In Marcel Proust: Life, Suffering and Doctors, the Swedish physician Carl Lindgren tells the story of the French writer’s life from a medical perspective, an approach that proves unusually successful in this particular case. The chapters have titles such as “Self-Medication”, “Asthma and Worms in the Stomach”, “Toothache and Noise”, “Fear of Germs” and “Glasses to No Avail”.

Lindgren highlights one event as decisive for the work and the cake scene, namely Marcel’s treatment for neurasthenia1 at a sanatorium in 1905-1906. There, the neuropsychiatrist Paul Sollier included conversations intended to revive repressed memories2 as part of the treatment, something Sollier called reviviscences (this closely resembles what Proust would later call involuntary memory, a central theme of the novel sequence, of which the madeleine is the foremost example3).

After his treatment at the sanatorium, Marcel began sketching out what would become his masterpiece. The possible connection is further strengthened by a notebook in which he developed the framework of the novel and wrote Sollier’s name beside a central note on involuntary memory.

Whatever the truth of the matter, it is entirely certain that we have Proust to thank for The Bagatelles. As I have mentioned before, I was signed off work a few years ago for a period because of burnout, which paradoxically gave me enough peace to embark upon In Search of Lost Time. At the same time, I was enrolled in a stress management course through my local health centre, where we were taught to set boundaries, do one thing at a time, meditate and use outdoor gyms.

One day, we were given an assignment: do one thing you enjoy every morning. Inspired by my friend Marcel, I decided to try each morning to encapsulate a feeling in memory and in writing. Preferably one as small and self-contained as possible, and then to describe it fully, in as much detail as possible. You know, like taking a sip of Perlenbacher Pils from Lidl and being hurled back to a volcanic expedition on Lanzarote?

No? You soon will.

Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt

✦ The Conquerors of Lanzarote ✧

Something of a madeleine moment occurs when I take my first sip of Perlenbacher Pils, bought at Lidl, and let the pale, meaningless, almost tasteless drink trickle through me, carrying me back to a balcony on Lanzarote one December many years ago, when I was about to become a father and therefore needed, in the months beforehand, to roam around a little before everything presumably became static.

Back then, the pale lager was called San Miguel, renowned among connoisseurs for being perfectly acceptable even when lukewarm. Jeppe and I drank litres of it in our sun loungers while breathing in the slightly chilly Atlantic air, dressed in jumpers and jeans, and it was nothing like the spontaneous sun and swimming package holiday we had intended.

When we were not occupying the balcony and drinking beer, we sat indoors and drank beer, with the addition of the World Snooker Championship, to which Eurosport devoted all its airtime during those days. The routine had been there waiting to be discovered. We drifted into it without resistance.

To make the beer consumption easier still, we munched chilli marinated corn snacks, which gave me a rash, yet were so addictive, but they gave me a rash, but were so addictive. And this continued for five days at least, with equal parts beer, snacks and snooker, until one morning on the balcony Jeppe pointed towards the volcano on the farthest edge of the horizon and said:

Tomorrow we will be standing at the top.

He might just as well have pointed at the moon, so inconceivable was the prophecy in the warm alcoholic haze. So impossible that it nevertheless became something to yearn for, rather like Knausgård, after the anguish of the years with small children, forcing six novels into existence under the pressure within. And Jeppe’s voice was resolute. He was tired of this sluggish existence, which had admittedly lasted only a few days, but possessed a life-denying monotony equivalent to decades.

Early the next day, we began our determined march, heading directly towards our destination, up slopes, across property boundaries and over solidified lava. In the distance, across the magma, we spotted a guard dog charging towards us, and we raced in panic up and down the Martian landscape like soldiers fleeing through a hail of bullets. There was no right of public access here, we realised slightly too late.

Someone whistled the mutt back, and we were saved and able to continue upwards, and after many hours of wandering we stood at the summit of the volcano, beside a shabby mobile phone mast and heaps of old newspapers and advertising leaflets. My heart beat proudly in my chest. The feeling that nobody had ever been there before, which had of course already been disproved, but at least no package tourist. We were not like them. We were conquerors.

And so we strolled all the way back, eventually landing on the balcony with aching joints after what must have been thirty thousand uphill steps, cracked open a San Miguel of uncommon sweetness, munched the corn snacks and felt worthy of the moment, I think as I sit on the sofa drinking my Perlenbacher Pils, letting the meaningless drink run down my throat as I put on an episode of Rome I have not yet seen and allow the images to take over my thoughts.

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✦ Car Showroom ✧

I am brushing my teeth when a combination of toothpaste and a stale odour from the drain fuses into the smell of a car showroom. A highly distinctive smell, rarely conjured anywhere except inside these hangars on the outskirts of town, filled with new vehicles, no doubt deliciously perfumed so that the buyer can breathe in his future.

He can compare it with the reek of chips in the car he drove there in. Because it is a he. The entire arrangement is built around this he who is meant to feel like a winner. Leather and a newly built engine, exclusive plastic and untouched tyres awaken the man’s desire for another man inside the man, proud and assured and suddenly within reach. The note of the door closing, with precisely the right balance of softness and firmness in its suspension, and then that indoor feeling inside the cabin. A new solitude settles in, in which one’s new self makes its entrance as a promise of greatness, of superiority, something that will spread into one’s behaviour in every other room, as though the scent were transferred to the owner: a man with a V8, who can effortlessly glide into the overtaking lane and quite legitimately remain there, perhaps for the rest of his life.

I could live here, the man thinks.

For a period, I frequented car showrooms often. Not because I took the initiative myself, but because I was a child, and children have to adapt to their parents’ interests, and my father liked new cars. Nor did I have any objections to the destination, since there was often hot chocolate in the machines at the back beside the sales offices. The drink dripped mechanically into brown plastic cups, which heated the skin so fiercely that I had to change hands from time to time. The tip of my tongue soon went numb. There was also often a bowl of hard blue sweets wrapped in plastic, which I cracked between my teeth to gain time. The lozenges were really too strong. A foretaste of spirits, perhaps, and probably just as well to get used to it, to stretch the taste buds upwards.

At times I wandered alone among the cars, which stood like flagships beneath the high, long rows of windows. For how could these untouched vessels possibly have been brought across the gleaming floor, something as inconceivable as driving over herringbone parquet? As a rule, I settled into one of the more expensive makes, breathed in the fumes of exclusivity, brought my palm towards a gear lever decorated with wood, but took care not to touch the handbrake. Sometimes the radio could be switched on.

Then I placed my fingers over the steering wheel and imagined driving, without imagining in the slightest that I might one day actually drive. A boy cannot drive, and how could I imagine myself as anything other than a boy?

I understood, however, that somewhere inside these cars lay the key to something decisive, something capable of awakening the desire of other men. The newer the car smelled, the better, more masculine and more competent the driver, a man who could afford it and also possessed enough sense of smell to understand how to prioritise. A capitalist test of manhood, effective because everyone bought into the concept.

Sometimes we were allowed to take a test drive, to feel the surge of acceleration on the motorway, but then the smell vanished, the same smell that unexpectedly drifts towards me as I finish brushing my teeth and hurry towards the door. I have a doctor’s appointment to keep and must catch the metro.

✦ A parallel dimension ✧

The vacuum cleaner rolls onto the yellow Ikea rug in his son’s room, and the father calls out encouragingly, “You’ve made it look so nice,” when, for no apparent reason, the brain shifts into detailed memories of the football pitch at primary school.

Why, he cannot understand. The brain simply does it. Somewhere in the tangle of associations produced by Saturday cleaning, this place has been brought to the fore, found in a forgotten archive, examined at one of the conferences of the unconscious, and apparently there is reason here and now to return to the gravel, the goal frames of white painted wood, the feeling of a stitch across the chest, but above all the fence that frames the pitch in and the world outside it out.

On the other side are the gardens of detached houses. A parallel dimension, constructed in a way that makes it almost impossible for the children to comprehend. People probably exist there in ordinary life, living beside the most public of public places, wandering around the houses in slippers, slurping coffee and reading the newspaper, day after day, as anonymous to the pupils as neighbours in a residential complex, despite being only a few metres away. They might just as well have pitched a tent in central Stockholm.

The children speculate about the homeowners, some better informed than others, because some have been to the other side in pursuit of a stray ball, climbing the high fence when a teacher looked away and finding themselves in a stranger’s garden. Descending like an astronaut, urgently trying to retrieve the ball before some neighbouring creature caught sight of them and perhaps became angry about the intrusion, or the noise, or the kinds of things faceless adults might do to a child in the imagination.

Nobody has seen them. There is speculation that an elderly couple live there, but if that were true, surely they would be visible throughout the day, unless they were deliberately keeping out of sight. More likely they work office hours, but nobody knows and nobody will ever know. The children continue playing their matches, making noise during penalty shootouts and sending balls over the fence, while the neighbours continue being neighbours, unknown and permanently present, while the years drift onwards and the child becomes a father vacuuming another child’s room and is flung backwards and forwards through time, like a stray thought or ball.

Psst. A new chapter every Sunday:

The Last Siamese

A novel by Jörgen Löwenfeldt. All chapters are free for the first two weeks after publication. After that, they go behind the paywall, available only to paid readers of The Bagatelles.

By Jörgen Löwenfeldt

Thank you for reading.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

This dispatch went out to readers across 106 countries. If it resonated with you, consider sharing it with a friend who might feel the same, leaving a comment, or recommending it on your own Substack.

A warm thank you to the sponsors of The Bagatelles. Your belief in my work keeps me going, and as a paid subscriber you have access to all long-form content, including the novels Zenopolis, Bardo Noir and The Last Siamese.

Do you have any feedback, ideas, or questions? I answer selected questions in dedicated Q&A dispatches: send them through this form.

You might enjoy this story in five parts:

✦✧ Looking for the archive? You can find every post here.

It was hard, after all, to prepare for the experience, because it was a first, but in an eerily familiar way. The bed stood in the same corner as when I lived there several decades earlier, and on waking, my legs instinctively pulled in, not wanting to knock the speakers over. But there had been no speakers beside the bed for many years. Yet in me, on waking, they were standing there, and I might just as well have been a teenager on his way to school as a father of two on a nostalgia trip. All time was latent in me, ready to be activated. In that very second I was immortal.

(If the story feels familiar, I wrote about it in more depth in my Q&A dispatch).

The body keeps the score, as they say. But it keeps codes, signatures and people too. That is the theme of this dispatch of The Bagatelles. Below, I offer you an essay on door codes (non-fiction), a short piece about the time travel of meeting someone from the past (more fiction) and a bagatelle about a more unusual reunion (all fiction).

And while we are touching on autofiction, do not forget to follow the novel The Last Siamese, which is developing with a new chapter every Sunday. We are already on the third, in which the intern Jörgen Löwenfeldt has found himself in some rather comforting dilemmas. So make sure to come along before the paywall (or wait for it and sponsor my writing). Each dispatch is free for the first two weeks.

Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt

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✦ Four Seven One One ✧

In the good old days it was easy to get in everywhere. All you had to do was read the marks on the keypad and guess the movement. Like at my grandmother and grandfather’s, where the code was 4711, like the perfume, a little left-leaning movement that wore the numbers away on one side. In other words, you could get in on general knowledge alone and a touch of deductive reasoning. Not least since every other entry code carried some memorable story, because whoever had initiated it understood the art form and did not want to squander the act of creation on chance. The residents could therefore parade their interest in history by saying, instead of the actual digits: “the Battle of Lützen”, “Gustav Vasa’s coronation” or “the end of the First World War”.

Surprisingly often, “the Battle of Hastings” also appeared, which is really an irrelevant year for a Swede, but the kind of knowledge drilled into people at school and which landlords and the chairmen of housing associations evidently recited in their sleep. And since one did not necessarily carry an encyclopaedia, the Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook, or even an almanac of facts in those days before smartphones broke through, one simply had to hope that the worn digits would at least give a hint of the right century.

4711, EdC from Mülhens, is a German eau de Cologne launched in 1792. According to the company’s founding myth, the brew came from a monk’s secret recipe for a miraculous decoction, prepared as a wedding gift for the merchant Wilhelm Mülhens. True to his profession, he sniffed out a good business, and of course a story that would sell. The name 4711, printed in large figures on the bottle of Kölnisch Wasser, derived, suitably for this essay, from the house at Glockengasse 12 in Cologne to which Wilhelm moved in the middle of the nineteenth century. It had the house number 4711, which was listed beside the founder’s name in the local address book, precisely as an alias: and voilà, the conditions were suddenly in place, long before the entry code had even been invented.

I had to look all this up, because although I had keyed in four seven one one thousands of times as a child, a young person and an adult, my research never went further than settling for the explanation: it is a classic perfume. Had you asked me to name another one, I would have had no idea. And the supplementary fact: it is one of the most common entry codes, so if you are locked out somewhere, try it. But despite this well-meaning tip, those numbers never worked anywhere else. So it cannot have been entirely generic. A shame all the same, since, like every popular four-digit code, it has the advantage of being rhythmically right, like a little finger dance across the keypad, and like every dance it is important that it be performed without stumbling, and naturally without having to cross your fingers, or by resting your palm against the box and using your thumb as well, which is against the law. Here the index finger is king. Besides, these are numbers the inhabitants of the building will have to live with for a long time, a practical and elegant little everyday choreography. Preferably one to speak of, discreetly, aloud.

That was also the case for my grandmother and grandfather, who for many decades lived with and as 4711. It was probably the only code they had ever lived with. Not that the locked entrance itself really mattered very much, because there were not many strangers running around the neighbourhood anyway, meaning that loose dangerous sort of people whom the whole procedure of a locked entrance was meant to keep out. And besides, the newspaper delivery person needed it, as did the postman, the people delivering advertising leaflets, various tradesmen, and all the relatives, not least the grandchildren, so they could drop by whenever they liked, and everyone who at some point in the last thirty years had been to a party in the building and had at some point been rather politely informed by the host and hostess, over the home telephone, that the number combination was very easy to remember. Like the perfume, that’s all. Oh, right, of course, everyone would then respond, and perhaps one felt a little stupid, or a little clever, as I did myself now when I learnt the background story, which I would gladly have held forth on if anyone had had reason to listen to the anecdote about the monk.

Unfortunately, there are probably not many people interested in knowing more about an eau de Cologne from 1792, since the code was changed from one day to the next. It happened quite suddenly, in connection with the entire locking device being replaced. It was presumably something that, like everything else these days, was simply done rather quickly, without consulting anyone, and this person, who was probably a man, keyed in four digits and then everyone had to learn to identify themselves with them. 2525. Two five two five. Unimaginative. A terrible code, unless it belongs to the child’s first tablet.

These numbers, even though they are closer in time to the moment of writing, I have never memorised. Instead they are stored in one of my phone’s many notes, the one named “entry codes”, where I have written them down as soon as I have been given them. In theory, that means I only need to ask once. Alongside a long row of names of people I no longer see, workplaces that are not mine, there is also the toilet code for the café on Götgatan. They change often. There is someone called “the psychologist”, though I no longer remember which one, and the allotment area by Vitabergsparken, which I was given access to one stressful spring, but never used for cultivation, and which I now associate only with chaos. These days I do not use the list very often. Except every time I go to another relative’s place, since my general knowledge has not managed to hook that year onto anything. When I search online, I see that it is connected to the French Revolution, riots among students in Scania and the Jewish court jeweller Michael Benedicks immigrating to Sweden.

Sometimes I walk past an entrance from the past and try not to try, simply letting my fingertips touch those small buttons they have met so many times before, letting muscle memory do the work, and not infrequently the little green light flashes its “Open Sesame” and I am admitted, without having any idea which numbers were needed to perform the magic. But even more often the whole process has been erased by the new age of security thinking and technological progress. The modern stranger is therefore asked, via a small screen with digits, to search for a surname and press a telephone symbol. If the resident then chooses to take the call and then press the number five on the keypad of their mobile phone, I am let in. A digital voice says: “Welcome in”, without my ever having 1) felt welcome in 2) thought about what the voice is saying.

My list of entry codes in my phone remains as a memory bank of thousands, millions of finger dances around Stockholm and Sweden, from a time when it mattered which four digits one wished to be associated with. A time that has not quite passed yet, but will soon be as forgotten as the identity of that solitary Carthusian monk with the recipe. If only he knew what his wedding gift would mean to the people at Grevgatan 70.

✦ Someone From Before ✧

Time has passed. It always has, of course. We have to formulate ourselves anew. The time that has passed is mine. Like everyone, I have a certain amount of time. How much, I do not know. All I know is that I have a certain amount of time. That is why it is hard to know what counts as a considerable stretch of time. Even a few years can be the difference between the beginning and the end. I do not know. That is part of the charm.

So time has passed. I meet someone from before. And this time I understand, for the first time, that before is before, and now is not now but afterwards. That last time and this time are forever inaccessible to one another. Between them: a gap. Three hundred parentheses inside parentheses. Probably more.

The person from before is new now. New in the sense of being someone else, older. Probably every cell has been replaced. You are, of course, you. However you have gone about it, you have been you. As a child you were also you. But with everyone else it is different. Because they can actually be other people now. And this person is, the one through whom you notice that time has passed.

She is not the person you remember. She is also the person you remember. You are not the person she remembers. You are also the person she remembers. Everything you have shared is contained in the memories. But you do not talk much about them. They are kept apart, so as not to be contaminated. You talk about now instead. As if no time had passed at all.

✦ The Pen Shop Reunion ✧

Only those of us with especially unusual names know how it feels when the name appears without warning, as when a mother calls out to her child at a bus stop (once), when an advertising character has been given our name to raise a laugh (also once), or when you, like me, are leafing through the pad in the pen shop, looking for a blank page on which to test the expensive ballpoint, and catch sight of the name amid fictional, delayed dialogues between pen testers of different ages, sticky little figures of doubtful artistic merit and countless variations on the sentence “I’m testing this pen and it seems quite good” in different colours and depths of point.

This unique conversational form of pen shops might possibly have been the subject of a story of its own, were it not for the fact that I stop short, completely as if lightning has split me in two.

Not only am I there once, but a dozen or so times, both in fine ink and black pencil, each time in the same wavily elegant schoolmistress handwriting, which always made her seem a little more well bred than the rest of us. I recognise it the way one remembers a voice or a scent, with such automatic force that I do not even have time to scrabble for the memory, because it is already there, and it is she who has written my name, who has written me, tediously many times, well over a decade after we stopped being meant for forever.

That is probably the rule for all teenage infatuations, really, that one says that, that one believes it, I think, and recall all her curly letters and invitation cards. They had a calligraphic quality. No wonder she has refined that talent by becoming the kind of person who tests expensive pens when most people, like yours truly, make do with whichever one is closest to hand, but now that I am buying a graduation present I thought, avuncularly, that a fountain pen would suit the young man, not because I have ever used one myself, but because it feels right, the sort of thing one buys to encourage an interest, or one that ought to exist. That or coasters from William Morris. Or a bowl from Iittala.

And then I see the name, the name, the name, repeated, the one that basically belongs only to me, which has neither a name day nor Scandinavian frames of reference, the name everyone constantly reacts to with: “Right, could you repeat that?” And I can. “And how is it spelt?” And I spell it out with particular emphasis on the accent and the dissonance. “I’ve never heard that before, actually.” “No, it’s a bit unusual.” “French?” “Romansh. No, we’re not from there. It’s a long story.” Sometimes I have to tell it too, usually in the sharply shortened version, which basically comes down to my epidural-blissed mother seeing a name in the newspaper in the maternity ward and taking it as a sign from the Lord Our Creator. As I say, there is a fuller, considerably sharper version too.

So there I am in the pad, taking up all the space, and now I am the one holding the pen. Without further thought, I draw in a plus sign and then add her name after my own. I do the same on every line. She and he. She and he. Muscle memory senses that we have done this before, though I do not know when or how, but it feels like the most natural thing in the world to join us together before the future spectators in the shop, who, in their search for a blank page, will be made to witness a reunion.

After the misunderstanding, we met only once, very briefly, in the shopping centre outside the shoe shop, when she was there with her mother and smiled awkwardly and said “hello there” (not hello, hello there), then she moved away to study while I stayed at home and avoided student loans. And that was just as well, because that was how I could afford the sailing boat, once upon a time, which became the beginning of everything, the so-called career.

The whole page is now ours, once again as a couple. Unfortunately, I am not entirely happy with the pen, whose nib leans too heavily, and instead choose one already lying in a box. It will probably not be used by the boy anyway, and if it is, only once the ink has dried.

When I am standing at the till and, after flexing my payment card, ask to have my purchase wrapped, I think of her, the girl, now of course the woman, who will come back here and continue testing pens through my name, probably like automatic writing, as unconsciously as some people still use passwords from their teenage years. Then she will see my additions, understand their meaning and think: It is fate.

Then anything can happen.

Thank you for reading.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

This dispatch went out to readers across 103 countries. If it resonated with you, consider sharing it with a friend who might feel the same, leaving a comment, or recommending it on your own Substack.

A warm thank you to the sponsors of The Bagatelles. Your belief in my work keeps me going, and as a paid subscriber you have access to all long-form content, including the novels Zenopolis, Bardo Noir and The Last Siamese.

Do you have any feedback, ideas, or questions? I answer selected questions in dedicated Q&A dispatches: send them through this form.

You might enjoy this one:

✦✧ Looking for the archive? You can find every post here.

Why? Let me elaborate. Among other things, because I can. I’ve kept my day job, and my creative fate is therefore mine to steer as I please1. Also, a little, because the first thing I do after finishing a novel is write another one, and then another. The selling part is not really for me, so I prefer to postpone it, and then postpone it again. Should you wish to assist, please do get in touch.

