier to imagine the consequences of such a destruction. But since everything happens as if in a mad dream, what follows from this apparition is something more subtle, more ineffable. Strange, the uneasiness that innocuous sentences, constructed with elegant clarity, as if to indicate something obvious, something transparent, can emanate. Yet it is in the shadows that meanings flourish, and there they remain even when the light returns.
Reading these pages, one gets the feeling that something imperceptible is creaking. That something could be bourgeois beliefs, the most stubborn illusions, or—this is the hypothesis that fascinates us most—the idea that man can somehow float on the surface forever, basking in the sunlight, never turning his gaze to the abyss below. Even more seductive is the sense that this mysterious depth conceals within its restlessness what is most alive in life—as if uncertainty lends our steps greater attention, sharper vision, a more intense and true feeling.
Or perhaps these are merely the seductions of a jovial old satyr who instills doubt for a slightly perverse diversion, throwing bits of chaos around the house like confetti.
As he stood there, enveloped in the storm, solemn sensations arose in his soul, stirring his heart and making his thoughts fruitful. And so it is that Pontoppidan’s psychological refinement impels the reader like a goad, making the shimmer (malignant? or vital?) of those unexpressed dreams, of those submerged desires we fear discovering deep down there, reverberate in his soul.
Written by Delis
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Henrik Pontoppidan, L’ospite regale, Iperborea, Milano, 2026
Original edition: Den Kongelige Gæst, Copenaghen, 1908