This summer I will be taking you on a journey through a vanished landscape: the city of Norrköping as it was in 2007.

The Last Siamese is a novel about an intern at the local newspaper (who shares a name with this writer), a missing colleague (who shares a name with my friend and former colleague), a Turkish folklorist, the girlfriend back home, and a cat: Alice. It is fiction, but not pure fiction. Rather, it is a magical realist hybrid of what happened, what-ifs and wild imagination. So be careful where you step.

As you are now used to, I’ve decided to give this story its own publication, to make sure I only have readers who have signed up to read a full novel. Subscribe below:

The Last Siamese

A novel by Jörgen Löwenfeldt. All chapters are free for the first two weeks after publication. After that, they go behind the paywall, available only to paid readers of The Bagatelles.

By Jörgen Löwenfeldt

A new chapter will be published every Sunday. For the first two weeks, each chapter will be available for free. After that, it goes behind the paywall and will be readable only to paid subscribers of The Bagatelles.

Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt

Has The Bagatelles become part of your routine?
Join the small inner circle that keeps these letters alive.

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✦ The Last Siamese, chapter 1 ✧

In the autumn of 2007, naturally, none of what would later happen had yet happened. I was an intern on the culture desk at Norrköpings Tidningar, commuting weekly to the second-hand flat on Plankgatan, furnished by a career soldier who, after his time in Bosnia, had come to hate impressions. Grey wallpaper. Dead furniture. Pill bottles above the fridge.

From there I fled into various whims. After borrowing a paperback edition of the novel New Year from the city library, I asked whether it would be all right to interview the writer, Stig Larsson. We met at Rosa drömmar and his breath wafted pear cognac. Afterwards he wanted to change all the more reasonable quotes, but keep the megalomaniac ones (he was the greatest since Thomas Mann). A few weeks later I met Roberto Saviano, together with his interpreter. I tried to make a joke about Berlusconi, but it did not go down well, since he was, after all, the one guaranteeing the bodyguard protection. And so the autumn went on like that. In between, I went to IFK’s matches in Superettan, where, led by the Icelander Stefan Thórdarson, they finally climbed the league system. But I had not yet started going to training sessions. That only came when I was on parental leave, as an endpoint to my walks with the stroller, which indirectly led to my seat on the board.

It was amid all this youthfulness that I came into contact with the Turkish woman. She was an exchange student at Linköping University, specialising in Nordic folklore, and for no reason valid to me had begun asking questions at Kafé Kuriosa on Hörngatan.

“You there, have you perhaps read Pauli Olavi Kuivanen’s books?”

I put down my review copy of Björn Ranelid’s Open Letter to George W Bush (which I would later come to own in duplicate, one of them signed, through a gift from my former parents-in-law) and quickly tried to shift realities. Had she really asked that? As far as I knew, my colleague on the desk had never published anything. True, he had slipped me a few sheets of poems from the eighties, and hinted that there was a novel project about growing up in Åby somewhere sloshing about at the back of his mind, but for the life of me I could not believe that he, the least ambitious person in my circle, could be persuaded to let himself be judged by strangers. She, who I came to understand slept on a mattress in the art gallery (after being invited as a guest artist by Johnny and the gang who later started Den svenska björnstammen), stared at me as if she expected an essay read aloud on my colleague’s art of living. “How do you know him?” I asked, now slightly irritated. By this point I had concluded that she had realised we wrote for the same newspaper, perhaps she recognised me from the byline photo, which the photographer had needed several sessions to get right, since that year I had not yet had my eyes operated on for strabismus. The picture of Pauli Olavi Kuivanen had been difficult for another reason, the fact that he preferred not to have one. He had failed to appear at so many photo sessions that the personnel manager had been forced to issue a written warning, and then he finally turned up, stern and surly, a photograph that generated that rumour about him being severe and unreasonable.

The Turkish woman drummed her finger over the books on the café table beside her. A hefty pile. The titles seemed to be written in Finnish and yes, of course, there was his name along the spine of every one of them. It was, after all, irrefutable evidence. But when the hell had he had time to write them? I began going through what I knew. Perhaps when he worked at that home for people with intellectual disabilities? He had told me how it was during those decades that he became well read, by sitting on watch through the nights, surrounded by world literature and sleeping young people. I had had no reason to question anything he had told me, but now, with the authorship as evidence, there must have been something else, a track he had chosen not to tell me about, for reasons still completely obscure to me. The Turkish woman giggled inwardly, as if she could read my thought process. She said, in broken but grammatically perfect Swedish: “I really did not expect this. I thought you would be much younger. That is how you were described to me.”

To further explain the mysteriousness of the situation, this took place during the years when I did not look at women. I was blind to everyone except my partner in Nacka, who in turn commuted weekly to the district court in Västerås, blind not only because of love but also because I was inexperienced. I was twenty when we met and still lived at home. Since that first meeting we had continued to see each other every day, with an inevitability that had something of fate about it. There was simply no logical possibility of breaking the chain of days, no more than one can change siblings or parents, and therefore there was also no reason to lay eyes on attractive women, not even as a pastime, I decided. One or two had, of course, punctured the bubble, without my understanding how it had happened, or even that it had happened. Forgetting stepped in and I later had to place these events on my straw of memories in order to understand myself, who I was without her and quite simply: what the women had had in common. Yet there was nothing that connected either the curvy emo girl at Eriksdalsbadet, the fashionista on the outdoor terrace in Västra hamnen, or Kelly Kapowski in Saved by the Bell with the inquisitive Turkish woman I now had before my eyes.

At the risk of exoticising her: she was not a type, did not fit the templates of my subconscious, came from a culture I was not familiar with, smelled unfamiliar, radiated an intellect I still had quite a few decades to go before I could measure myself against it. In addition, she was beautiful. I could of course determine that, but without being actively drawn to it, since I had not yet learned to understand my impulses. They simply arose like viruses in a computer and then I tried to fend them off without ever grasping what they were about. So I answered her: “Have you read what I’ve written in the paper, is that what you mean?” I recalled that the suite of articles from the film festival ought to have been published that same day, it was probably those. Perhaps the subeditor had used one of the pictures of me at the very back of the row (placed there because of the knee problems I would come to hold forth about in the texts). Was I famous for a day?

“Is it all right if I sit beside you?” she asked, pinched one of her books with her and sat down after I had nodded slightly. Now I noticed that she had fitted hundreds of the pages with small taped bookmarks in yellow plastic, which in turn had been supplied with notes in what must have been Turkish. She could therefore quickly turn to page 244 in the work Kaikki virtaa, which dealt with a kayak journey across Lake Ladoga. Suddenly, among the lines, I found at least two familiar combinations of letters: Jörgen Löwenfeldt. She translated the rest for me. According to the story, I had apparently travelled with the author to Sordavala, in present-day Russia, to visit my colleague’s remaining and now rather distant relatives. There we were to put together a documentary film, with me as technical assistant. That she had thought I was younger had everything to do with how I was described: sluggish in the mornings, mad about sport and the extensive problems with acne (which would be solved the very moment I came into contact with the almost magical face lotion from Ullared). Nothing written in the book corresponded to how I perceived reality. “What you have read there is an entirely fictional account,” I said, adding: “Do not ask me why he wrote it like that, but in any case it did not happen.” She gave me a sceptical look, leafed to the middle section of the book and said: “But how do you explain the photographs?”

On the glossy paper there were pictures from the Winter War, my colleague’s grandfather as a soldier, wearing a bushy moustache and a white fur cap, pictures of his parents during the first shift at the textile factory in Industrilandskapet, and then a panorama from the family party at the terminal in Mariehamn, where I saw the child Pauli Olavi, or Olli as everyone called him, wearing sunglasses and lying in front of the others. When she turned the page I then found the sequence of pictures from what was claimed to be our joint trip to Karelia. It certainly was someone with my appearance visiting the old church school, now rental flats. And yes, it did look as if I was standing there with the digital camera photographing Willy Kyrklund’s childhood home, a typical thing for me to do, I could admit that. Only it had not happened, must have been manipulated and retouched with first-class sharpness, however he had learned that technique. Nor did it answer the more burning question: why?

I could not ask him either, since he had taken two weeks’ leave of absence to read up on current historical non-fiction ahead of the next term’s publications (something the employer really ought to have paid for, we thought). No one knew where he went during these periods, even if we suspected that he had merely cycled up to the cottage by the lake and left his mobile phone turned off, but I had no desire to take a taxi there only to find the house empty. “Thank you for showing me this,” I said at last. “I can understand why you asked. It would be easy to mistake this for the truth. The way it is written and rendered, I mean.” She pointed towards the pile and said: “There is more, but it has probably become a little too much for you today, hasn’t it? Perhaps we can meet a little later, once you have slept on it.” She went back to her place over by the thirsty monstera and began packing books, notebooks and pens into a tote bag. “What is your name, by the way?” I asked stupidly. She answered: “Eda Eriş, but surely you already knew that? You wrote about my photography exhibition. We even shook hands at the opening.” I did not remember that, for fuck’s sake I was writing four or five articles a day to make up a spread now that Olli had scarpered and Mats had gone on holiday to arrange the funeral, but for some reason I nodded and smiled while she left the café. As if this sort of thing happened to me all the time.

At this time in my life, there were men everywhere: living and dead. Men with hubris, a few without. I read men, listened to men, compared myself with men. Because the developmental phase was based on similarity, rather than difference, on becoming who one is by searching where others had searched. A lad among lads. For some reason I avoided telling Emma about the café incident when I spoke to her on the phone that evening. Instead I said something brief about Ranelid and Marcus Birro having the same agent, just to say something. She, in turn, had met a former Säter patient, known from court, at McDonald’s. He had stared at her for half an hour. When we hung up, I realised that I had avoided bringing up Olli’s authorship, not because of the incomprehensibility of what had happened, but because of who had revealed it to me. It seemed impossible to me to be unfaithful, and yet to some extent that was what I had been simply through this avoidance. Because, I could not explain it, but there was a because.

The next day at the office I chose not to sit in my usual place in the cupboard beside the entertainment desk, since the culture desk was empty. The letters editor Anna-Karin was also early and observed: “Well then, it’s the intern running the pages now. Swiftly marched.” But I did not really have time even for joking, since I needed to have three finished articles, not yet begun, before late afternoon. I had almost emptied the stock of reviews written by freelancers in order to save Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s papers, before the film special took care of Thursday, so now I could only insert a short, vague notice from the choir leader Michel Bruce about a premiere performance at the opera in Stockholm. Then it was empty. If I wanted a future on the desk, I could not put in material from the news agency, as other departments gladly did, apparently that was some form of sacred rule here. I therefore devoted the morning to speed reading Ranelid’s book, secretly reading what the Stockholm papers had written and formulating something punchy, after which I phoned, at random, the talkative artistic director of Vadstena Akademien, so that with a generous five thousand characters I could summarise the summer (a little too late for that really), whereupon I skipped going to the lunch restaurant, since I was out of vouchers anyway, and could then start a column in which I pointed out how this internet community Facebook might mean the beginning of a new surveillance society. Technology was my way in as a young person, I thought, and thought again when the telephone on the desk rang.

Since I constituted the editorial desk, I answered. A bleak, aged male voice asked: “Is that Mats Granberg?” “No, it’s Jörgen. I also work here,” I said, and cut myself off, because I did not want to say that I was an intern, since the word immediately made people lose interest, as if I could watch myself being devalued in real time. “This is Peter Tidman, I just want to make sure that what I sent arrived. There have been some problems with my connection. The modem has been making strange noises. As if it is whistling at someone.” The editorial email was empty, and I did not have time to give him a basic course in machine lore, so I asked him to read the text aloud, about a new Romanian poetry collection in which he saw merits. Afterwards he wanted to check whether my transcription contained the correct number of commas and semicolons. He was satisfied, and then I dared to give him a little praise. During other café visits I had, namely, read the caller’s poems about children tearing twigs from young apple trees (a line that dissolved something in me), so I took the opportunity to tell him how impressed I was by his handling of language. Every sentence so precisely measured. “Oh, well, yes, that’s good,” he said, without changing tone, as if I had asked whether he wanted to take part in a survey about ice cream. Outside the window, in the car park, some intermezzo was taking place between the photographers Larsson and Rundstedt over who had the right to the space by the entrance instead of taking the route round by the loading bay. It struck me that I could ask him about what had happened. “By the way, do you know anything about Kuivanen’s authorship in Finland?” Now I heard violent breathing on the other end of the line. “I know nothing about that,” he said, and continued with a self-contradiction: “And you should stay away from it.” He hung up abruptly. At least I had got the review, did not need to hurry with the column, and could soon, at the afternoon meeting, calmly instruct the subeditor on how we imagined the pages. A saved day in a flow of days.

Towards the end I could even afford to play a few rounds of table tennis in the basement with Ulrik Paulsson (the surname pronounced with a long Bjurholm a, Pa-ul-sson) from UngNT. As usual he won by just a few points, only the match plan was repeated so often that it could no longer be seen as an even game, but only as a sadistic game with my competitive instinct. After we shook hands I told him briefly about the Turkish woman and he did not even ask what she looked like, he was never interested in things like birds or even beer, but merely observed laconically that “Olli is a man of integrity” and that “one could have imagined as much”, as if nothing I had told him surprised him in the least.

Norrköping did not yet know at this point that the city was in the middle of a golden age. Industrial premises stood empty in the centre, students were beginning to spill over from Linköping, while the politicians had read too much of Richard Florida’s theories about the creative class. Every youthful initiative received municipal compensation, if not financially then in space. There was a museum of forgetting in the smithy on Västgötabacken, which became SVT’s premises, from where I often reported on new events, debates and photography exhibitions. Once I took part in a panel and claimed that the only thing preventing a journalist from writing what they wanted was their own morality, while disregarding the ethical rules, since I was writing a short novel during that course, but also because I had learned the importance of angle. How easy it was for me to manipulate the reader into this or that opinion by introducing a few disagreeable adjectives, or simply by writing out exactly how people spoke. The art gallery lads, for their part, had gained access to the flat on Trädgårdsgatan after a short conversation with the head of the culture administration. No one else wanted the Art Nouveau rooms anyway, so they might as well fill them with bizarre artworks, graffiti, flown-in artists such as the Turkish woman, or just drunkenness and parties. I, the intern, simply had quite a lot to write about during those months. There was always someone who wanted to show something new. And otherwise one could always write about the still new concept of gentrification or the city’s curious attempt to become European Capital of Culture, in which they had sent Ydre municipality an invoice for fifty million kronor, since it was considered to benefit from any possible future designation.

Back home in the capital, I scarcely dared pedal to Ica Maxi on a bicycle, but here I was immortal. Through an acquaintance I had got hold of a used seventies Monark (so that it would survive the weekends at the train station), refrained from wearing a helmet (because of the wind in my hair), and skidded whenever I could across car parks and tram tracks, piles of leaves and later slush, and in darkness through heavy, deep snow, without using lights. The way home stretched from St Persgatan, the intersection by Spiralen where my father’s shop still stood, down past the Freemasons (who when I interviewed them denied that they drank one another’s blood) and the Bosnian association and then quickly past the brow with no visibility, where I nearly came to grief a few times, towards the bridge over the stream, Kungsgatan and the drunks, left up towards Vattengatan where a mannequin stood in an otherwise solitary shop window and then the cemetery, depressing Plankgatan, where I placed the bicycle in the stand in the courtyard.

When I looked up towards the entrance door, Eda was standing there. Beautiful and fresh. Here, in the squalor, as misplaced as the mannequin ought to have felt. “Can we talk upstairs?” she asked. “Yes, that’s probably better than standing here,” I said. While we climbed the stairwell I asked: “How did you know where I live? It’s not written anywhere, is it?” She said, with a built-in shrug in her pronunciation: “I followed you.” As I fumbled with the key in the lock, I was reminded of what it looked like inside. The whole week’s dried out dishes were still there. In addition I had used the rucksack as a wardrobe. Of course I had not made the bed, but did the sheet cover the mattress?

Eda grimaced when she saw my teenage room installation, went immediately towards the balcony and opened the door to air the place. “Better,” she said loudly into the air. She then reached for her bag and slowly brought out all the books by this author Pauli Olavi Kuivanen who shared a name with my colleague and wrote about me without my knowledge, a rather fascinating story if I had not been so stressed and overworked. She laid the works on the veneer dining table with their covers facing upwards. “I thought you could begin helping me now, because there is quite a lot that does not add up,” she said. “Why don’t you ask him directly?” “That is exactly what I did and then he ran off,” she said. “Then I got to the sections where you appeared and thought you could help me, but honestly you seem a little, what does one say, confused?” “No, I see no logical explanation for any of this. True, we have known each other since the short placement last autumn, but we have never gone on any journey together.” “Förvirrad, that is what it’s called,” she said and smiled. I thought she would leave me alone after this, since her searches yielded so little, but instead she turned to the kitchen area, inspected the meagre contents of the fridge and pantry and began throwing together a rice-based dish. We ate from deep bowls on the sofa while watching the television broadcast of the away defeat against Bunkeflo, in which Imad Khalili scored both of the opponents’ goals. She never left, so in the end I had to ask.

She answered: “There’s an inspection from the municipality over the next few days. We have all had to move out. But it is only temporary.” “Oh?” I replied, feeling my heart thump. There was no question of sleeping on the sofa, which was barely possible even to sit on comfortably. “We’ll have to sleep head to toe,” she then said. “Your girlfriend will surely understand. She doesn’t want you to force a young woman to sleep in the street, does she? Think what could happen?” “But there are loads of Turks in Norrköping. It ought to be easy for you to find a countryman who can help you?” “They are just peasants. You do not understand my country. It would never work.”

That evening I did not have my call with Emma. I only wrote in a text message that I was too tired, which was true, and it was not improved by the fact that I had received a visitor in bed. I hardly think I slept more than a couple of hours, was conscious the whole time of my body, her body and scent and her scent on me and mine on her, without us ever touching each other. She breathed heavily in her sleep and I felt the draught against my feet. There was, of course, something deeply erotic in the situation, and that was probably why I only perceived panic. The slightest movement towards intimacy and my life back home would come to an end. The thing that was my life, my real one, not the parenthesis that was this. Only it did not feel that way from this side. It never did. No more than a dream cares what takes place during the waking hours of the day.

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The Last Siamese

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✦✧ Looking for the archive? You can find every post here.

In the bipolar country where I live, this means that one suddenly sees men and women in swimwear in the park, the same people who only a few weeks earlier were wearing coats and tightly wrapped scarves. And it changes our way of being too. From introversion to extraversion.

It is not always easy being Swedish when you are sensitive to weather and light, but one thing is certain: we know what it means to seize the moment. So I do just that and write at least one new story every day, because it becomes so easy when you have just emerged from a long, painful winter. It’s payback time, and God knows we know how to make the most of it.

This time I take you to a labyrinthine train station in Moldova, guide you through an unexpected, perhaps obscene inheritance, and finally give you a glimpse of what it is like to calculate scores in figure skating.

The theme of the dispatch? I think Josef K. would have had no trouble recognising it.

Welcome away ꩜

Jörgen Löwenfeldt

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✦ Counter 27 ✧

At the railway station in Chișinău, I joined a queue and waited my way to the front to ask for a ticket to Odessa, only to be brusquely referred, with an eye-roll, to counter 27, as though the same question were asked a dozen times a day, and as though I could not possibly expect to buy an international journey from any of the first 26 counters.

The ticket windows were numbered in an unnecessarily long row, given that virtually every journey from here went either to Tiraspol or Bălți, but the building had been erected during the communist years and the logic of that era had come with it. Employment above all. The woman at the counter was therefore not particularly accommodating, so I tried counter 5 instead, which had no queue, and asked the man there, who was sitting counting tokens for some dice game I had no intention of trying to interpret. He too gave me an irritated look, as if I had just toppled his pick-up sticks, and muttered: “International travel, 27.” But there are only 26 counters here, I noted, slightly desperate, gesturing across the station hall, because time was passing and the train would leave the platform with or without me, and then I would be stuck in this sooty city for at least another twenty-four hours, and considering the state in which I had left the hotel room, it would be best for me to get out of here as quickly as possible. But my problems were mine, and evidently not the station staff’s.

For several hours I searched for counter 27, via all the other ticket windows, but nobody knew exactly where this mythical gateway to foreign lands was located. I asked around wherever there were people. The tobacco seller claimed it had been moved after the damp damage in the concrete ceiling. The sweeper pointed out that before that, you needed a special code, Gagarin, to be granted access at all, but that was a long time ago, and besides, the code was top secret. The lad who used to sit at that counter later became a decent poet, the newspaper distributor told me, after all the reading he had managed to do during working hours, but that information was of no use to me now, as the hours passed and who knew whether the hotel cleaner might not call the police. Was that sort of thing illegal in this country? Entirely possible.

Then at last I saw a small arrow on the floor, pointing towards the urinal, then an A4 sheet with another hand-drawn arrow, and I followed the direction down towards the basement level, where there was an Orthodox prayer room that did appear to be in use, and also a rest room that seemed altogether too well used by shady elements who could hardly be ending their working days by reciting the commandments of God, and at the far end, by the boiler, there was another arrow, a childish sticker pointing towards a ladder and yes, I climbed all the way down and found myself in a bunker-like system that had surely been in use long before the station was built, back when world wars were raging above.

At the far end of the corridor with the flickering fluorescent lights, there actually was counter 27, the number written on a folded sheet of paper, with the addition: International travel. But nobody was sitting there to take my order, which of course was not so surprising, given how inaccessible the place was, and therefore how poor the prospects were for encountering other human beings. I sat down on the wooden chair behind the folding table and waited, because now at least I was in the right place, and there was nothing more I could do anyway, and I had grown rather tenderised by all the searching.

A few minutes later I heard a clatter over by the ladder, and an unknown body climbed down into the bunker system to keep me company. Slowly but surely this person approached, whose sluggish steps led me to assume that this was unlikely to be a swift affair. My companion turned out to be a backpacker guy, of course, one of my kind. In Greek English filtered through some sort of peculiar Low German dialect, the stranger managed to ask: “Is it here I can buy tickets to Prague?” I looked around and caught sight of a scratched larchwood hutch, odd that I had not noticed it before, and when I opened it, there lay tickets arranged in alphabetical order, to almost every destination on the planet. Under P I soon found the one he was after, first class as well. I handed it to the lad and accepted his notes and coins, weighing them in my palm, staring him in the eye, and decided to keep the change. Then he went back up towards the higher levels, while I put my feet up on the table and searched my breast pocket for a packet of cigarettes. Not that I really smoked, but it just felt right in the moment. It was hardly going to get busy here.

✦ What Doesn’t Hurt You ✧

The executor of the will observed that, broadly speaking, the father had left behind only two assets of any significance: first, a unique Märklin Spur 0 collection from the 1920s, containing an Austrian station building, twenty-six clockwork locomotives in mint condition, fourteen electric locomotives, eighty-seven lithographed tinplate carriages, bridges, viaducts, semaphore signals, points and enough track to offer a journey all the way round the block; and then, of course, the swingers’ club he had run with great success for decades. The value of the two was judged to be roughly the same.

The will contained precise instructions. The train collection was neither to be broken up nor sold to collectors, and the club was not to change its nature. The sons still had a choice, the executor observed when they gathered around the table for the review of the estate: namely, either to accept the inheritance, or to leave the premises empty-handed.

The summer cottage in the archipelago had been made over to the Hungarian dental nurse, also the father’s mistress, a legally watertight arrangement. The liquid assets, which had once been substantial enough to buy a defunct adventure park on a whim, the father had withdrawn in bundles of banknotes and distributed as lavish tips during his final years of milder dementia. Among other things, he had made a waitress both rich and written about in the local newspaper, and in addition refurbished the establishment where she worked to resemble a Bavarian beer hall. The attic flat in town he had sold many years earlier in order to pursue a caravan life, and the caravan itself was, as everyone knew, lying at the bottom of Lake Fryken. Hence this meeting, the executor summed up, without altering his tone.

It ought to have seemed natural to let the model trains pass to Olof, the slightly nerdy and prudish physicist, and thereby sign the club over to Ragnar, the bohemian and extravagant motorcycle mechanic, but the will ordained the reverse. Their father’s principle of upbringing followed the proverb “what does not harm you hardens you”, which apparently also applied from the realm of the dead. The brothers could have spoken at length about this, but in adulthood they almost never met, and on those occasions the conversations remained at the level of small talk.

The sons had certainly been hardened, as children of the scabrous sex director, whose business attracted all manner of herpes-ridden pervs with neither university credits nor table manners. From time to time a certain amount of tourism was generated in the town by suspicious German gangs with television crews, and more than once the neighbours complained about loud howls and used condoms, which had not even been properly sorted for recycling. But the enterprise put food on the table, as people say, and the father had been careful not to bring his work home with him. Their mother did not say much, mostly satisfied at having drawn the winning ticket of not having to work.

Furthermore, the executor explained, I shall guarantee that you sons honour the inheritance. You may sign here, he said, pointing to the dotted line at the bottom of the fifth page of the booklet.

There was nothing to do but obey.

For many long weeks Ragnar stared at the boxes where they stood unpacked in the middle of the villa. As if they might suddenly spring open by themselves, with a surprise and a revelation. His partner said nothing about their placement outside the guest toilet, mostly pleased to own something so expensive for the first time in her life. She boasted about the inheritance when guests came over, and they too had never come close to anything so expensive, so they later came to boast about it second-hand.

The value, however, began to fall on the night, in the wolf hour, when Ragnar decided to take command of the situation. He tore open the untouched packages with their Gothic Märklin logos and began laying buffer stops and centre-rail track across the vinyl flooring. The collection came to life, with carriages, spring-driven locomotives, remote-controlled points and hand-painted semaphore signals. There were both bridges and viaducts, so the thresholds caused no difficulty. He built as if in a trance, and when the rest of the family had woken, they had to tiptoe over the rails to reach the kitchen. In front of the dishwasher stood the Central-Bahnhof, with ticket window, platform roof and a clock face that had stopped at 17:12. Not especially practical, but no one ever questioned Ragnar.

When the line was complete, he sent off the first locomotive. It chuffed away, if not towards Verona or Innsbruck, then at least towards the hall. The sewing-machine sound of the striving engines soothed his mind. The whole procedure reminded him of taking an antique Chinese porcelain service down from a display cabinet and using it to serve tea, then focusing entirely and fully on the drink itself. A transformation into an object of use, from observer to user. And more than anything else: into the protagonist of your own life.

When he checked his mobile after setting several parallel departures in motion around the home, he discovered several missed calls from Olof. His timid brother normally never used the telephone function, it was almost surprising that he had even discovered it existed, and at most sent a text message on birthdays and anniversaries. Now he had called several times during the night leading into Saturday. He had also left several voicemails.

But Ragnar did not call back.

✦ SkateCal ✧

Let us say you have become someone’s parent, perhaps imagining that it would be cosy to become one of those blissfully meandering couples with a sleeping little creature in a stroller, never suspecting that twelve years later you would be ordered to count points at your daughter’s club figure-skating championship.

It is not the sort of thing they talk about much at the baby clinic, that one Saturday you might be placed in a well-heated conference room outside the ice rink with a trio of other parents in order to compile the judges’ scores in SkateCal for girls of varying ages, from young to older, and thereby be responsible for the ranking, in these forms you have been set to fill in.

You are given a brief introduction to the work, very brisk, because the coach has other things to do, and you are adults with jobs, so you know this sort of thing, but all right: after the programme has been performed, the judges send numbers via WhatsApp to the parent group, who then eagerly fill in the form, add everything up and stack the papers in a pile with the winner on top. It is not really that complicated: each jump requires a code, the competitor may fall, which means deductions, different per class of course, and then there is an overall assessment through which every point towards the end has to be filtered, and do not forget either to enter the correct coefficient.

You do not understand how this is supposed to work, no more than you could have learnt C++ during a coffee break or Claude Code by hearsay. If this were at work, you might call in the union or ask your manager for simpler tasks better suited to your IQ, but here it is a matter of five minutes’ total learning time before the code snippets from the judges arrive on your phones with their S: 4.0, P 4.0, C, 3.75. Interspersed with first 2L7 + 1A + 2T and FSSp3, sometimes marked with << in the corner or sometimes just a three, or a one, and it has to be quick because soon it is Rafaela’s turn, and Ester’s, whose verdict from those who know better reads: Well done. Really lovely arms and expression. Good spins! These phrases are to be entered at the bottom of the paper, but they are only words unless you parents, via the formula on the website, together with algorithm-swift mental arithmetic and patience, succeed in producing the final result, the judgement you are to deliver, even though, as is known, you have only glanced at the relevant statute book for a few minutes.

Fortunately, the others know more than you do. One father has even done this before, the previous evening, so the knowledge is fresh. The stress eases a little, even though everything moves at hyper-speed: Elvira, Majken, Li, Olivia, and do not forget Cornelia, who gets an S of 4.5 and apparently that is excellent, assuming higher numbers are better than low ones, and you do not know that, and are those figures actually supposed to be counted first or last, and does it make any difference? Probably a difference.

This goes on for an hour or so, then another, and you realise that in all your decades of working life you have never encountered a task under such pressure, because you do not work with things like feelings. What do you actually work with, that prevents you from doing things that matter to other people?

You know nothing about figure skating. Nothing at all, you realise.

You try to do what you can do, namely delegate tasks to others, the arithmetical geniuses who quickly grasp the concept and add paper to paper in the pile, which you sort by final score, that much you can manage. Someone has to project-manage, you think, keep everything in order. If no one cares about the whole, everything might collapse, lead to double work, triple work, or someone being forgotten entirely. What would that look like, an awards ceremony where one or two girls do not even get to find out how it went? Weeping and wailing and furious leaders, but at least no deduction from your salary, since this is happening pro bono, because parenthood is compatible only with expenses, but one cannot say that, so you do not say it.

Besides, it is going well like this, you have time to think amid the stream of messages, with you handing out papers with names already filled in and comments that your fellow parents complete with code snippets and notes about deviations, while several others document the whole thing on the whiteboard.

It works, like a miracle, the stacks grow and are organised, there is no time for analysis of why and how it happens, because it is happening.

Until someone has to leave to watch their daughter’s performance, then someone else leaves for the same reason. And someone else.

You are alone in the room.

JC, 2S +2TF. FSSp (n)1, Stsq1, 1A+1A+2Lo+CCOSP (no, crossed out). -4, -5, -2, +1. S: 1.5, P: 1.75. C: 1.75. Not very good numbers, or perhaps absolutely excellent ones. And the pictures keep rattling into your phone. It never ends. You sit on a wooden chair by the coffee machine and stare down at the screen, like a drugged bingo caller, with no idea how you would begin even if you were to pretend to begin, what means what, how SkateCal means, is, or works, and least of all what it wants. Girl’s name after girl’s name. Protocol after protocol. You simply look. Nothing is filled in. Because no one returns.

Perhaps they thought this was enough, there were so many others working too, everyone thought, in other words, it is a simple thing after all to help out a little extra at the weekend with the girls’ competitions, nothing to get worked up about, and besides you are all doing this to show goodwill, and then it was just you left, whose daughter’s performance had already taken place yesterday. You could just as well have skipped the whole thing, but duty called, because your name (that is: the daughter’s name + dad) was in the notice.

You could just as well have become the announcer, but.

Cut.

This does not happen, of course. Not in this way. You wake in the middle of the night with a heart ticking as quickly as a fledgling’s. Your unconscious has views on your emotional world’s overreaction, and since you have somehow become stuck in a space between dream and waking, it can reach you without a filter. Certainly, parts of this episode really did take place, but the interesting thing, the unconscious thinks, is the hysterical stress you experienced at being the one who had accidentally given a child a possibly lower score simply because you had keyed in the composition figures beforehand rather than afterwards. The unconscious should not really have been surprised at all, since it knows better than anyone that the event is related to a memory from when, as a young adult, you got an extra job magnetising all the school library’s books and spent several days on the task, only to be told in the end that you had done everything wrong, whereupon the job had to be redone by someone else, someone who understood better.

There is, so to speak, a trigger.

You need to talk about this, you and even more you. And right here, at 03:50 in the night, you can reach one another, have a real conversation, as long as you do not reach for the phone or begin dressing fear in logic. “Who are you?” you ask, and the answer comes wordlessly, with an association to the arms of an octopus, which you understand exactly. “And who am I?” Here too only words without letters are needed, explaining that you are the tip of the iceberg you, and therefore see exactly what you need in order to understand decisions already made. It is as if you are never quite you, you feel now, as if you have been pushed onto the stage with a script in your hand, written by all that mass beneath the surface of consciousness that you never see, but with which you can now at least converse, as long as you do not wake any more than you already have.

“What do I learn from this?” you ask, and soon receive a new wordless wave meaning that it is your job to understand and interpret, because that is how things work here. You as a Rubik’s Cube. On the other hand, that is how it is for everyone. Then, despite everything, you reach for your phone, hoping to fill your brain with other people’s words and pictures, and the conversation dies, but what remains of the dream, the conversation and yesterday is instead a persistent, sweaty and all-encompassing stress. You almost die of shame, you feel, even though what happened is not the end of the world, but it still feels that way. It is as if you had got every answer wrong on the national exam, and worse besides, with accompanying deaths and promissory notes, and inherited guilt on top of that. And it is not the end of the world, you know that. But it feels that way. It feels that way. It feels that way.

Like standing naked in front of the whole class.

You scroll and scroll yourself clean, yet still think that perhaps a girl is lying awake at the same moment as you are trying to free yourself from the stress, awake because the young figure skater, after a flawless competition, has unjustly been named the loser. She is having a conversation with her unconscious about the matter, which does not know either about the injustice within the injustice, about what this would come to mean for the so-called identity. Nothing good, of course. It is not in her nature to lose, winner that she really is.

But perhaps she will get used to it.

Thank you for reading.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

This dispatch went out to readers across more than ninety countries. If it resonated with you, consider sharing it with a friend who might feel the same, leaving a comment, or recommending it on your own Substack.

A warm thank you to the sponsors of The Bagatelles. Your belief in my work keeps me going, and as a paid subscriber you have access to all long-form content, including the novel Zenopolis, all chapters of Naïveté Travels, and the first season of Bardo Noir.

Do you have any feedback, ideas, or questions? I answer selected questions in dedicated Q&A dispatches: Send them through this form.

You might enjoy this one:

✦✧ Looking for the archive? You can find every post here.

Everyone who will feature in this conversation series shares this: my admiration.

It also makes The Bagatelles slightly more extroverted than previous dispatches. With the help of you, almost 3,000 individuals, I have formed connections with like-minded people in more than ninety countries, and now I want to go deeper. Ideally, a series of conversations like this might lead to travel, excursions and unexpected collaborations. It also allows me to draw on more than a decade of steady work as a journalist. The circle closes.

The Bagatelles Salon is influenced by many similar projects that have enriched my thinking over the years, for example Designboom’s structured interviews on creativity, The Paris Review’s monumental series “The Art of …”, ’s physical salons in Hornstull, as well as my own proto-experiment, 10 Answers on Creativity (a series consisting of two interviews).

I believe our very first guest would be pleased with this development. She does not believe in finished states at all. Even if she herself seems to have brought one into being in The Bagatelles Salon.

Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt

As a paid subscriber you get access to all long-form writing including full novels. It costs $5 a month, or $2.50 a month if you pay for a full year. That is currently the lowest price Substack lets me set.

with

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

When I was a teenager, I grew up in a suburb outside Stockholm. Everyone’s parents seemed to live the same life. I often saw them on the commuter train, looking as though they were on their way to1 their own funeral. They all worked in offices in the city, sat there all day, then commuted back only to fall asleep on the sofa in front of the TV. This is how it appeared through a teenager’s gaze, with a limited understanding of the world.

For myself, I imagined the following destiny: a few years of studying, a job in finance or whatever it was adults worked with, then finding someone to marry, buying a house in the suburb, taking on a mortgage, having children, and being stuck forever.

Consequently, the only thing I wanted from life was to be surprised.

And oh, how that wish came true. On the one hand: be careful what you wish for (I never specified that the surprises had to be positive). On the other: I did ask for it, and I remind myself of that regularly when facing setbacks. It is still much better than that parallel unlived life.

For people like me, ’s book Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World strikes a particular chord. She, formerly at Google and now a neuroscientist, puts it simply: forget the map and focus on the landscape. Her philosophy resonates with architect Christopher Alexander’s ideas about unfolding (his alternative to imposing a fixed vision), and with the very American philosophy of pragmatism, where outcomes matter more than theory.

In the book, she makes a lot of bold statements: for instance, that we should let go of the idea of “following your one true passion” (because we are more than just one thing). She also asks the reader to stop obsessing over the concept of “legacy”, and instead focus on what the psychologist Erik Erikson called generativity: the act of contributing to others and to the world around you, here and now.

How to begin? One practical way is to start seeing life as a journey rather than a tedious march towards a fixed destination. Instead of deciding to keep a diary every evening for the rest of your life, and becoming the kind of person who keeps a diary, why not start with four entries, just to see what happens? Do it first, evaluate later. Like a scientist approaching a problem.

The perfect tiny experiment is not only doable and limited in time, it should also tickle your curiosity and sit at the edge of your comfort zone. So I chose to reach out to people I admire. One of them was Anne-Laure, and she kindly agreed to answer a few questions I had.

You must have bad days, like the rest of us. How do you make sure you keep moving your projects forward, even on a sleep-deprived Tuesday in November? And how do you build those kinds of habits?

— Yes, of course I have “bad” days, although I tend to think of them as “off-peak” days when I’m not at full capacity and shift my focus to maintenance and recovery.

The first thing I do is stick to my morning routine, which becomes even more essential on those days: stretching and journaling. Then I look at my to-do list and move anything that’s not urgent and important to another day. If there’s anything left, I use the limited energy and focus I have to do the one urgent and important thing, and take the rest of the afternoon off.

“Off” here doesn’t mean going back to bed. It might be reading papers, going to an exhibition, or doing some light admin work while listening to music. Whatever I choose, I make sure to close my laptop early, read a novel in bed, and get a good night of sleep so I wake up refreshed the next day.

I don’t have any trick for building these habits. It took me a long time to break the cycle of having a bad day, pushing through anyway, and turning it into a bad week. Now I trust my body and brain to recover if I give them the space and support they need.

Which work of art has influenced you the most? Could you tell me how that came about?

— As a writer, I could point to a book, but there are too many that have shaped me and choosing just one would feel arbitrary. So instead I’ll mention something less directly connected to my work.

Growing up, my dad had a large collection of Buddha head reproductions he brought back from his time working in Indonesia. Being surrounded by non-Western art, along with the stories he shared, exposed me early on to different ways of seeing and thinking about the world. It made me curious about what else was out there, and over time that turned into a desire to travel and see it for myself.

Those Buddha heads were just part of the background of my childhood, but they left a lasting imprint on how I think. It’s fascinating how much your environment can shape your outlook without you fully realising it at the time.

This year, my dad didn’t know what to get me for my birthday, and then he had a dream that he should give me one of the heads. So he picked one, packed it in a suitcase, and dragged it from Paris to London. These things are heavy! It now sits in my living room and I’m looking at it as I answer this, which feels like a nice way of closing the loop.

What is your best advice for someone who hasn’t nurtured their creativity for a while?

— Run a tiny experiment! Just pick a simple action and a short duration to give it a try. It could be writing one line every morning for a week, doodling for five minutes a day for five days, or reading one poem every evening for a couple of weeks. Choose something you’re genuinely curious about, and that feels so small it’s almost impossible not to start.

Do you have a book, a website, a song, or something else you think more people should experience?

— I’ll recommend some music I think people should experience. One of my favourite artists is Thylacine. He blends electronic music with field recordings and sounds captured during his travels, so each track feels atmospheric in a way that’s tied to a specific place.

Thank you for reading.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

This dispatch went out to readers across more than ninety countries. If it resonated with you, consider sharing it with a friend who might feel the same, leaving a comment, or recommending it on your own Substack.

A warm thank you to the sponsors of The Bagatelles. Your belief in my work keeps me going, and as a paid subscriber you have access to all long-form content, including the novel Zenopolis, all chapters of Naïveté Travels, and the first season of Bardo Noir.

Do you have any feedback, ideas, or questions? I answer selected questions in dedicated Q&A dispatches: Send them through this form.

A related post, on claiming all that you are:

✦✧ Looking for the archive? You can find every post here.

Busy, exhilarating weeks.

However, you do not have to move in order to travel. Readers of The Bagatelles are already well aware of this, as I offer up to three escape routes with every dispatch. And attentive readers may recall my earlier mention of the French author Xavier de Maistre, who wrote Voyage autour de ma chambre (A Journey Around My Room) after being placed under house arrest for forty-two days following a duel. The book became an inversion of the adventure novel, where the bed, the armchair, and the paintings served as destinations and sites for contemplation. In doing so, he established a tradition of adventure as an inner movement.

So even though the body needs to move now and then, this newsletter is a place for the heirs of Xavier de Maistre. This dispatch is no exception. We are heading to Plaza de la Alfalfa in Seville, to what might be a moss garden in Kyoto, and to an unknown terrace by the Mediterranean, all without even putting on our shoes.

Welcome away ꩜

Jörgen Löwenfeldt

As a paid subscriber you get access to all long-form writing including full novels. It costs $5 a month, or $2.50 a month if you pay for a full year. Substack does not allow prices below that.

✦ Darkness falls over Alfalfa ✧

“It looks like a pegboard,” the child says about the sea of sunflowers in the newspaper, and the father looks up and looks down, examining the print’s screen of differently coloured dots.

With a more attentive gaze, the father begins to study the other articles fanned out across the table. Here it is claimed that Argentina has the most psychotherapists per capita in the world. There that ambidexterity is the ability to write with both hands at once. In the news briefs that computers have discovered that men and women have different retinas.

But of course this does not happen. Newspapers do not write about such things.

Yet let us imagine that they do, as darkness falls over Alfalfa, as the cup is drained of cappuccino, as three hundred and forty-seven breaths are taken unnoticed, as the waiter discreetly picks olives up from the floor, and the caffeine rises towards the brain like a suddenly returning personality.

And as it is time to leave.

Then she appears, in the middle of Plaza de la Alfalfa, the one who spoke about working at the checkout during the pandemic, in connection with the horror film Smile. It was connected in that behind the face mask she learned to smile in new ways. In the film without involving the eyes. In reality without the mouth. Quite troublesome, she said, but something that could be practised.

So let us believe that she appeared in the square with her picnic basket filled with artichokes and marmalade and began to talk about her Moroccan parents and her Catholic girls’ school and the ten years without citizenship and about the friend who works at the bar behind Las Setas: perhaps you would like to come along?

The child is given a Sprite. The father a draught cerveza. They pay for everything. This is not happening, yet it might have happened, we imagine. What is true, however, is that evening becomes night, and that towards five in the morning they head to the airport with a group of friends from Triana to sit in the arrivals hall. They watch people. People do not look back. They simply reunite and are absorbed in that.

But what really happens is that the father stares at the sea of sunflowers in the newspaper and mutters something inaudible, because in truth he has seen nothing. Or not even that. Not even that happened.

✦ Indoor moss garden ✧

Inspired by the garden of Saihoji Temple, I chose to tear up the wall-to-wall carpet and replace it with moss. The process was simple: equal parts clay, sand and soil spread across the floor, then a sprinkling from the moss cocktail I had bought online, water, and wait. In Japanese tradition, moss symbolises eternity and harmony. Look out over Kyoto’s vivid green coverings, closing tightly around trunks and gravel paths, and you understand. The moss itself is a detailed piece of nature for those who look closely: stars, spirals and triangles, like small galaxies.

A few weeks after the initial phase of the project, the growth had begun to push across the floor. A few more weeks later, there were hardly any surfaces left uncovered, and at last I could place my feet against the reassuring living ground as I rose from bed in the mornings.

Soon the vegetation worked its way up the walls and across the ceiling. Other forms of existence also began to make themselves known. Spiders and woodlice, of course, but also mice and frogs, deer and elk. In the kitchen lay a cluster of boulders, which at night might transform into trolls, or not, everything was still possible and impossible.

The entire flat soon brought to mind the forest I roamed as a child, where I could get lost without ever being gone, because nature was always home. As then, I wandered further and deeper in, found streams and marshland, ravines and clearings. Not a step was taken without noticing the softly tickling organism that lived beneath the soles of my feet. An unending massage, a reminder that I was moving in the right direction.

When one morning I spoke Japanese, I was not surprised, though that might have seemed natural given I had never practised the language before. I was simply in such a phase now, and besides I had other things on my mind, as I had misplaced my rake. Maple leaves covered the living room floor, and I was expecting guests.

✦ Tempo ✧

In Italian, the word tempo is used for both weather and time. A compromise for everything that lies beyond our control, yet remains within reach in the long run.

She said, and stubbed out her cigarette against the window ledge.

The view from the balcony was uninterrupted. On a clear day we could see Corsica and, with a little squinting, all the way to Sardinia, but most of the time violent winds drove in here, against the house whose façade was so porous that after every storm I checked whether the plaster was still in place.

The wind is a metaphor for breathing, she said, and ran her pen across a few newly written lines, which I glanced through, and I was probably meant to say something now, though it hardly mattered since she did not trust my judgement, but I needed to say something out of politeness:

Interesting, almost animated.

She drew a fresh cigarette from the packet, cupped one hand around it and held the lighter long enough for the flame to catch. She inhaled deeply and then exhaled. A heavy cloud of smoke formed, quickly swirling away over the Mediterranean. At times her mood followed the ebb and flow, and I had the sense that she was at high tide just now.

Good, she said in reply and took another drag. You should do the washing up now, shouldn’t you?

When night came, I could still see the small cone of light swaying in front of the view. The wind scattered sparks against the window. Her outline could not be distinguished from the night. And I attended to my puzzle, as always. It was all an insignificant episode among the many from that time, simply the one I remember.

Thank you for reading.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

This dispatch went out to readers across more than ninety countries. If it resonated with you, consider sharing it with a friend who might feel the same, leaving a comment, or recommending it on your own Substack.

A warm thank you to the sponsors of The Bagatelles. Your belief in my work keeps me going, and as a paid subscriber you have access to all long-form content, including the novel Zenopolis, all chapters of Naïveté Travels, and the first season of Bardo Noir.

Do you have any feedback, ideas, or questions? I answer selected questions in dedicated Q&A dispatches: Send them through this form.

3x3 Bagatelles:

✦✧ Looking for the archive? You can find every post here.

One of the stories was called The Diary and is about a man who hears of an intriguing call from Nordiska museet in Stockholm. They are looking for ordinary diaries from ordinary people, which suits the protagonist, who considers himself unusually ordinary. He wants to be selected, so he begins to write.

All of this sounds like something I could have invented for The Bagatelles, only this time I am on the other side of it. The project is real, I lead it, and the five selected participants are still writing. By next Friday, they will have documented their lives for the museum for a full year. You could safely say that my worlds met there for a moment, when reality became fiction, only this time it was someone else’s.

I, too, try to record the everyday. I have been inspired by a number of public diarists: some write everything down, some leave almost everything out, and others write in code. The diary entries I share today, dating from when I started this newsletter, focus on capturing singular moments. They might be a feeling, an encounter, or just leaves dancing in the wind. Things that usually disappear in the maze of memory, and that I want to hold on to.

Or, to quote myself, 14 May 2025:

Not everything has to be included, if anything, it’s an advantage if I manage only to trawl memory for a single detail from the day. Preferably something I’d already forgotten the moment it happened.

For obvious reasons, I have placed most of the entries behind a paywall.

Two other posts on the Nordic Days and Nights project:

Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt

As a paid subscriber you get access to all long-form writing including full novels. It costs $5 a month, or $2.50 a month if you pay for a full year. Substack does not allow prices below that.

presents

✦ April 15, 2025 ✧

The leaves dance in a circle by the accessible entrance.

✦ May 11, 2025 ✧

According to the receipt that fell out of the book, she bought it for me on August 31, 2017, at the Moderna Museet gift shop, where she had likely gone with her parents. A typical weekend activity for them, but not for my family. Only for me.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, 75 kronor.

In both the summer and autumn of 2017, I was so lost that I couldn’t appreciate the book, it required a certain prior understanding of being lost. Like a sea captain who turns to the stars when the compass fails. But I kept tapping on my broken compass, trying to make the needle point in the direction I wanted. Outward, away, but never inward. Someone else was tasked with fixing me, and on August 31, she took that task seriously and bought the book. As I recall, it was handed to me ceremoniously, like the solution to a famous math problem.

Read more

They did not let people vote, though. So at least we are adding something new to the art of the novel, you and I, deciding the path of the story together. notes this in an article in Compact Magazine titled “Substack Has Revived the Serial Novel”. He writes specifically about The Wind Chime Chronicles:

“Readers (…) get to vote over the course of the week, and the majority vote indicates which of the five possible plot developments Löwenfeldt will post next. It’s like a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book, except none of the other possible pathways are ever published.”

Warm thanks for the mention, and welcome to all new readers (you are now more than 2,500, spread across ninety countries).

But back to our story. Do you remember what happened last? It began with a publisher getting in touch. There was an address with two buildings. You chose the wrong one, or did you? You heard a jazzy harmonica melody, followed it, and ended up in the home of a crazy old lady who locked you in and showed you stacks of a novel based on her late father’s epilogue.

You had several options for how to get out of the situation, and you chose to climb out of the window, which won by a single vote. If just one of you had chosen to read the manuscript instead, we would not be playing with danger right now, standing outside the building, trying to get somewhere.

How will this end? Well, it is up to you.

Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt

If you missed the first parts you can read them here:

presents

D1. You climb out of the window

You always have a choice, they say. No matter how cornered you are, you can choose, even if it is to stand there weak-kneed and let everything that happens happen to you, but that is not really your style, is it? You are a decisive person, one who owns your fate. You are not about to let an eccentric lady stand in the way of your future.

Read more

In Det mesta händer aldrig (Most Things Never Happen) we follow the thoughts of a terminally ill man who, alone in his attic apartment on Södermalm in Stockholm, looks back on his life, which he likens to a tree. He finds himself near the end of a thin twig, and for a moment is able to visualise all the other paths, via the trunk, the branches and the smaller offshoots before him, even though they are, of course, invisible. Only one path remained on the tree that at first held countless possible lives.

The metaphor may seem simple, but I have carried it with me ever since reading Anderberg’s book.

Do we choose things? Or do we unchoose others?

What we are doing here is something similar, in a violently simplified version. In this narrative experiment you have voted on your future. Nineteen per cent of those who read the first part wanted us to take the stairs. Fourteen per cent wanted to go to the neighbouring building. And three per cent each wanted to choose the elevator, or simply leave and perhaps go home. None of this will unfortunately happen. Instead, we will follow the decision of the sixty-two per cent who wanted to follow the music.

20 out of 25 possible futures erased. Because most things never happen.

Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt

If you missed the first part you can read it here:

As a paid subscriber you get access to all long-form writing including full novels. It costs $5 a month, or $2.50 a month if you pay for a full year. Substack does not allow prices below that.

presents

D. You follow the music

The harmonica. Like the children enchanted by the piper, you feel an urge to follow the music, and just like them you are led out into deep water. Yet you are not detached from logic: the instrument is probably played by a culturally minded person who would willingly and kindly guide you to the publisher’s office. Not a bad thought, you think, but you mostly follow the feeling, climb the stairs with excitement and do not even notice the colossal trilobite fossil on the fourteenth step.

On this floor the ceiling is painted with frescoes as if you were in Florence. A door stands ajar, from which a particularly flowing jazz phrase comes. You suspect it is the opening of Autumn Leaves, but you are not entirely sure, you probably need to listen a bit more, closer to the source.

When you have stepped over the threshold the music stops, as the harmonica has been placed on the hall table. The woman who just produced the sound waves locks up behind you with a padlock and a heavy chain. She turns the key and places it between her breasts, where it seems to stick.

“I do not want any break-ins,” she explains, then adds, winking with one eye, whose lid is heavily painted in an emerald shade: “Or breakouts.”

There is something baroque about her, as if her entire being were doubly ironic. Before you have time to introduce yourself or even shake hands, or for that matter flee, she tells you that she has come to practise the harmonica day in and day out since her retirement. Music became the love she had lived almost an entire lifetime without ever encountering, but only almost. A bit like how nirvana has been described by those with a talent for such things.

“Yes, you are really very good. Anyone can hear that,” you say a little too loudly, spelling it out, as if you assume she wears a hearing aid. She does not.

“Did I ask for your opinion?”

She notes that you have noticed the sweet smell of marijuana in the air, since you make a small grimace, one that for most people would have been too subtle to detect.

“It is from the neighbour, you know. He keeps smoking all day. Dangerous fellow, really, at least when he gets his psychoses. He has even killed a few, paperboys and such, but we are no snitches in this building.”

She speaks like a dealer from the seventies, but looks as if she were on her way to a ball, though one that got stuck on the way and suffered some painful mishap, though it is unclear exactly what. You glance at the padlock and say:

“That protects you from him?”

She laughs at you for a while, at how naïve and frankly rather stupid you are. That you do not understand this yourself suggests a rather severe imbecility, she seems to think.

“No no, he keeps away from me. A kind of balance of terror, you could say.”

You try to change the subject, because it is becoming uncomfortable, and besides you are in a hurry. Your meeting starts in fifteen minutes. If you are late you will be late to life itself, and everyone knows what happens to those who think they will get more chances.

“I am going to the publisher, you see, and I am a bit pressed for time. Do you know on which floor it is? The instructions were a bit unclear.”

She smiles maternally, but not warmly.

“You are in the wrong building, lad. But do not be upset about that. Such things can happen to the best of us, and believe me, it is not the first time I have lured in an arrogant debutant with a ridiculous story about a bought-out project manager at a taxi firm. Who would have thought that harmonica studies could have such an effect on the sweethearts?”

Unexpected. You are breathing a little faster now.

“How do you know all this?”

“I do not like your tone. In any case, I think I got ahead of events slightly. But you need not worry about missing anything with that woman. She often does that when she finds someone she thinks is cute and pretty. Takes almost anyone and hands them the card. But she did email you, of course. Perhaps she saw your picture somewhere. In any case, you are her type.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Takes one to know one, as they say. You could say we have an arrangement where I get the crumbs. I do not complain. It is like in nature. And who am I to defy God?”

It is as if she has prepared an answer to that question, which you take to be rhetorical. You stand for a moment in an awkward and growing silence, until you understand what is expected of you and say:

“No, of course. One cannot do that. God is God.”

“And his ways are inscrutable.”

She leads you into the living room, where the smell is replaced by the lemon-sweet scent from a dozen green plants with splayed, finger-like leaves. They stand in terracotta pots on every available surface, except the one by the window where she has placed a typewriter. Many piles of what look like a manuscript lie neatly arranged across the parquet floor. She sees what you see and says:

“You are not the only one who has such ideas. You understand, lad. I found a box when I was clearing out the attic, and in it an epilogue my father had written, but I never found the book itself, so now I am trying to write it from the epilogue. It goes both well and not so well. Like the bus journey between Kulu and Istanbul in 1965: ten hours without a toilet break1. I did not even know he had been to Turkey and I do not plan to go there either, so I have got a bit stuck there.”

You are of course aware that the French author Xavier de Maistre wrote Voyage autour de ma chambre (A Journey Around My Room) after being placed under house arrest for forty-two days following a duel. The book became an ironic inversion of the adventure novel, where the bed, the armchair and the paintings served as destinations and places for contemplation. With this he established a tradition of the adventure as an inner movement.

“For some, imagination is enough,” you say in conclusion, to lighten the mood, to get on good terms with the old woman and perhaps persuade her to open the door without you having to become violent and tear open her bra for the key. She seems more eccentric than dangerous, after all.

She does not seem to have listened to anything you have said.

“You stay here while I go and make some coffee,” she says, sweeping her hand across the room. “And for heaven’s sake, do not read any of that. Father would have been so upset, you see. He always held everything back until the final full stop. The dead cannot defend themselves, you know.”

She leaves you alone in the room and you suddenly remember your real errand: to become elevated, important, a name for the encyclopaedias. The path there runs via the building with the same number half a stone’s throw away, where the publisher at this very moment is getting ready to receive you. She throws the scribbled Post-it notes into the trash can, fixes her hair in the mirror and notices that a strand has come loose, which she places behind her ear, and turns her gaze to the wall clock. Exactly twelve minutes left. No, wait, eleven minutes and fifty-eight seconds. Most people would already have taken their place in the waiting room by now.

The last part of your story:

Thank you for reading.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

This dispatch went out to readers across more than eighty countries. If it resonated with you, consider sharing it with a friend who might feel the same, leaving a comment, or recommending it on your own Substack.

A warm thank you to the sponsors of The Bagatelles. Your belief in my work keeps me going, and as a paid subscriber you have access to all long-form content, including the novel Zenopolis, all chapters of Naïveté Travels, and my work in progress: Bardo Noir.

Do you have any feedback, ideas, or questions? I answer selected questions in dedicated Q&A dispatches: Use this form!

One who knew how to choose:

✦✧ Looking for the archive? You can find every post here.

The multidisciplinary artist Eno has long been interested in regenerative art: the idea of creating a seed, or a strand of musical DNA, then releasing it and seeing what happens. Art that grows1. This approach led, among other things, to the excellent documentary ENO by , where every screening appears in a different version using a generative story engine.

This kind of thinking is not entirely new, though. There have been interactive television programmes in the 1990s, including in Sweden and Brazil, where viewers could call in and choose what would happen next. (I once wrote about this concept in a film magazine.) But times have changed, and so have the possibilities. There are probably many ways to create that kind of fleeting story, but today, here on Substack, I thought I would try one specific approach for the first time.

Here is where you come in. You will take the role of the wind in this experiment. I will write a story and give you five possible directions for what happens next. You will have a week to decide, and you are completely free to cheat, campaign, or do whatever you like. Whichever option is leading when the poll closes will become the continuation. Then we will do the same again, with five new alternatives.

The third text will be the ending, chosen from twenty-five possible outcomes2. That is still far fewer than the ENO film’s 52 quintillion potential versions, but after all I am a human being, not a robot. The journey is not guided directly by nature, but it is still shaped by its surroundings. In this case: the readers.

I, the writer, simply adapt.

Now you know the rules. Which direction will you choose?

Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt

As a paid subscriber you get access to all long-form writing including full novels. It costs $5 a month, or $2.50 a month if you pay for a full year. Substack does not allow prices below that.

presents

0. The Beginning

We begin high in the sky. It is early morning and the earth has just rotated the sun into view, its rays falling at an angle across the glittering grand apartments along the waterfront and bringing everything to life. But that is not where we are going, nor to the central arteries. Instead we continue moving across the city, still from the bird’s view: the grid of blocks, tangles of tracks and culverts. The traffic has already begun to thicken: lorries, commuter trains, the occasional cabriolet heading south. It is a Monday behaving like one.

Time to choose, to land somewhere, to let the image sharpen. We must stop panning and descend slowly, finding a suburb beyond the old toll gates, with the housing blocks lying like oversized bricks among the pines. Now we approach ground level so that we can see through the windows, almost like doll’s houses. We can take anyone, slip through the half-open blinds, choose a voice and continue to inhabit it. And so it happens.

It becomes you. Perhaps it feels random to be chosen in this way, yet we could have picked anyone. Still, the only outcome we know is yours, so let us assume there is a good reason why we follow you today, and only today and no other day.

You yourself have no time to reflect on such things. Instead you are busy getting ready for your meeting. Normally you would not call yourself vain, but this time you have spent weeks thinking about clothes, shoes, and timing your visit to the hairdresser so that the editor might understand that you are just as interesting in reality as you appear on the screen. In truth you should not be thinking this way. It was she who contacted you, not the other way round. She appeared out of nowhere in your inbox to arrange an appointment. The time has been circled in red in your calendar. You have cancelled things, rearranged things, mentioned it in every conceivable context and said: no, I cannot meet then, because I have a meeting with the publishing house.

You hope she will ask about a novel, even though through your internet alias you have never hinted that you have written one. But you do have one, assembled a decade ago when you were bought out of the taxi company after your investment in a new switching system turned into a fiasco. Customers were connected to other customers. One couple later married, although the management had no use for that knowledge. The union handled the negotiations with the employer and soon twelve months’ salary were transferred to your account in exchange for a promise that you would never again set foot in the office. With the time that money generated you wrote a work about a project manager who was fired from a taxi company. Dig where you stand, Stephen King said, or maybe it was Margaret Atwood.

In any case you are in a rush now, or rather you are hurrying so that it will not turn into a real rush, so you leave home, take the metro, move from the periphery towards the centre, perhaps for the last time as just anyone. Is that why we have chosen you as the protagonist of this story? Are you on your way to becoming someone?

The thing about the address was a little strange, the editor had warned in a follow-up email. On the street there are two buildings with the same number, a heritage-protected mistake that occurred in the eighteenth century and therefore could not be corrected. The confusion deepens because their offices are found on the fifth floor, but only if you take the elevator, whereas if you take the stairs, you will find them on the seventh. In the vestibule it is claimed that the real location is on the sixth floor, but that notice you were asked to ignore, because almost nothing there was correct anyway.

That would surely sort itself out, you had thought when skimming the information, but when you, after zigzagging through the narrow streets from the metro station, finally reach the office building you realise it may not be quite so simple. The building beside it with the grocery shop has a different number, yet another a few doorways away carries the same one, and the two buildings look alike besides: ageing, crooked at their foundations, with flaking yellow plaster and uncertain roof tiles. You cannot enter both at once, the absurdity of that speaks for itself, so you choose the entrance before you. Good, you think, a decision.

It should be a simple matter to realise if you have chosen the wrong door, and besides you are in a hurry, or not really, but you will only relax the moment you know you have landed in the waiting room and begun leafing through their most recent poetry collections. Pull yourself together now. She invited you, not the other way round. She, who is asked to comment on Nobel Prize winners both in the speculation beforehand and afterwards, delivering the verdict on whether the academy made a reasonable choice. You must trust her judgement.

Nothing in the vestibule suggests that you have arrived at the right place, nor that you have arrived at the wrong one. There is a faint musty smell, and a lingering trace of marijuana in the air. Somewhere on the upper floors you hear someone playing the harmonica, jazzy, with finesse. You try to locate the melody but remember that you have business here. The plaques showing which tenants occupy which floors list only company names that mean nothing to you. The publisher may well operate under another corporate name, not unusual at all, and after all she asked you not even to look there.

Then you remember the last words your grandpa said before he left for Argentina. A sentence you have tried to keep as a guiding principle, despite everything that followed: the adventure does not begin until something goes wrong.

Above: the result of the vote, which led me to write the following text.

Thank you for reading.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

This dispatch went out to readers across more than eighty countries. If it resonated with you, consider sharing it with a friend who might feel the same, leaving a comment, or recommending it on your own Substack.

A warm thank you to the sponsors of The Bagatelles. Your belief in my work keeps me going, and as a paid subscriber you have access to all long-form content, including the novel Zenopolis, all chapters of Naïveté Travels, and my work in progress: Bardo Noir.

Do you have any feedback, ideas, or questions? I answer selected questions in dedicated Q&A dispatches: Use this form!

This is an underrated post, if you ask me:

✦✧ Looking for the archive? You can find every post here.

In the end I could no longer keep it inside me. I needed to write myself empty. One evening, with a ballpoint pen, I scribbled odd sentences on the backs of envelopes. Little stories about nothing, written from a part of me I had not been in touch with for a long time. The texts did not even feel like mine, more as if I were merely a vessel for something else.

This was seventeen years ago. I listened a lot to Beethoven, Dvořák and Bartók, who all wrote short pieces they called bagatelles. The name suited the envelope texts. Not least because it felt as though I were playing them out of myself, rhythmically and constantly humming as if I were Glenn Gould in a recording studio (this we can talk more about another time, the points of contact between writing and making music). The name also eased the tension, suggested that it did not matter all that much, it was only a bagatelle (in Swedish also the word for a trifle) (at the time I suffered from both writer’s block and performance anxiety).

Up until then I had often done many different things, in a long phase of exploration, and there was nothing wrong with that, but it more rarely moved into a phase of exploitation. This time I extended the project, put the envelope texts on an anonymous blog which a few years later became a relatively popular Instagram account, which led to me being noticed, sought out by publishers and agents and eventually publishing a novel. I spoke in the media. I was labelled an author. I was allowed to stay in Ingmar Bergman’s home (twice!).

Everything I had dreamed of came true.

But then the nightmares also began to come true. All those lower layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs began to stir. My brain could not keep up, and one contributing cause1 was the very place that had helped me forward: social media. I was forced into an abrupt halt and burned up everything I had built (see below).

Four and a half years passed. I carried on with my work, now without an audience. In the meantime I learnt patience. I wrote novels no one could read. I wrote bagatelles which I emailed to three or four people. When they became more than that I had to use Mailchimp, after a few years of that: Substack. There I came across the fellow Swede , who wrote in English, and , who regularly emailed out dissertations on Proust. And people liked it?2

A thought crossed my mind: Perhaps my friends were out there, just thinly spread?

I wanted to begin at a new school as the pupil without a past. Not to have a cluster of “friends” on who could bring up embarrassing incidents from the gymnastics lessons. So exactly one year ago I sent my letter to zero subscribers. Then I began talking aimlessly with people, writing notes about whatever came to mind: the centre of gravity and the exquisitely muted yet sharp click of the finest pens, Cărtărescu’s roulette scene in Nostalgia, odd maps, evidence for panpsychism and Maria Strømme’s theories of an all-encompassing field of consciousness, niche signals for those who were looking for them.

At this school I would be entirely myself.

Henrik wrote about the architect Christopher Alexander’s theories of unfolding, and about how everything good that had happened to him in life had followed the same design process. And I recognised myself in that. To simplify: unfolding is the opposite of having a vision. It is about constantly being where you are, truly being there, and then taking one step more. And after that another. Treading a path through the forest rather than cutting down trees and building a motorway (but you must of course start from a core that is truly yours, otherwise it may well be time to have a vision after all).

In my case the core is my fiction, and the next layer is the person who writes the fiction, and not the other way round.

Somewhat jokingly I have called my strategy here my no strategy strategy. To be myself as much as possible and follow every impulse. Yet does it not rather resemble an actual strategy? Because it has worked. Now, seventeen years after I wrote in ink on the backs of envelopes, 2,129 different individuals from over 85 countries have chosen to read these texts, and almost 6,000 people follow me via Notes. The extremely private, by way of many years of detours, has finally become global. A journey that resembles a destiny.

So what happens in the second year here? Well, I write another newsletter, and then probably yet another. And along the way things will happen that I could never have imagined.

This mailing contains no fiction, yet it is still literary writing, which this time has taken the form of answers to questions sent in from Australia to Brazil and Sweden. The format is inspired by the artist Jens Lekman’s Q&A project Small Talk, which he has been running on his website since 2004. Because if you find something that works. Hold on to it tightly.

– Write your own question here and I will answer it in a forthcoming dispatch.

Welcome away ꩜

Jörgen Löwenfeldt
February 24, 2026, Stockholm

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, Stockholm, Sweden:
”If you could travel through time, which version of you would you seek out or which moment?”

Let me tell you about a time I travelled through time.

It began when I saw my childhood home listed on Airbnb and decided to book three nights there with the new owners. I brought my siblings along for the journey. And one morning this happened:

It turned out that the room they were letting was my old boyhood bedroom. We moved the beds so that I could stay in my corner. My sleep was excellent, light and clear. I woke of my own accord at half past seven. And I was careful with my foot, because I did not want to knock the bedspread down and topple the loudspeaker.

Except that it was not there and had not been there since 2003.

Even so I remained cautious, because what if, what if all the years had been a dream. What if I were in fact a teenager again. What if I had school today. What if my clock radio were to kick in a few minutes later and play Good Morning Good Morning by The Beatles and I counted down to ten in my head and rose on two. Stepped awkwardly by the beanbag, on towards the wardrobe. Put on a checked shirt, a pullover and jeans, back to the other end of the room: the washbasin, washed my face and perhaps ran the razor over my cheeks a few times.

My muscle memory had everything ready, it was simply a matter of doing it, but the Ikea armchair was not there, nor the computer corner or the television, which emitted the most irritating high pitched tone, inaudible to adults but like kryptonite to younger ears. My eyes couldn’t see it but my body knew it was here. It was confusing. I could have woken up twenty years earlier and simply continued living as if my children had never happened. Become a child myself, again.

Suddenly, and constantly during my days in the house, memories surfaced that I had not thought about since they were first stored.

I remembered the time the family had a glögg party and I ran up to my room and found it filled with odd young friends of mine or of the family. E had rifled through all my drawers and mocked me for various discoveries when I was not present. M was there with a friend. She had noted that my shelves lacked literature. Proper literature, that is. Not The Young Indiana Jones. She later took a doctorate in history. At the same party G was asked what his favourite music was and he replied: marching music. A few decades later he was my teacher when we dissected brains at the Karolinska Institute (but you will have to look that up in Ensamma tillsammans) (his favourite passage in the book, as it turned out).

Yet I was still lying in bed, in my corner. Here I had suffered more than anywhere else. The majority of my anxiety had been spent here. Thoughts about the next day, driving lessons, in the dream I lost control of the vehicle, swimming with school, where I drowned, or what would become of my life, loneliness. Would I ever meet someone?

I lay in the same corner and stared at the stain on the ceiling that once caused a hole but was repaired, and now I saw a new stain so it was probably damp. I thought that this life had turned out all right, and that I would have felt relieved had I known. There was no invisible hand leading me astray, I came to lead myself and I went on leading myself.

When my brother and I went downstairs for breakfast with our host and his nine year old son, I ran down the stairs, as I used to. Fell down them in light steps. Light, steep steps, even though it was not a school day.

By this I mean that it is perfectly possible to travel through time. For time already exists within you. So it is simply a matter of choosing where you wish to go.

, Australia:
“If you started from week 1 again, what would you do differently?”

When does anything truly begin? It is a question that has occupied humanity for as long as there has been a humanity, and before that it surely occupied the Neanderthals. At some point a Neanderthal thought, for the very first time: when does anything truly begin?

That is the nature of stories, that we can in fact assign them a beginning. We can choose for ourselves when something passes from not existing to existing. That is why there is such a charge in openings. I am drawn to those that seem to begin in the middle of something, where we wake into a line of reasoning that has already been going on for a long time, where the circumstances are self evident to everyone but me: the outside observer who, step by step, tries to stitch the threads together. In other words: like being born.

So how might I have been born differently on Substack, had I been able to go back and alter the past? It may sound a little coquettish, but I would in fact not have changed very much, and that is connected to what I wrote a few paragraphs above: the choice of beginning. Another beginning might have been when I was new as a journalist in a newsroom and did not dare to speak on the telephone. Instead I emailed my interviews for several weeks before finally realising the battle was lost and I had to pick up the phone, and how I did it!

What I can say, however, is what I would have done in the same way again: I would have focused on what I cannot stop doing, I would have tried to attract other people who are like me, I would not have adapted myself. That I became dependent on the various metrics this platform offers was unfortunately easy to foresee, and I did foresee it, and I considered it worth it nonetheless. For this is the great promise of the internet.

, Portugal:
”Do you think poetry has a future in this world of speed and frenzy?”

I read a newspaper article about how dreary it had become to walk into a railway station and look around the waiting room. Everyone, absolutely everyone, was sitting with their gaze directed elsewhere. Namely in the book on their lap. The article was from the late nineteenth century, and since then we have changed our amusements several times. Quite a few of the arguments for the rise or fall of something have remained the same.

As in the early 2000s when many Swedish authors made their debut with short story collections, which experts interpreted as a response to our increasingly fragmented age. People no longer had any concentration. And to be honest, concentration has not improved very much since, I will be the first to sign beneath that. Nevertheless, people still primarily buy novels. Few read short stories and even fewer read poetry. Nothing new on that front. Those of us who write bagatelles must wait for our moment in the spotlight.

But it also depends on what one means by poetry. I listened to the Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu give a lecture a few years ago in which he explained what he was looking for in a text, or in anything really: that drop of poetry. I imagine it as a drop of ink in a glass of water. Before long the drop possesses the entire space and leaves not a single molecule untouched. That is how poetry works. Either it is there or it is not. And we know when it is there, because it answers a need we did not always know we had.

, Switzerland:
”Have you explained your fern craze somewhere?”

I don’t think I have, so here you go3:

Zeynep Tinaz Redmont, , Portugal:
”What is your advice to beginners?”

You could, for example, do as I did.

When I had just turned twenty, in the autumn of 2003, I was a beginner. I had spent an autumn walking in the woods to process personal losses, my grandmother’s death, my girlfriend leaving me, a job that disappeared, sprained ankles, futures and a university place that had vanished because of a technical mishap. I was also afraid of working life, of becoming an office zombie.

One morning I woke with a new, all-encompassing feeling. Suddenly it was there. It felt, in earnest, like the lure of a nymph: yes, like something otherworldly, I could not resist it. It was the forest calling. Which was entirely absurd, since I had never voluntarily wandered in nature, or had any relationship with it, or cared about it, only been forced into marshland during school orienteering, yet now I had been summoned, stepped into my shoes, called the dog to me and put on a lead and then set off towards the Nacka nature reserve, for I had a vague sense of where it was.

Every day I did the same, walked myself lost in a forest I did not know and dissolved myself, because everything that weighed on and troubled me loosened its grip as soon as I stepped among leaves and pine needles and time after time I reopened my sprain, so that I limped intermittently, it would have been a strange sight if anyone had seen me, but I was almost always alone in the forest, could tramp for hours without meeting anyone, and on the rare occasions I did it was almost always an older woman I encountered and we greeted one another and went on our separate ways.

A few years later I learnt that what I had been afflicted by was called dromomania and reached the height of its popularity in France in the nineteenth century when it struck young men with broken hearts, who wandered themselves into exhaustion in their disillusion.

Here too a writing process began without my being fully aware of it, but my mind must have needed an occupation separate from philosophical theories. Earlier that summer I had begun secretly writing short pieces in my lunch break, escaping from the office where I worked. They were my first literary attempts and I need not review them, but they were important. During the autumn walks I began to formulate sentences which I assembled into short stories and poems. I needed somewhere to place them and found online writing forums where I published them as “essays” because that category had the least content (I did not really know what an essay was either). Through the community I found through texts ruminated on during walks I made friends whom I would later meet in town. Together we taped up posters with our writings.

It all culminated in the book I wrote in two days. A grossesse, a friend observed, and I had to look up the word and it fitted. In the same way that I had woken and been driven out into the forest I woke and wrote a novel. In a robe, I wrote until I collapsed into bed, slept a few hours, and then wrote again. When I was finished after two days and one night I had assembled 160 pages. At least I had written a novel in this life.

Winter had settled over Stockholm, it was soon to be 2004 and for the first time I felt I had used myself fully. One hundred per cent. What I had also created was the memory of a blazing, blissful writing process that I have never experienced again and never will, and against which I will always measure all other creation. It was pure. It was without regret or anxiety. It simply was and it was simply allowed to be.

Then I wrote every day, lived and read, and twenty two years later I started a Substack in English. Now that I think about it I do not believe this is particularly good advice for a newcomer, so I would suggest doing it in an entirely different way. It is probably more efficient.

, Cornwall, UK:
”As someone who has taught English to many Swedish children and business English to Swedish academics and leaders of industry, I found The Swedish culture somewhat different from the English, and I learnt much when I lived in that country. What do you think of the main similarities and differences between the English and the Swedes?”

For example, we both speak Germanic languages and we have a shared history. There are plenty of words that stem from the time when the Vikings ruled your island, such as queen (kvinna = woman), or egg (ägg = egg), and hundreds more (a complete list is to be found here). Having descended from fairly Anglified parents – my mother through a slightly upper class style of porcelain, tea time and Roger Moore as a male role model, my father through music, rock, the progressive scene and football – I would probably say: it is very similar.

What is not similar are the enormous class divisions a Swede notices as an outsider looking at your country, and the way they are taken for granted: gated communities, an overwhelmingly car-centric society and a tacit assumption that people must simply take what they get. On the whole, there are more similarities than differences, largely because we grew up with your culture rather than you with ours. After all, how Swedish is Abba? It is more like the sort of music we imagined you would appreciate.

A brief explanation of this adaptability: Sweden is, in itself, an export nation, a small people who have grown wealthy on others’ consumption, so we have always needed to look outward; the Vikings even built cities in North Africa and Ukraine and returned with Roman coins (the Romans, of course, had no interest in our chilly climate, so they spared us). In the eighteenth century the French became the norm, we even imported one of Napoleon’s generals as our new king. In the twentieth century we first tried to imitate Germany, then the war came, so it became England, then the United States. Not the United States any longer, though. You can guess why.

I guess it’s time to follow our own path.

, Quebec, Canada:
Jörgen, how many languages do you know, and does it include Spanish and Portuguese?

I think I have a talent for a language without words, namely the ability to understand what people mean. I have sat in rooms where someone insults another person present, and I understand that it was clumsiness rather than malice, without anyone else realising it, and without the clumsy one even grasping that they have offended anyone. And then someone needs to mediate, and that someone is me. This gift also means I at times have to protect myself with many layers of emotional shields (if you relate: click).

I have also become competent at interpreting the expressions of my own body, what means what, how it can be resolved and what it stems from, instead of entangling myself in excessively overthought analyses. Another language I feel I command is speaking with children without hierarchies, which can be interpreted as childish, but which I see as the outcome of genuine curiosity. I generally do not care very much about ages and have always had friends from different generations. If one shares an interest or a disposition, that is enough for me.

But the question concerns spoken languages, and then the answer is Swedish, English, Norwegian, Danish (in writing), German (I am not very good at speaking it, but understand a great deal), a little Spanish, a microscopic amount of Portuguese (mostly through Spanish). I do not think I have any particular aptitude for languages other than Swedish, even if my English is finally beginning to resemble the language I use for thinking.

, Iran:
Could you please share the top 10 of people you admire?

The list of the best human beings of all time will have to wait for another dispatch (one I do not measure by achievement). For now, here is my top-one list of creative heroes:

1. Leonardo da Vinci

The rest is a list of people whose creativity and/or curiosity and/or passion and/or intelligence I admire, for one reason or another: Marcel Proust, Hildegard von Bingen, Brian Eno, Lina Wolff, Tyler Cowen, Blaise Pascal, Ana Carla Maza, Leonora Carrington, Karl Ove Knausgård, Roberto Bolaño, Jay-Jay Johanson, Alejandro Zambra, Gertrude Stein, Tadao Ando, Helle Helle, Willy Kyrklund, Masha Gessen, Tomas Tranströmer, Teju Cole, Charlie Kaufman, Marguerite Duras, Georgi Pinkhassov, Krzysztof Kieślowski. (Dear reader: Based on this, please give me advice on people I would like to follow from your own country and culture. I’m a bit Euro-centric, but I’m working on it.)

, Lisbon, Portugal:
What was the turning point for you on Substack?

Kevin Kelly’s idea that you only need 1,000 true fans was a slightly too seductive theory for those of us compelled to express ourselves in smaller languages. There may well be enough Swedish speakers willing to pay for make-up tips, training advice or detective novels, but perhaps not for surreal short stories. It is possible, of course, but it is naturally more difficult.

That I dared to switch to English was due to the fact that, with LLMs, I could have a linguistic coach by my side so that I would not make a fool of myself (note that I do not write with AI) (there is a post about that). It is not discussed all that much, but how this technology will affect the possibilities of communicating across language barriers is likely to become one of the great revolutions of the coming decades. And that is a good thing. What will it do to the position of native speakers of dominant languages? One can only guess.

, Bucaramanga, Colombia:
”In the tradition of Borges and Calvino, the narrator is often a collector of fragments from a larger reality. From your perspective as a collector of stories in a museum, do you believe that the modern writer is discovering a new story, or are we simply in the process of remembering, through our ‘bagatelles’, the structure of a truth that humanity once chose to forget?”

First, a confession. I am no expert on either Calvino or Borges. It was my loyal reader who, in her newsletter, used the following description of The Bagatelles: beguiling mini novels in the tradition of Borges and Calvino. Sometimes it is easier to be introduced by someone else, and I felt that line functioned as an exact set of directions, two coordinates leading the reader home.

For we do inhabit the same neighbourhood of literature, Borges, Calvino and I, without so very often knocking on one another’s doors (but I can see the similarities: the play with literature, the magical and the non-magical realism, the fondness for encyclopaedias, maps and psychogeography, for odd facts and history). We would surely have had quite a few animated debates at the local café. I therefore trust Lisa’s judgement here, even though I would most of all have preferred to move to another neighbourhood: Proust’s. Most of us strive to reach a place we are not already in, and that is true of me as well. My wish is to write with more passion than intellect, to extinguish thought and simply play it out, even if I do not often succeed. The kind of text I have visualised as an emotional room requires a degree of isolation I cannot quite afford at present.

That was a long introduction without coming any closer to the question, whether we who write invent or rediscover. It is of course both, but which should occupy the greater space? Let me put it like this: when I was on sick leave and could not listen to music with lyrics4, because it then contained too much information, I was nonetheless completely harmonious and calm within myself. In that moment I realised that I already had everything I needed to be happy. I required no external addition, rather the opposite: a silence that made possible another kind of hearing. Without claiming to know more than anyone else, Emerson, and based on that entirely life determining insight, I believe you are on to something with your question.

Igor, , São Paulo, Brazil:
”If you feel like writing, please comment on Brazil. Anything will do; it would be interesting to see what’s on your mind about my country.”

I have just met my neighbour in the street and spoken about your country. She had in fact just spent three months in South America, most of that time in Brazil, and I asked whether she might help me answer your question.

You may not know this, but we Swedes are in love with everything that is yours. I asked my son which country we view most positively and he answered as most people here would have done: Brazil. Why? It is not only about Pelé and the World Cup in Sweden in 1958, nor about the fact that we share blue and yellow in our flags, but about something larger, a self-image and a projection.

You are our opposite, or so we believe. When we feel cold and controlled we imagine you as warm and spontaneous. Here people are almost offended if addressed by a stranger, with you it is a social norm.

In any case my neighbour and I agreed that we would rather walk about in shorts and a T shirt than try to sustain a conversation on a Friday afternoon in many degrees below zero wrapped in several layers of clothing. Yet we sustained that conversation for twenty minutes, speaking about everything we are not, by doing precisely what we claim we do not do. Does that then mean we are not truly Swedish?

(This could lead to a longer line of thought about “people”, since “people” are never either you or the person standing in front of you, so who are they then?)

You asked for anything, Igor, and I believe that is exactly what you received here.

Thank you for reading.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

This dispatch went out to readers across more than eighty countries. If it resonated with you, consider sharing it with a friend who might feel the same, leaving a comment, or recommending it on your own Substack.

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Two more summaries:

✦✧ Looking for the archive? You can find every post here.

How do you interpret this? Surely you feel that you know me a little better now?

And yet there are those who claim that listening to people talk about their dreams is the most boring thing there is. This may apply to certain dream scenes in fiction, but the real ones can say a great deal about the person telling them. A shortcut into someone’s inner life, especially fascinating if that person otherwise does not talk much about it.

As you may know, I work at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm on contemporary collecting projects. Our museum focuses on everyday life, and my job is to gather stories from the present to preserve for the future.

Starting now, we are collecting people’s dreams and stories about sleep. We believe they say a great deal about our time. Just as Charlotte Beradt discovered when she collected dreams in the Third Reich, when people were afraid of being exposed (even while asleep!), or as Deirdre Barrett observed during the pandemic, when people dreamt unusually often about insects. Similar patterns of political imagery can be seen in a recent collection of Russian dreams during the invasion of Ukraine, with Putin suddenly beginning to appear.

Nevertheless, dreams today are often treated merely as a meaningless by-product of sleep, with some notable exceptions, such as the Brazilian neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro. As you know there have been periods when they were given far greater attention. Freud was particularly significant here, whose focus on the narratives of the night surely inspired the researchers who, between 1920 and 1963, collected dreams, life histories and psychological test results from around the world for a vast database, in the project Microcard Publications of Primary Records in Culture and Personality. Anthropologists lived among Indigenous communities solely in order to ask, each morning, what people had been occupied with during the night.

The collection is now practically inaccessible, as the material was stored on what are today virtually unreadable microcards, despite the fact that the researchers held remarkably forward-looking ideas about how humanity might one day handle vast quantities of data. If you are curious, you can read more about this online in Database of Dreams (there is also a new database, not connected to the microcard version, containing 44,556 searchable dreams).

The stories of the night not only differ between years and dates, but also between countries and cultures, something visualised by the map below, and also noted in the latest issue of The Substack Post. (The data here).

For almost a year now, my museum has been collecting days, through more than 5,000 diary entries. It will be exciting to complement them with the nights. Quite fittingly, we call this project Nordic Days and Nights, Nordiska dagar och nätter in Swedish. It could be the title of a collection of poems, and it is not far from what we want to achieve here: to go deep into emotions and lived reality, into what really matters.

If you found this interesting, here are three important links:

1. If you live in a Nordic country and would like to share stories about your dreams and your sleeping habits, here is the form (in Swedish).

2. Would you like to read more about the project? You can do so here (Swedish/English).

3. See a map of days and nights already collected (and published).

This issue also contains five shorter bagatelles, about alarm clock chimes with Pavlovian qualities, precise Japanese words, black-and-white memory displays, and quite a bit more.

Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt

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✦ Nemimi ✧

Nemimi in Japanese is a word for what is heard by the one who is asleep, to be distinguished from what is heard by the one who is awake. She had found it in a list of unique concepts in different languages, alongside the Portuguese toadeira, a harpooned whale that continues to howl, and the Turkish mihrap, a beautiful woman who is no longer young.

She used to turn towards his nemimi.

When he had wrapped himself tighter in the duvet in his sleep and she woke with her feet left uncovered, she would sometimes take the opportunity to speak. When awake, he only wanted to be together, only to cuddle, only to have someone to ruminate with. His waking ears were given to someone else, his day friends, but his sleeping hearing was hers.

With it she could talk about her childhood, so softly that the voice was almost only audible within herself. About how, at the age of six, she went alone to the sett to lure out the badger. With a greasy chicken wing between her fingers, the plan was to entice the animal all the way home to the cabin and lock it in the cellar. The badger had probably already gone into hibernation, and dusk transformed the forest, she could not find her way back, volunteers formed a search party and she ended up in the newspaper, but she never told the truth.

Until now.

Another time she had been offered painkillers by a friend at a party, but the pills turned out to be fentanyl. A joke that ended with her spending a week in hospital. Then she complained of gastritis and a splitting headache and perhaps depression even, but the doctors found nothing unhealthy and eventually she was discharged. She told his nemimi about this too, when she was truly certain that the ears were asleep.

The months passed and she found herself on several occasions waking with bare feet. She grew ever bolder in her confessions, describing how she sent a report of concern to social services about a colleague, or how she used to steal Nespresso capsules from the community hall, as a protest against the board. Not even when she set out her detailed murder plan against her enemy from upper secondary school did he show the slightest sign of life. He simply slept sweetly and stupidly through the nights.

In the mornings she nonetheless felt consistently better, as if cleansed by her nocturnal confessing, and could more easily play the happy wife and brew coffee and toast bread, and listen to his detailed accounts of his dreams. One time he had found a goldfish in the closed ecosystem, another time he had copied the telephone directory for a client. Good heavens, how exhausting, my dear, she had said to his waking ears, and even then he had not heard what she said, for by then he was already deeply absorbed in the morning paper.

✦ A Change of Air ✧

I dreamt that I stepped off an airport coach and was met by a wall of high summer heat. The air was hard to breathe, as if it lodged in my lungs and did not come back out. My hair sticky, the strands clumped together like dreads. Then I woke on a January night, in dense darkness. The newspaper delivery boy slammed the front door shut after completing his round. By then I would usually try to fall back asleep for a few hours, only to realise in the end that it would not work. I got up, wrapped the quilt around my body like a mummy, went into the kitchen and opened the freezer, closed my eyes and thought: Svalbard.

✦ Pavlovian Chirping ✧

After I changed the alarm clock chime on my phone, birdsong took on a Pavlovian effect on me. Especially the first few times it felt as though I had discovered a portal between worlds, the moment a flock of house sparrows started making a racket in a bush.

Just as when Pavlov rattled his bell, I travelled between states: from a sleepwalking life to wakefulness, except that wakefulness went in two directions and could just as easily hurl me to the Sillekrog petrol station outside Nyköping, where we stopped in various Aprils, halfway to the Allsvenskan season opener.

After a frosty, football-poor winter, we thawed out in order to make up for the conversations that had only taken place internally within us, and then after an hour or so with his right foot on the accelerator Conny needed a bit of sugar more than the car needed petrol, pulled over to buy sweets and a Coca-Cola, maybe a hot dog, but probably not, and I didn’t really need anything since I had just eaten to keep me going for a while, instead waited by the magazine rack and skimmed headlines about the week’s TV programmes, without really being interested, but it was the feeling, being sixteen or thirty-six, stretching my legs and standing by the magazine rack at Sillekrog on a sunny day in April where the gravel still sticks under the sole of your shoe and we were on our way somewhere, towards a city, a season, a match, a new campaign, a second chance. In every version of the memory, sun.

So back to the passenger seat, a few Ahlgrens bilar candy shaken out of the bag and landing in my palm, accelerating back onto the E4 motorway and letting my body be pressed back into the seat, yet never really noticing any traffic, because all the openers had to be sorted through, from the times when everything collapsed on the first day, to those when we could hope a little longer. As yet we know nothing about our immediate future.

All Aprils the same, the same shoaling hope, and in the cabin’s few cubic metres of universe the feeling that this is in fact always going on, that we do this every week without interruption, and that it will always be like this, regardless of players, divisions or generations, if not us then someone else. This journey towards the future, with its attendant stop at Sillekrog, always exists and is always bright, I think as I realise that the house sparrows are house sparrows and not an alarm clock, and I continue on my walk.

✦ Time Travel ✧

I am in a dream.

Someone says that I am 35 years old.

I panic, before I realise that I am only 25.

There is plenty of time.

Then I wake up and realise that I am 85.

✦ The Solution ✧

When the dream was sketched out on the screen, it turned out to be in black and white. I was a little surprised, as I thought I dreamed in colour, but the lecturer explained that it had to do with my age. Since I was born in the fifties, my childhood television experiences had been colourless, which had left their mark on my dreams, he maintained. The following night I tried to dream up turquoise and plum, but on printout these colours too proved to be different shades of grey. How was I to go about rejuvenating my dreams? I ordered psychedelic pills, subscribed to Cartoon Network, even started exercising, but without effect. Still only black and white. Drama even on the occasions when I found my inner show genuinely comic. I asked the lecturer whether he had any advice for me, and he suggested dementia. Even though that condition was persistent and worked its way from the present backwards, it would eventually crowd out my earliest television experiences and could thus be replaced by new ones in colour. It perhaps sounded a little too advanced, but I was the stubborn type.

Thank you for reading.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

This dispatch went out to 1,906 readers across 86 countries. If it resonated with you, consider sharing it with a friend who might feel the same, leaving a comment, or recommending it on your own Substack.

A warm thank you to the 20 sponsors of The Bagatelles. Your belief in my work keeps me going, and as a paid subscriber you have access to all long-form content, including the novel Zenopolis, all chapters of Naïveté Travels, and my work in progress: Bardo Noir.

Do you have any feedback, ideas, or questions you would like to ask? Click here.

This one includes yet another dream story:

✦✧ Looking for the archive? You can find every post here.

Which is how he ended up whispering the Japanese, subtitled in Spanish, into my ear in English. To me, the Swede. The film itself, Rental Family, earned a modest 2+ from me and I have not thought about it once since, but the intimacy of the translation was hard to forget. It felt like being entrusted with a service, administered little by little, over the course of two hours. Whisper by whisper.

The moment brought back a memory of the time I stayed over at my friend C’s place and ended up sleeping in his daughter’s bed (she being at her mother’s). We were slightly tipsy, and I asked whether, in the child’s place, I might be allowed a bedtime story. The question was meant jokingly, and he replied in the same spirit, sitting down beside me in the dark and beginning to tell one. I listened with playful attentiveness to stories of deep forests, restless legs and drawn swords, when, between two moments, I was transported away from the room, the bunk bed and the hard slatted base. The storyteller changed too at that very instant, shifting from body to voice, a voice that replaced my own.

I was there, he was there. Everything was real, beyond jokes and intoxication.

Intimacy does not have to involve eroticism. As these moments suggest, it can arise in the most varied situations, between men and men, friends and strangers. One simply has to notice when one is part of something quite special. This dispatch contains three bagatelles on this theme. A perfumer gives herself away, a stranger overhears a love relationship that is doomed to fail, and an accountant opens up.

Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt

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✦ Pluto and Mercury ✧

It is a day in May when half of the flâneurs are wearing scarves and the other half have rolled up their shirt sleeves. Some of those hungry for summer have gathered on the long bench in the park, where I will become one of them, and she another.

The she in this story is not someone I know, but we are soon to spend an hour together, she with hers, I with hers. At first she thinks it would be better to sit on the shaded side, to create a buffer zone, since she is not alone but has brought along two lively and boisterous boys, but then she decides that the best place is probably a metre or so beside the man reading Marcel Proust’s The Guermantes Way with a pencil in hand, the same person who will write this text in an attempt to understand himself and everyone else.

She has something of a village schoolteacher about her, speaks with a Mediterranean accent, wears a sunhat and sometimes loses her words when she addresses the children. Her manner is nervous, of the kind I am often drawn to and paralysed by, since it forces me into real-time calibration. The children, by contrast, move with complete assurance, running freely past us as we sun ourselves. I have to turn up the volume in my headphones several times just to take in a few lines of the book.

Then he arrives, the man they have apparently been waiting for. It turns out he is the father of one of the boys and the Mediterranean woman’s new boyfriend. Unfortunately my first thought when I see him is not a kind one, namely: can divorced middle-aged women really imagine just anyone, simply to avoid feeling like a divorced woman? Not that the man now sitting close to me is ugly or untalented. He just comes from another planet, and this time it is not merely Mars and Venus but rather Pluto and Mercury.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have waited with the picnic,” he says without meaning it, and this is what I soon understand to be characteristic of his language: an undertone invisible to him in everything he says, but visible to everyone else. He has no village schoolteacher aura, rather that of someone who spends his days in an office, leases his car and can easily slip into casual racism in the sauna. I am being unkind again, sorry, because he does not deserve it, but I want to mark a dissonance, the one everyone notices except the unfortunate couple in love. A sort of non-existent inward attentiveness in both of them, which leads them towards feelings and impulses that hit every target except the one that matters. The elephant-in-the-room-sized one.

When there is no longer any point even in pretending, to myself, to read the book, I start making notes in the margin instead, because what is happening around me has clear Proustian qualities. He begins to speak, with that tone again, which seems designed solely to impress an audience rather than to address his son, to whom he says: “Now I want you to finish your yoghurt.” He tries to sound gentle, but also firm, letting the emphasis dance on every syllable. A manner he adopts to signal that he is both masculine and a present parent, but beneath it lies that invisible pressure of: why do I have to put up with this? A question he probably does not hear himself and is therefore unaware of.

It is complex, being a man, he surely thinks. In that he is of course right, just as it is evidently difficult to be a divorced woman in search of a decent bloke who has read some book other than Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s. The Pluto man now jokes with the children. He tries to adjust to their simpler vocabulary and references and talks first about high fives and then about the Jackson 5. The latter goes over their heads, but the jokes were never meant for them. The boys finish eating quickly and start running again. It becomes possible for me to continue reading, but then suddenly the mother begins to cry, dramatically and unmistakably extrovert, as if she wants one of us others to intervene, but we of course pretend to be deaf, since we are Swedes.

The Pluto man now knows that he needs to show emotion, but he also understands that he has to handle it neatly because there is an audience. “Think about your breathing,” he says, since he is apparently more focused on effect than cause. “That’s not how one should think,” he says, thereby explaining that in his view she is feeling the wrong way. When that does not help either, he comes out with: “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.” The sort of thing people say when they really have no intention of doing anything for the grieving person, but have not entirely ruled it out, since that would mean they were bad people.

None of this seems to reach her. She does not even understand how the crying began, offers explanations such as being stressed by the boys’ dynamic. That they show no gratitude. That she builds up a baseline stress. That she cannot find her role. That the joint trip to Öland was probably a bad idea. He says: “There, there, love.” But what she actually feels, and cannot reach, is this: everything just feels completely wrong all the time and I do not know why. It feels as though I am constantly being forced into a framework alien to my inner nature. As if I can never be seen and appreciated for who I am. As if I always end up being the hysterical one when all the disparate feelings spill over me. And what it really means is this: we do not fit together in any way. My body, my soul, my psyche are asking me to get out, but I cannot understand it.

Instead she says: “I’m hopeless and messy and you make everyone laugh.” He says: “Don’t build a narrative.” She continues, of course, to cry, because nothing is resolved, and he sits beside her helpless, as if he only has a hammer when all that is needed is a Phillips screwdriver.

The boys run lap after lap with a new, wild frenzy. Now it would be impossible even to read the back of a milk carton.

He understands that he should leave, that exit is the only solution. When he has picked up his son, he asks: “How much should I pay for the picnic?” The mother pulls herself together and says: “Two hundred and seventy-three kronor.” The moment he leaves the bench, a calm arises of the kind that comes when a photocopier stops working in an open-plan office. All that remains are our thoughts.

Here there is time to think that it is nevertheless logical that a man with such a different nature should also have a child with the same temperament and rhythm of life. That it simply is what it is. That energies either match or they do not, and so many still try to combine their hammers with screws.

Now the mother is finally still, in both soul and body. Her son too. They hug tightly, symbiotically, speak calmly in their first language. A few more tears fall. Perhaps from relief, perhaps from resignation. She probably still does not understand what is wrong. And perhaps that is how it is, that we always see everyone except ourselves, thinks the man sitting beside them, before he walks home alone.

✦ Encapsulated Memory ✧

After reading a newspaper article about how Neanderthal DNA had been extracted by processing a fossilised finger, I once again began to occupy myself with the idea of travelling through time.

To some extent I was already engaged in this pursuit; a what-if loop had been running through my mind for many turns. A few times I had played along and built futures based on shifting decisions: how I said no instead of yes, yes instead of no, stayed instead of leaving.

It was all merely futile daydreaming, I knew that well enough, but at least of an advanced kind. I did not settle for replaying the choices themselves; I painted entire future scenarios from them, years and decades of decisions branching out from the new node.

These were fantasies, however, not time travel. Still, I could not shake the thought of being allowed to start again. As I strolled past the perfumery in Gamla stan and saw their tourist-facing sign about encapsulating memories, I took them at their word, stepped inside the shop and told them about my destination:

I want to go to the day before, when I vacuumed soil and clay pebbles on the balcony. A mild surrealism over the moment. The wind brushed my face. The air was clear and cold. The feeling that everything was still there.

There was something refined about her, my scent creator, as if through all her senses she had progressed to finding yet another one, unreachable to the rest of us. She took my request seriously, because this was precisely how the industry always worked, starting from a feeling that needed to be circled in. Whether it was spring sunlight, Ariana Grande or sin.

You need to give me a little more, she said, in an unexpectedly light and velvety voice that made me think of mango. I do not know why I made that association; it must have come from the mood of the situation itself.

I told her:

The olive tree had just put out new buds after a winter indoors. The geranium was past flowering. The clockvine had nearly wandered up towards the balcony above. The sun lay at an angle between the courtyard buildings and created a slit of light over me, so I had to squint. My palate was marked by Ethiopian coffee with an aftertaste of strawberry Cornetto. My thoughts were marinated overnight by a dream in which I was hyperpolyglot and all languages were therefore comprehensible, but only during the night.

She took no notes, which made me anxious, much as when a waiter memorises an excessively long order. To prove something, but to whom?

I went on talking:

So this was the day before I said no. But perhaps that is beside the point.

Not at all, she said, because you did not know that then. If you want to cause a correct temporal displacement you need to be completely truthful to the actual event. How full was the vacuum cleaner bag, by the way? I assume it was an Electrolux?

I had really wandered into the shop almost as a joke, but now a seriousness settled over the situation and I began to feel a hope growing in my chest. I gave her further instructions.

At last she was satisfied enough to proceed, so she led me a few metres behind the counter into the lab. Before my eyes a process began with bowls and tubes, as she threw out various names of fragrance materials pulled from refrigerators: cis-3-hexenol, myrcene, lavender EO, and a little sabine since the balcony mat was plastic.

More questions followed as the potion was being assembled: from which direction had the wind come? Had I watered the plants recently? Were there any cigarette butts nearby?

The glass rod spun in the tube. She sniffed a little and muttered to herself:

All the notes have to land exactly. But a little more lactonic, yes, wouldn’t you say. Yes, wouldn’t you.

A brief artistic pause before she said, with restrained triumph:

And there we have our accord.

The liquids in the tube tumbled together into a single entity. She let it all run down into a glass cube, screwed on the lid, affixed a label on which she wrote 4 June-15, then sprayed the scent over her neck with a precise press, moved her hair aside, closed her eyes and whispered to me:

Bon voyage.

✦ The Accounts ✧

We are old friends now, I realise as I sit down across from him at the café. We’ve met regularly for seven years, yet only seen each other seven times, every spring in connection with the tax return, when he goes through the accounts and helps me with deductions. It’s more of a sideline these days, since with each declaration we discover something new to brush into view about one another, and he says, have you considered that even kindness can be a form of performance?

In fact, he works with addicts, alcoholics, drug users, people on the edge of the absolute edge, and his support can sometimes provide just enough balance to tip them into safety. Only one person has ever thanked him for that extra weight, so the affirmation he hoped for came sparingly. Being good is watertight, he says, but still the same as everything else. He needs somewhere to rest his heart after the working day, runs an accountancy firm, goes through my purchases and invoices from the previous calendar year and thinks I’m bordering on too meticulous, and he says, I get a little better with women each time I try.

Two tax returns ago I had separated from the mother of my children. Last year, it was his turn. This year, we’ve both started meditating, have calibrated inwards, added a few more decimals, been on retreat. I’ve burned out and found a method of focusing on the left side of the body that short-circuits the brain, and he says: It’s around your age people start running out of strength, and then they can choose to change or to keep going, and not many who keep going make it to my age.

Once he worked nights at the church, but the priests were neurotic and the council spiritually impoverished, Christ’s message remote. I show him my text about the church caretaker who discovers hidden, possibly inner, rooms, and he tells me about his new novel or non-fiction book about notorious winners, who follow systems to the point of absurdity, who know they’ll lose thousands every week for a year, right up until they win. I say, happiness isn’t something you become, it’s something you are.

The declaration is dealt with in under a minute, because I’ve already submitted it and filled everything in correctly, since I know how to do this now and we both know that.

These aren’t difficult matters, but they are a reason.

Thank you for reading.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

This dispatch went out to 1,642 readers across 83 countries. If it resonated with you, consider sharing it with a friend who might feel the same, leaving a comment, or recommending it on your own Substack.

A warm thank you to the 21 sponsors of The Bagatelles. Your belief in my work keeps me going, and as a paid subscriber you have access to all long-form content, including the novel Zenopolis, all chapters of Naïveté Travels, and my work in progress: Bardo Noir.

Maybe you would appreciate this:

✦✧ Looking for the archive? You can find every post here.

The thing is that the young Karl Ove himself was hardly without hubris. In The School of Night he describes a rather ruthless, almost sociopathic young photographer who wants nothing but to get ahead and succeed, and when reporters have tried to understand how he managed to portray him so convincingly, Karl Ove has said that the photographer bore certain similarities to himself when he was young.

To extend this legend line of thought, which is of course easy to laugh at, but which still leads my mind back to a time when I too was a young would-be writer with big dreams who happened to collide with reality. In my case his name was José Saramago and the book was called Blindness. It was the first proper novel I ever read, and I understood immediately that it was something entirely different from everything I had experienced. It had momentum, it had a story, and it had a language beyond comprehension. The narrative hit me in the back seat during a family summer holiday. I have crystal-clear memories of how the blindness suddenly spreads through society in the novel. How someone sits behind the wheel at a red light and notices how a white film, like milk, slides across their field of vision. Milk. Everything is milk.

But José Saramago’s fantastical story was not only a great reading experience, it also made me understand what was achievable and possible. I realised at once that I was not a legend and never would be one. The bar was set too high. It was an unbearable insight, and at the same time it gave me hope for humanity. There was so much more beyond teenage bedrooms and back seats. There were others.

Nevertheless, José also gave me my first serious case of writer’s block, as I began comparing every paltry thing I produced with the work of a Nobel laureate. And who was I in that context? Apparently just anyone. Over the years I have learned to embrace that experience instead. Not such a bad outcome either.

All of this came back to me the other week when I visited the excellent Saramago Museum in Lisbon, where all his books hung along the walls, together with the medal he received from the King of Sweden. He more than deserves it, legend that he is.

This issue of The Bagatelles contains three stories about the writer behind the act of writing. We make our way to a supper where everyone revolves around the victim of the author’s storytelling, we encounter a graphomaniac who may never have existed, and finally a completely true story about how readers and writers can also meet.

& three links:
1. I’ve launched a new website, now in English.
2. I’ve also launched another site, created after said he wanted to read one of my “notes to myself” every day.
3. And please tell me more about yourself using this form (and get a gift in return).

Welcome away ꩜

Jörgen Löwenfeldt
Seville (more about why here)

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✦ The Calculated Suppers ✧

Picasso claimed that true creativity is caused by mistakes, in order to mislead the conscious mind. Cocteau, for his part, claimed that a poet does not innovate, but listens. And perhaps that was how my friend came up with the idea of the calculated suppers.

Or rather, we were more acquaintances than friends. Even though we saw each other daily, I do not think either of us would ever have asked the other for advice, let alone for help. We mostly drifted lightly on the surface of everyone else’s lives, and thus among other things at the calculated suppers he hosted in the vast flat on Folkungagatan, just above the clamorous traffic.

On the occasion I am about to describe, the din had fallen silent thanks to a traffic diversion. People strolled down the middle of the street, as if under a state of emergency. A powerful calm that compelled one to listen inwardly.

He rang me just before eleven at night, when I was already in bed about to sleep, and I hesitated, but then he told me who was there, so I ordered an Uber and arrived half an hour later.

In the salon were the usual suspects: the host, the composer, the tramway equilibrist, the neighbour with the chamber pot, the host’s girlfriend of the moment, the Latinist, and then the evening’s true guest, for whom the rest of us served as a backdrop: the pearl. A twenty-year-old boy, recently noticed in the press for his enormous sculptures in polystyrene.

Are you really allowed to be out this late? I joked, and was quickly shushed. Apparently they had already made quite a racket and been reprimanded by the neighbour upstairs, who normally indulged us, but who was now at death’s door. She was an ambassador’s widow, and beyond the fact that she was advanced in years, we knew very little about her.

So we had to speak as if in church, subdued and reverent, one at a time. I did my bit with my best anecdote, which the whole crowd had heard many times before, about how on a trip to Poland I had run into Prince Bertil at a urinal in a roadside inn outside Katowice, and had managed to utter nothing but a sudden witam, whereupon he had said, to me, the imagined Pole: You were a particularly ugly one.

Little did the boy suspect that it was all just a piece of theatre designed to ensnare him and press stories out of him for the host’s next creation. Expensive wines from Bordeaux were served, but only on these occasions, otherwise only Rioja, since the bottles were to be regarded as an investment, tax deductible according to the host. The Tax Agency had probably not scrutinised the receipts yet, I thought.

The boy carried himself as if he belonged on the periphery of the party, positioning himself in different corners and speaking only when spoken to, and then only in single lines such as: Yes, it feels fun, or rather No, don’t know. In hindsight I feel a certain guilt for having chosen to take part in these plays, but I suppose I was ensnared like everyone else.

Like the boy, I had happened to bump into the host at The Opera Bar, who quickly hooked me with his psychopathic charm and then I was part of the ensemble. Besides, he paid, and I was weak for what was free, along with this hint that I belonged to something elevated, that I had come somewhere after all.

But of course these suppers often left a bitter aftertaste, when I got home around five in the morning and thought of the victim. Not that I was any innocent myself, and we all have to grow up in the end, I thought in my defence, but what kind of defence was that, really?

The host delivered long speeches about something flashy, and the girlfriend of the moment stroked his arm tenderly and dutifully inserted a few amusing phrases the host had said to the consul in Venice. All of it was certainly rehearsed.

The boy grew ever more at ease and began to talk, more and more freely. More than anything, the host wanted to understand how young people amused themselves these days, preferably with juicy details, where the most shameful and perverse provoked the greatest delight.

There the boy had little to announce, unfortunately. He seemed to belong to the solitary kind, but even solitude could contain material, thought the host, who continued his fawning interrogation in search of ancestral sins and family secrets.

Around three o’clock he got a bite. There was something incestuous about the boy’s parents, and moreover the boy had at one point in childhood collected hedgehogs, which he kept in shoeboxes, only to later find the animals dissolved by maggots. A consolation prize nonetheless, thought the host, who needed to keep his unusually illusory authorship going (now forgotten, and rightly so). If the boy continued in this way, he would surely be voted into the ensemble and help to find new victims.

Half an hour later, as usual, the pearl’s sexual orientation and its deviations were discussed. The host had begun to paw, and then the trio went to the bedroom, and I tried not to think too carefully about what was going on in there. Perhaps they were playing backgammon, or perhaps not. I actively tried not to register the sounds produced on the other side of the wall.

Then there was a knock at the front door, a liberating sound in the uncomfortable atmosphere. The rest of us were just sitting there with pumped-up champagne music and were about to pretend once again that nothing was happening. I went to open it, and there stood the dying lady from the floor above, who looked as if she had just been resurrected.

May I come in? she asked.

I hesitated, and then she said:

It was only a polite question, my friend, I own the building.

So I let her pass. She swayed forward with upper-class assurance, went over to the drinks table in the smoking room and poured herself a bowl of cognac, which she downed. Then she said, as she prepared the next drink:

Yes, now she’s gone.

Who? I asked stupidly.

✦ Merkel ✧

As far as I could tell, there was no evidence that Merkel had ever existed. There were plenty of observations and anecdotes about his generous way of life and his appetite for women, but no actual proof. In the court’s view, he had never been, and therefore no search was undertaken for his disappearance. As without trace as he had lived, so he passed on.

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Every seasoned people-pleaser knows how difficult it is to disappoint good people. So I let them in. They meant well, of course. The problem was that I wanted neither help nor spontaneous meals. I wanted solitude, but I had not yet learned how to defend it. Moreover, I did not know how to listen inward, perhaps because I could not yet hear anything there at all.

Eventually the strain announced itself in the body. A dull ache. A racing heart. A nervous system pushed beyond its limits. Faced with this, I at last did the only sensible thing.

That is, I constructed a story. I am a writer, after all1.

Speaking of being a writer. It can sometimes feel one-dimensional. That is not why I choose to share things online. With that said, do you want to ask me a question, or tell me something about yourself? Use this form. (You get a gift in return).

Welcome away ꩜

Jörgen Löwenfeldt

Give yourself a year with The Bagatelles

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✦ The Yes Man and the Invader ✧

Already as I receive the email, I get a sense that something is off. The signature is set in an italic, hard-to-read typeface, and the sender uses a language I find overly personal, given that we do not really have a relationship.

It concerns a press screening of a new film at Zita, and I am invited in my capacity as a reviewer, since I used to do that kind of work, before everything that was not meant to happen did happen. The film is described as a progressive story that challenges gender roles. It has been made by a group of friends from Skåne, and all of them will be present for interviews, if I am interested in deepening my involvement after watching the ninety-five minutes the story is to occupy of the Wednesday afternoon in two weeks’ time.

A few days later the sender sends another email, in an anxious tone, simply to check “where things stand”. A few days after that, yet another arrives. The sender wants to be sure I am coming, and I reply that I will “probably go”, but I do not want to promise anything. More emails follow, in which the sender asks me for advice ahead of the upcoming PR work, and I help as best I can, offering tips on what professional mail-outs usually look like.

When Wednesday arrives, I decide to go to the cinema, since I now feel that I owe the sender something. He is so insistent and so afflicted, and I would prefer to alleviate suffering where I can. Watching a film does not really count among the greater sacrifices a human being can make; it is an easy thing to agree to.

Then another thought strikes me. On the metro towards Zita I try to imagine which other reviewers will be accompanying me at the screening. In my mind I go through name after name and conclude that none of them would even consider watching a film like this: a narrow amateur production intended for the closest circle and perhaps even the closest circle of that circle. The thought hits me with full force, and brings with it a terror that shoots through every joint. It is just me. As usual, it is only me who does not understand the rules of the game. I am the one who arrives at eight for a party when everyone else drifts in at ten. It is only me.

All right, all right, I am exaggerating, I try to calm myself and perform a few breathing exercises: inhale for four seconds, hold for seven, then exhale forcefully for eight. I magnify threats in order not to be unpleasantly surprised, probably this time as well. I laugh quietly to myself in the seat, yes, typical of me to paint such threatening scenarios, especially now after the sick leave, when I have barely met another human being for several months. Just brain ghosts, poorly anchored in reality.

In purely aesthetic terms there are of course cinemas with worse decoration, but for the connoisseur Zita offers a reliable guarantee of good taste. Whatever film is shown there is to be regarded as a better one, this one included, I think, as I catch sight of the torches outside the entrance. Inside, by the counter, I look around for other faces when I suddenly hear my name called out as a question.

“Gabriel?”

“Yes, hello?” I reply, turning towards the man stepping forward with a broad smile.

“Håkan,” he says, holding out his fist. “We’re the ones who emailed. I’m so glad you could come.”

“Oh. Hello.”

“Or do people say Gabbe?”

“Gabriel is fine.”

“I really like Gabbe. It sort of sits well on the lips. A mate from my military service was called that, just Gabbe.”

“Where is everyone else? Are they over there?” I ask, rising slightly onto my toes.

A bit further away, by the restaurant area, I notice several groups that look at home. When I turn my gaze in that direction they begin to look back at me. Someone even points. Faces turn. I hear a murmur, and perhaps the contours of my first and last name within it.

“No, that lot are the actors, the directors, the producer with their families. It turned out to be a bit hectic. Too many people.”

“There will be more, surely?”

“Well, a few cancelled, but it’s really no problem. We’re so happy you could come. I’m so excited to hear what you think of the film. It’s great that you’re here. And that we finally get to put a face to each other after all the emailing back and forth.”

He repeats:

“I’m so excited to hear what you think.”

“No one else is coming?”

“You’re here. That’s huge for us, you know. If you like, you can choose a seat in the auditorium and we’ll start the film when you feel ready. Do you drink alcohol?”

“Not very often, now and then.”

“It is a premiere, you know,” he says, winking slyly with one eye.

Just as I am about to enter the auditorium, he says:

“There’s a dinner afterwards. Officially just for the ensemble and their families, but we can squeeze in one more. No problem. You can think about it. Or actually, don’t. You should focus on the film. I think you’ll like it, it’s bloody, how shall I put it, challenging. Scratchy. No, raspy.”

The auditorium is mine. The lighting hums reassuringly. I slip into the back row, as I almost always do, sit in the middle and wait, flicking at my phone screen to pass the time, then looking up again as the lights dim and finally disappear altogether. The curtain is drawn aside and the screen appears, black. Everything is silent. A new calm arises. I repeat to myself: let me appreciate the film. I had not really taken any particular interest in its content, seeing the press screening mostly as a way to get out a little, to slowly approach the world again, with the profession as a glove. Now it is presented to me in the form of a man from Skåne wearing shorts and nothing else. He stares straight into the camera, completely still. It takes a full minute before he speaks. He says one word: Now. Thirty seconds later he says it again. Now. I reflexively glance at my phone and suddenly register a loud commotion, turning around. A new person enters the auditorium and I hear Håkan whispering instructions:

“Sit there next to Gabbe, but don’t disturb him, he’s a reviewer.”

The newcomer barrels along the row and drops into the seat beside me, so close that I become acquainted with his breath. I know who he is, and that is why I am surprised. My new neighbour is called Dino and was a famous rapper in the nineties, nowadays known for various odd advertising jobs and appearances on television game shows. He watches the silent man from Skåne on the screen for a moment and then says to me:

“What the hell is this? I floored it up from Gothenburg to make it in time. For this?”

He is dressed in a zigzag-patterned suit, with a rose on his chest, white trainers, and a cap.

“For fuck’s sake,” he says. “They said it was a gala premiere.”

“Now,” says the man from Skåne.

A few minutes later the door to the auditorium opens again and I flinch in surprise. Håkan slips in towards us with two glasses of bubbling liquid, hands them to us and then, smiling, mouths silently: I won’t disturb you. He tiptoes away demonstratively, to show his reverence for the artwork we have been set to witness.

“Cheers,” says Dino.

“Yes, cheers,” I say, sipping cautiously.

It tastes unexpectedly good, too good, certainly champagne. I feel guilt as I drink it.

The film continues on the screen, a plot beginning to take shape. The story revolves around a male group of friends who gather for what seems to be an annual ritual in a summer cottage on Österlen. They are to spend a weekend discussing topics chosen for them by their wives, who do not participate. The contents of five sealed envelopes, the film’s title is unsurprisingly The Five Envelopes, are meant to fill the weekend hours with conversation, while numerous canisters of red wine are emptied, day turns into evening, and exhilaration gives way to hostility. The question Do you regret anything? triggers a severe jealousy drama, complete with a scuffle. The scene might have been dramatic if it were not so clumsily filmed. The supposed fight looks more like two drunks hugging.

Dino nudges me.

“Wave,” he says.

Directly in my line of sight he places his mobile phone. He is recording something for his social media, I realise, panning across the entire auditorium before beginning to type what I assume is an explanatory caption. I wave as instructed. Later I will look up the ten-second clip, feel scruffy and unattractive, and think that I should have asked him not to publish it, since I am uncomfortable seeing myself even in my parents’ photo albums, let alone in public contexts. But by then it feels too late. It would be a bit too blunt to force him to take it down.

The film carries on before our eyes. Or mine, rather, since after fifteen minutes Dino increasingly lets his phone screen entertain him. I keep watching out of duty. The men from Skåne continue to chew over life questions, and towards the end they are surprised by their wives, whose presence unsurprisingly changes the dynamic in the summer cottage. I recognise a few of them from the foyer, where they glanced at me. The final scene closes a circle. The married couples sit together and eat a meal in silence, while the camera slowly zooms in and stops on a grandfather clock, now heard ticking loudly. Everything goes black. Now, says the voice, and then the credits roll.

It is not a good film. Nor is it a bad film. It is more questionable whether it is even a film. The actors are amateurs. The script seems improvised. The dramatic curve is flat, with small hopeful jolts here and there, like speed bumps. The question is not what rating I should give the film, but whether it would be fair to write a review at all.

“What a turkey, eh?” says Dino.

“Well.”

“It needed more action.”

“I don’t know about that.”

The curtain falls back into place. The auditorium lights up. Anxiety begins to stir through every joint as I think of who is waiting for me out there. I need to be able to say something positive, just something, something I can grab and repeat, but that would feel like betraying my innermost nature. The idea of the envelopes could, in fairness, have been developed into something more urgent, but it did not last beyond the idea itself. The dialogue could be described as pubescent, but it lacks the teenager’s nerve and irrationality, and therefore becomes like being forced to eavesdrop on a few lingering older relatives’ rambling whisky talk towards the small hours. Technically the production is, at best, reality-television level, though without realism. None of this can I say.

I stand up with a jolt. My vision flickers as I leave the auditorium. My feet feel numb; I can hardly connect with them. When I step outside, they are all waiting there. I recognise them now. They are the people I have just spent the afternoon with. Their faces brighten expectantly, and most of all Håkan’s, his cheeks seeming to have swollen with excitement. He says, giddy:

“Gabbe, you have to meet our director now.”

He grabs an arm belonging to another man, who looks much like him. They throw each other a playful glance, as if bantering in mid-air.

“Have you ever seen a film with a similar theme?” the director asks, throwing up his hand and letting it tremble like a cymbal.

I think that I have seen at least seven films with a similar theme, all of them more memorable than this one.

“Tell me more about what you had in mind,” I say.

The eyes of both Håkan and the director begin to glow.

“We were fed up with the patriarchy. All those rigid ideas about how men ought to behave,” says the director.

“Yes, exactly,” says Håkan. “Why shouldn’t a man be able to talk about raising children? It doesn’t mean he can’t tile a bathroom.”

“No, of course,” I say.

At the same time I hear that Dino has ended up beside a few of the wives and he says loudly:

“It needed more action!”

Everyone chuckles a little at his pushiness, and perhaps also at the frankness; it is hard to tell. He keeps holding court, and the next time his voice rises, he says:

“Have you got any more fizz somewhere?”

Håkan has heard it too and turns back to me, smiling and shaking his head in a manufactured sense of camaraderie.

“Well, good thing you’re the reviewer,” he says.

The director adds:

“I’ve read quite a lot of your texts, actually. I mean, when I found out you were coming. I had a google. You can be really harsh sometimes, I’ve noticed.”

“He means you’ve got good taste,” says Håkan. “That’s why we wanted you here, because we trust your judgement.”

“Oh, right. Well, thank you.”

They both fall silent for a moment, and I can hear the question hanging in the air before Håkan voices it:

“So. What did you think?”

All around us the conversations have stalled. We are standing unpleasantly close. It is as if everyone is fighting to occupy the same square metre of the foyer. Wherever I turn, I meet an expectant face, without a trace of suppressed dread. The naivety is paralysing. The verdict I deliver could extinguish dreams, kill the evening and the fellowship. Everyone is convinced that the fantasy world is sound. I can see how they have supported one another and, during the production, never invited an alternative view of the world in. There are psychological terms for the phenomenon.

“So what do I think,” I begin to mumble.

“Surely it was something quite special. A modernised Ingmar Bergman,” claims a woman with corkscrew curls.

“Let’s not interrupt Gabbe,” says Håkan.

I close my eyes, and then I hear myself say:

“Yes, it was something special. It was.”

Perhaps I remember the sequence of events a little hazily, but I imagine that my words cause euphoria: applause and bright cries of joy. As if the music has suddenly been turned up and we are in a nightclub with pulsating lights.

“A masterpiece, I told you,” says Håkan. “Good thing I pushed you a bit, so you got to see the film; you weren’t so sure at first.”

“Bloody hell, that’s beautiful,” says the director. “We’ve worked like animals for this. I’m so happy.”

“Glad to hear it,” I say. “Truly.”

“By the way, Gabbe, where will the review be published?” Håkan asks.

“I’m freelance.”

The director cuts in:

“You usually write for Svenska Dagbladet. So maybe there?”

“Yes. Maybe there.”

Håkan snatches a bottle from the bar counter.

“More champagne?”

“Yes, yes, thanks, gladly,” I say, holding out my glass.

The group has booked a neighbouring restaurant for dinner. Tasteful little labels by the entrance suggest that the place has earned both gold dragons and a Michelin star, but is aiming for another, the sommelier tells me, and there is good reason to hope for the next round, since they managed to identify the taster and it went “brilliantly” that evening. The menu has been tailored for us, adjusted to the season’s ingredients, and with the help of our sommelier the drinks are balanced just right, so we do not have to “browse aimlessly” through the wine list. I can hardly remember how I ended up here, suddenly as if at a family party, included as an in-law, among people who have barely lived a life without one another. In front of me on the plate: toasted brioche with chicken liver cream, braised onion and apple.

“Bon appétit then,” says Håkan, giving me a little nudge in the side.

“It looks good.”

“I sincerely hope it is,” he says, laughing.

The director leans forward across the table:

“I was thinking, do you need help with details? We’ve worked so hard on this film. Since that weekend in Skanör; it was Holger who came up with it, when we were swimming. We can make a film about us. We’ve always talked about wanting to make a film, but then the years went by. So you could say the film is about that; the time that has blown through us. Write that. It’s a good quote.”

I am interrupted by Håkan asking:

“Red or white?”

“Red, I think,” I say.

“Both then,” says Håkan with a grin, turning to the sommelier:

“One of each for our guest. He’s a reviewer; you might know who he is. Bloody talented.”

The director asks:

“Do you have any personal experience of Österlen?”

A silence rises that I register as threatening. Alcohol begins to seep out into the cells. I hear myself say:

“I thought the beach setting in the film brought The Sacrifice to mind. A bit Gotland-ish.”

“Like what?” asks Håkan.

“That’s Tarkovsky, isn’t it? Now I’m getting a bit pleased with myself,” says the director.

“Don’t feed him praise; it’ll go straight to his head,” says Håkan, roaring with laughter.
I pan my gaze over the table:

“Where’s Dino?”

“He had to go. I don’t think he was quite comfortable,” says Håkan.

“Oh.”

“It wasn’t quite what he thought it was, I gather. There was some mix-up in communication. He didn’t want to impose, or whatever he said.”

“You don’t want to impose.”

“You’re not imposing, Gabbe.”

“No, how lucky you feel that way.”

“Not at all, Gabbe,” says the director.

Next on the table in front of me: Swedish lobster with dill in an oyster sauce, kohlrabi braised in cheese whey and fir, and pickled shallot, with a glass of Improvisacio Cal Raspallet Penedès. Uncomfortably exquisite, of course. I eat slowly, as if not to attract attention, but now I am at someone else’s family celebration, so it is not easy.

Soon the dinner shifts into a new phase, where every other guest feels moved to make a speech. Most contain various comic anecdotes from the shoot, someone ringing the wrong plumber, Björn Karlsson, and I do not listen very closely, until a heavily overweight neurotic man, who has clearly played himself in the film, makes me central to his address. He speaks for over half an hour about his wife’s cancer treatment and how the couple took such comfort in having “something else” to fix their eyes on during that difficult time. Bald, she proofread the script from her hospital bed, we are told. And only a couple of months ago, when they thought they had cleared the last hurdle, she died.

“But we did it together. We did, for fuck’s sake. We came, we saw, we conquered.”

Then he turns to me. Tears run in broad channels down his cheeks. He says:

“Thank you, our outside eye, for making us feel seen. For seeing us. A thousand thanks, dear friend. I hold you in high regard, you should know that.”

“Oh,” I say, paralysed, and nod.

Håkan nudges me lightly and asks:

“Do you want some seaweed bread with crab spread?”

“No, thanks,” I say, bringing a hand to my stomach; I am starting to feel full.

“But still thirsty, right?”

I don’t remember how I get home. I think it’s by taxi but I’m not sure. The flat feels alien and cold, the air like visiting a summer cottage in winter. As I get ready for sleep, flash memories from the evening strobe at me like a dadaist art film. Everything is chopped up and deliberately out of order. There are scenes like my animal dance to house music. Me, who never dances. The place I was led on to looked like Harry Haller’s Magic Theatre. Among plush, skin and intoxicants, I lost control of my limbs and mind, deliriously.

I try to find my toothbrush but can’t remember where I usually put it, while new scenes pulse arrhythmically: turquoise drinks, a Russian-speaking woman introducing herself as Zelda Fitzgerald, my childhood friend’s father walking along Malmskillnadsgatan in a suit with a leather briefcase, suddenly a finger pointed at the sky and a voice saying that a giant ray is undulating between the clouds, but I can’t see it. When I lie down in bed I lose a few hundred grams and vanish.

After a few seconds or several hours, I am woken by the phone hissing on the bedside table. A number I don’t have saved; I answer. My brain trembles, post-traumatically, and I may have developed tinnitus.

“Gabbe, Gabbe! Hi! It’s Håkan, something’s happened.”

He wasn’t a dream, I think, just in time.

“What?” I mumble.

“I’m standing in the hotel lobby and they’re saying I booked the wrong date. That’s how bloody incompetent one is. I booked the room for tomorrow and not today, which is unfortunate for me because it is today today.”

He laughs easily and continues:

“And now there are no rooms left, so I’m wondering.”

“What?”

“How’s your sofa?”

I have always wished for a surprising life. But to be surprised, you first need to expect something markedly different. My fixed vision fell within the bounds of normality, because people like me often end up where we end up. We are the ones herded last into the pen, because we struggle to decide on anything and then someone else will do it for us. Not choosing is also a choice. Here, a fate might solve life on my behalf, lead me onwards into an enchanted labyrinth beyond the inescapable tedium I watched the parental generation, and then my peers, being pressed into: the grey darkness of everyday routine.

I have always kept a door slightly ajar for situations and people with crossroads potential. Decisions have therefore been delayed a little further, a hesitation that has left me open to change, to those willing to cause change in others. In truth I loathe loss of control, which is what it means to fall into the hands of people without boundaries. At the same time, I crave the vertigo promised by free fall, a duality that has caused conflicts within me. There is something in me that grants the boundaryless free passage, something they quickly scent. Not choosing is also a choice.

So when I, still intoxicated, give Håkan my address, it is with violent resistance paired with a cautious wish to be shaken up. He is a blinking lighthouse far off in the fog that promises something, anything, something else.

Up to this day, however, life has not turned out the way I had imagined, but that too was rather typical. The younger Gabriel did, wrongly, picture daily commuting from the terraced house in the area where I grew up to anonymous offices and meeting rooms, but from the position of hindsight it was not inconceivable that, in my mid-thirties, I would be left by my partner, the one who wanted to be my fiancée, or better still my wife, and who eventually tired of waiting. I think she did a rough calculation of my behaviour over the past eight years and concluded that nothing suggested change. Nor did it surprise me that I would be freelancing as a film critic, because I have never been able to attach myself to any job, and because the cinema always made room for me. That after the separation I would sink into a fairly mediocre depression was carried out as if on schedule. I could then pull myself up out of the dark rather quickly by adjusting my diet somewhat, beginning to walk in the woods, and avoiding alcohol.

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How long should you keep exploring before moving into the next phase?

The answer is 37%. That is roughly where I find myself now. It feels like the moment to begin using what I have gathered along the way: the invisible rules, the norms, an emerging sense of who holds authority, and a better understanding of where to spend time, and when.

One thing I did right from the start was to share only what I could not stop doing. Fiction is probably the hardest kind of writing to spread online, but it was also the only thing that would have made the effort feel meaningful. Better for reach would have been to share Substack growth hacks, links to articles, or advice on how to become happier. You can easily imagine a post with the title: How to improve your life permanently.

This dispatch is the exception that confirms the rule.

Recently, I went through some old notes and read them again. Among them was a list I wrote after a period of sick leave five years ago. It consisted of reminders, things I felt I needed to hold on to, even when the hamster wheel started spinning a little faster. I shared the list on Substack Notes and, thankfully, several people seemed to recognise themselves in it.

Many of the points still spoke to me. One served as a reminder that you can’t always live in a campaign, which is something I have done, to some extent, this year, as the newcomer at the party. Today I am no longer new, and will therefore need to handle things differently. Thank you for the reminder, me. At the same time, I now know things you did not. So I wrote a new list, shaped by what I have learned since then.

These new notes to myself bring The Bagatelles 2025 to a close. Thank you for this year. See you on the other side.

Want to ask me a question? Use this form.

Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt

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✦ 93 notes to myself ✧

First, a small disclaimer: my aim is depth. Deep thinking, deep writing, deep feeling, and deep relationships. But this runs in parallel with the demands of reality being met: cooking for my children, keeping track of homework and doctor’s appointments, work meetings, and an endlessly dwindling stream of emails and notifications. Perhaps one never quite reaches one’s goals, and perhaps that is all right too.

1. A minimum standard: always congratulate the people you care about on their birthdays. Make it a priority. Put it in your calendar as an annual reminder so you don’t forget.

2. And don’t dwell on the fact that they may not always remember yours.

3. Write down what you are going to do on paper before you use a screen.

4. An e-reader is not a screen.

5. Matcha’s caffeine is gentler, but lasts more evenly across the day.

6. Keep a single long list. Use AI to help sort it, if you dare (seeing yourself from the outside can be surprisingly eye-opening).

7. Set aside a fixed time for the list each week, so your brain can rest in the conviction that things are being taken care of. Sync it with another routine, so you know it gets done.

8. Light-therapy lamps work, but first you need to find a sustainable place for them.

9. Sometimes it is worth choosing the fast and unfocused. But choose with care.

10. Go to the cinema.

11. When it comes to TV: rent films. The opportunity cost is too high.

12. Focus on what you already have, and only very slightly on what you don’t.

13. It never ends, and that is how it should be. Choose a pace instead of trying to get everything done.

14. “This too shall pass” applies to success as well. Sad, of course, but an insight that leads to better balance.

15. Think in phases.

16. The advantage of routines is that they remain even when you fall out of them.

17. Build group-based social activities into a routine.

18. Fall into every rabbit hole, wherever you happen to be when it opens. It benefits everyone involved when you are your best self.

19. Meditation works, but unfortunately it requires a motivation you usually only acquire after things have gone quite badly.

20. Give yourself a point every time you say something wrong in a foreign language.

21. Want things to happen? Start by walking out the door.

22. Eat a boiled egg every morning.

23. If it’s not a strong yes, it’s a no. (That’s the essence of the book Essentialism, which means you no longer need to read it.)

24. Even if you live in a cell, you need to take care of your cell.

25. If the project feels too big, ask yourself what the next small action is. (My summary of the book Getting Things Done.)

26. Have a place at home where you put all technology when it is not in use. If you fall out of the routine, begin again.

27. Seek meaning, not happiness.

28. Good enough is good enough. Things change. So does the need for rules.

29. You don’t have to do everything yourself. In fact, something is off if you do.

30. One of the best feelings is watching someone else realise your idea.

31. Rules are not there for the good days.

32. Slowly walking through the day that has passed, in your mind, is a useful activity. It sharpens memory and shifts perspective.

33. You are the most important person in your life. That insight is a prerequisite for doing real good for others.

34. That means accountability. Circumstances matter, but you are always the CEO of yourself.

35. It is entirely possible, as a Swede, to work remotely from Seville for a few weeks in the winter, even with a regular office job. It does, however, require asking ten months in advance and turning it into an annual routine.

36. Annual routines are the best kind of routines, and the most caring thing you can do for yourself. They release enormous amounts of energy.

37. Interrail with your kids.

38. Always tell people if you are afraid. You may still have to do it, but it eases the pressure.

39. There is a correlation between selling and sales, but also spend some time thinking about what it is you actually want to sell.

40. Relief is an underrated feeling. A form of acute gratitude.

41. If you don’t want to promote what you create, how can you expect others to want to do it?

42. Host parties for milestone birthdays. Even if it feels overwhelming and too big. They last far longer than a single evening, and you show everyone, not least yourself, that you are worth it.

43. Buy a clock radio.

44. Use it too.

45. Creating art can be mistaken for a selfish pursuit, but it is a great comfort for those who remain to keep someone’s voice when it is gone.

46. Writing in silence with others is an effective way to get a lot written. Group pressure is uncannily effective. It is also a good way of meeting like-minded people.

47. Most things don’t happen (those who need to understand will understand).

48. Keep calm and carry on is an attitude that works in almost all contexts. On the one hand a cliché, on the other easy to remember.

49. If you have major plumbing work in your building, live with your grandmother. It may be your last time together.

50. The word Proust can be the key that opens the door to the right people.

51. People are entitled to their opinions, but there are others too.

52. Go to meetups via Meetup.com and meet strangers. It is only nerve-racking the very first time, and it broadens your sense of what is normal.

53. Broaden your sense of what is normal.

54. Substack is the great promise of the internet, if you choose to see it that way.

55. The one with the most patience usually wins.

56. It is good to consciously practise accepting uncertainty. A window of opportunity often opens just before a deadline, but control freaks never get to know that.

57. No system is permanent. See also 27.

58. How busy you felt will have no bearing whatsoever on the outcome.

59. You can’t compare yourself to anyone.

60. Basketball is a great social activity because you can play even if you can’t really play basketball. As long as everyone involved understands the purpose of the social activity.

61. Block time in your calendar with a colleague, then sit in a café and work on just one thing for three hours. It makes a big difference.

62. Podcasting is like a variant of couple’s therapy. Or a dancing class.

63. If you know with certainty what you want, you have a good chance of making it happen. But it may require a long planning horizon. Speak openly about what you are looking for so others can help you find it. See also 35.

64. A Spaniard may, at a first meeting, ask how you plan to celebrate Christmas. If you have no one to celebrate with, he will call his mother immediately.

65. And if you invite one or two Spaniards to your birthday party in Stockholm, they might show up with a guitar.

66. Both hyperphantasia and aphantasia exist. People are similar at the core, and also not. In that sense, your own experience is unique.

67. No one else can know what you feel and think unless you communicate it.

68. The aim of work is to maximise total utility.

69. The aim of art is to maximise personal utility.

70. If you are new in a place and want to make friends, start by asking someone you already know if you can meet any of their friends. It may sound a bit too forward, but it works.

71. The Portuguese are the Scandinavians of the Mediterranean. That can be useful knowledge.

72. Read at cafés with your children.

73. What matters in art is not being good. It’s being interesting.

74. Who you are is good and important.

75. What the young don’t know is how much can be accomplished with time.

76. Not caring is freedom. It is, after all, slightly more accessible than trying to become financially independent.

77. What self-help books don’t say: sometimes it’s simply not about you. Pull yourself together. Do your duty.

78. On the same theme. Setting demands is a form of care. It means: I believe in you.

79. A phone call can resolve most screen-based conflicts.

80. YOLO is a ridiculous expression that is nevertheless worth remembering.

81. One way to cope with the constant flow of impressions is to give yourself a screen window once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once in the evening. A little like how therapists advise patients to concentrate their rumination.

82. The bombast in Kieślowski’s films conceals how subtly the sequence of events actually moves. Watch and learn.

83. On the same theme: when you write, turn up the temperature. No one likes a story soaked in lagom.

84. Everyone needs a place where who you are is considered normal.

85. One workplace is enough, even for the generalist. There is value in having a clear and convincing answer to what you do, both at dinner parties and for yourself.

86. Try to avoid gatekeepers between your artistic practice and the people who are meant to encounter it. Only then does the system become sustainable over time.

87. There is always something. Always, without exception. It therefore becomes more a matter of attitude.

88. There is a particular kind of luxury in a high-quality promotional pen.

89. You can’t own too many cabinets, only a home that’s too small.

90. But it is in fact possible to own too many books. Ask yourself: will I read this within a lifetime? If not, isn’t it better that someone else gets the chance?

91. The very highest status belongs to those who have a good and loving relationship with their children. Bonus points if the children are grown up.

92. If you start a newsletter, don’t worry about the audience. Focus on what you want to give.

93. Be transparent about what you want and how you function.

You made it to the end! Don’t forget that life is wonderful and exciting.

✦ My favourites from my 2025 ✧

Below is my list of the most memorable presences of the year, grouped by category.

Film: Aftersun ✧ I cried uncontrollably. It clearly hit a nerve.

Reference book: Metropolis by Ben Wilson ✧ A Sapiens for the history of cities.

Purchase: The e-reader from Kobo ✧ I sync it with Instapaper to read articles and essays from the internet. My second best purchase of all time (the best was the automatic cat feeder).

Work: The diary project ✧ It involved some media appearances, but also close contact with writers and their lives, and culminated in an evening at the museum led by . Next year, we begin collecting dreams.

Podcast: The Last Invention ✧ The history of technology is one of my interests (see my pioneer interviews for the Internetmuseum), and the story of AI really needed to be told like the story it is. Runner-up: .

Article: “The man who wants to know everything”. ✧ That profile of the polymath , which makes you want to try street food in Ghana and memorise all the regions of Russia.

TV series: Ripley ✧ I binge-watched the entire season of the Patricia Highsmith adaptation. Then I watched it again, which was a first. The presence of Caravaggio worked remarkably well. The series later became a strong source of inspiration for Bardo Noir.

Paid subscriber: My friend ✧ The first, forever. Thanks also to everyone who followed in his footsteps. I see you all.

Anti-social media app: Minutiae ✧ Created by the Swedish photographer Martin Adolfsson in New York as an art project. Once a day, at a random moment, you are prompted to photograph what is around you, slowly forming a more reality-based photo album of your life.

Video game: Grim Fandango ✧ An even stronger influence on the book I am writing now. I almost see the story of Bardo Noir as an homage to this 1998 game, with Manny Calavera as the cynical salesman in the land of the dead. In my story the protagonist’s name is, perhaps, Björn?

Substacker: Henrik Karlsson ✧ Every time a new essay is released it feels like a small Christmas Eve. It makes the reader want to live deeper, deliberately, and more richly.

Website: Futility Closet ✧ Curiosities from the past, curated by a true connoisseur. Also available as a podcast. No longer updated, but it will take a long time to work your way through it all.

Non-fiction: Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey by V. S. Naipaul ✧ I found this one in a book-exchange shelf by a bus stop. His descriptions of travelling in Iran just after the revolution, and in rural Pakistan, are masterful.

Reader: ✧ She gives me an intense urge to read, and was one of the reasons I took the step and started this Substack. A place where serious literature was clearly appreciated.

YouTube: The Lost Ones on ARTE ✧ Inspirational eccentrics from history. The videos are removed from Arte.tv, but some episodes are still available on YouTube.

Most missed: My father’s cousin Ola ✧ Here’s my tribute to him.

Song: Down to the Beach ✧ Played acoustically at Ola’s funeral.

Playlists: Zenopolis & Bardo Noir ✧ On repeat while writing and editing.

Flâneuse: ✧ Pushing psychogeography forward on Substack. Also one of 32 newsletters that recommend The Bagatelles. Thank you all.

Date: ✧ Whom I met in Lisbon after being captivated by his chaotic prose. Another meeting in a few days, this time in the studio.

Tree: Ginkgo ✧ Runner-up: Japanese maple.

Force of nature: ✧ Every third day she has produced high-quality essays on emotional life and wisdom, with distinctly Proustian qualities.

City: Venice ✧ It was my first visit, and I only want to go back. The most spectacular destination of my life. Honourable mentions: Cambridge, Porto, Hudiksvall, Trieste.

Novel: The School of Night, by Karl Ove Knausgård ✧ For a long time it was speculated that he could only write about himself. It turned out that he could become anyone. Runners-up: Per Hagman with Johannes och jag, Lina Wolff with Liken vi begravde.

Distant relative: Ossian ✧ A century later, he generated a delegation of relatives from the US.

Secret salon: ’s ✧ An invitation via Substack to an off-the-map location led to a guided meditation by , conversations about alternative ways of living, and small-group discussions. Magical.

Project: Editing Zenopolis ✧ Eight months of work. Not the best thing I can write, but the best thing I have written. The kind of story you can only write at the end of an era.

Print newspaper: The Economist ✧ Because it is about everything except news. Instead, it prints what is actually happening.

Interpreter of Sweden: ✧ With his personal trilogy about the country we both live in. Also my second Substack date.

Celebrity death: Paul Auster ✧ It affected me deeply. When I started writing, I felt closely connected to his voice.

Obsession: Substack Notes ✧ Yes, it is social media. Yes, I became addicted. It was almost worth it, because that is how most of you found me. A double-edged sword.

Notes writer and photographer: My son ✧ He went viral on the first attempt.

World-watching: Exponential View ✧ is tirelessly guiding the way forward with a positive view of the future. I can’t wait to get there.

Pet: My cat Alice ✧ She passed away completely unexpectedly this spring. I still think, every time I come home, that she will be waiting by the door.

✦ Three Threshold Texts ✧

The posts of mine that have led the most people to start subscribing.

1. Clear winner with 20 new subscribers:

2. Joint second place with 9 new subscribers each.

My wish for 2026: that my writing and thinking continue to travel beyond my small Swedish language sphere, preferably in contexts I don’t expect, such as finding an English-language publisher for Zenopolis, or to see a bagatelle published in a journal somewhere far away from home.

Do you want to help? Or do you think I can help you with something? Or just have an idea? Please feel free to email me.

Thank you all for this year.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

This dispatch went out to 1,443 readers across 80 countries. If it resonated with you, consider sharing it with a friend who might feel the same, leaving a comment, or recommending it on your own Substack.

A warm thank you to the 16 sponsors of The Bagatelles. Your belief in my work keeps me going, and as a paid subscriber you have access to all long-form content, including the novel Zenopolis, all chapters of Naïveté Travels, and my work in progress: Bardo Noir.

Everything I wrote in 2025:

✦✧ Looking for the archive? You can find every post here.

It can, besides being quite triggering for the nervous system, lead to certain confusions. Did it happen or did I merely imagine it? I do not quite belong to that group, but it resembles the experience of writing fiction. The boundaries fade little by little, just as they do in dreams1.

This edition of The Bagatelles will be about time travel. Not of the Back to the Future sort, though. Rather of The Bagatelles sort. A style I unfortunately cannot shake off, no more than Proust would stop travelling by means of madeleine cakes. You who read do the same, after all. You travel within yourselves, through me.

As usual I share three stories. First we travel to a place that memory does not normally reach. Then we bring the world of Paul Auster back to life. And lastly we allow a great poet to undergo a kind of Benjamin Button transformation before our eyes.

Also, a warm thank you to everyone who filled in the form in the previous edition. Your feedback is my reward. As a sign of my gratitude I am offering a month of paid subscription to everyone who takes part, and will email Naïveté Travels as a pdf. It’s Christmas, after all.

Welcome away ꩜

Jörgen Löwenfeldt

✦ The Inland Journey ✧

I had found a way to travel in time, with certain restrictions. For some reason the method worked only within my own life and within my own body, and since I had never been a friend of spoilers I had, after a first attempt at travelling forwards, chosen to travel only backwards.

That was how I returned to the time of being almost born, eight months after conception, floating in the womb. The senses were fully developed by then, the amniotic fluid tasted of saliva with a hint of salt, the inner wall itself soft as jelly, a comforting massage whenever I was pressed back and forth in my warm pool.

The state was comfortable. Neither eating nor breathing was needed, all of that was handled by the hostess, and I had just begun to sway into calm when my ears suddenly reacted. My mother’s vocal cords sent out vibrations into my incubator, and I heard her speak, not only in my ears but as a movement that reverberated through my smooth body. Another rumble growled, which I understood came from my father. He existed still, yes exactly, at this time he was still here.

I tried desperately to listen to the conversation, but needed a few seconds to reconstruct it. The words came out of sync. Something about a car journey, icy roads, was it really worth it? The rumble offered a thunderous reply, and my mother continued her persuasion. Her bright voice dark as a conscience. He would not listen, I already knew that.

Why had I travelled precisely here, to this journey, when I had no possibility of preventing anything. I flailed hard with legs and arms to cause a reaction. She crouched and I tumbled with her. I kicked and struck wildly around me, wanted to tear a hole in the belly and get out, but I was helplessly stuck. My heartbeat ticked fast and sent shockwaves through my cosmos. They whirled back like a gong. Soon I was nothing but tremor.

She stood up and I was shaken again, now upside down with the umbilical cord round my neck. A deep darkness settled over my field of vision, perhaps she had put on a coat. We were outdoors, cold, I curled up my limbs. Through the fluid I heard her voice urge my father: We ought to go now, it has started.

✦ Auster Loop ✧

In the summer of 2002 he discovered Paul Auster at the same time as others discovered alcohol or girls, and with the same thirst and eagerness as his contemporaries. As for most people it began with The New York Trilogy for him, moved on to Leviathan and The Music of Chance, then to Timbuktu, Moon Palace and Mr Vertigo, without ever stopping. The output seemed endless.

Read more

Summarising ten months on Substack might be a little excessive. But I am not the worst offender. That title probably belongs to the dandyish Max Beerbohm, who at the age of twenty-four gathered his early articles and reviews and published them under the title The Works of Max Beerbohm. One hundred and sixty pages, followed by a bibliography compiled by his publisher. As Julian Barnes notes in this brilliant essay in the London Review of Books, it was an audacious way to begin a career.

Then there is the opposite temperament, Gustave Flaubert, not a dandy at all, who at the same age wrote to a friend: “Very often, I doubt that I shall ever publish a single line. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful idea for a fellow not to publish anything until he was fifty, and then, one fine day, to bring out his Collected Works, and afterwards just leave it at that.” He did not know that more than a century later the Swedish writer Lydia Sandgren would debut with that very title.

In a way, it is a small act of resistance not to focus solely on whatever happens to flutter past demanding our attention. The whole of society is built to make us do something else, think of something new. Newspapers, YouTube, Spotify, and also Substack. It is always the latest thing that receives attention. But it does not have to be like that.

In this dispatch I guide you through every post published during 2025, organised by theme to make them easier to navigate (The Bagatelles, The Tiny Bagatelles, The Diary Entries, The Novels, The Short Stories, Naïveté Travels, and the stories behind the paywall). Each story is just as important and just as fresh as when it first appeared. Save my collected works to your e-reader, or print them out and make them immortal.

Two more things:

1. Michael Maupin interviewed me here. His questions pushed me into deeper reflection. I am always open to talking about my writing, so if you have ideas: please email me.

2. And I want to understand you a little better ahead of the 2026 season of The Bagatelles. Help me by filling in this form. Everyone who does will receive, in addition to my appreciation, a pdf containing all chapters of Naïveté Travels.

Welcome away ꩜

Jörgen Löwenfeldt

No patience? Start with this one:

Some patience? Ok, let’s dig in …

✦ The Bagatelles ✧

A reflection on the strange luck of getting a second chance at a first beginning, retracing the path from envelope scribbles to blog, to Instagram, to novel, to newsletter, and now into a new language.

✦ The Maybe Man, Charles Swann ✧ A writer tries to catch an idea each morning and drifts into a meditation on Proust’s Charles Swann and the human urge to seek truth through desire.

✦ The Secret Pianist ✧ An anonymous neighbour plays Mozart in a way that transforms the narrator’s evenings, triggering an obsessive search for the pianist’s identity.

✦ The Atheist ✧ The protagonist dies in an apartment fire, leaves the body and ascends through the cosmos.

A dispatch about escaping a Swedish winter by borrowing a life in Seville, and how a borrowed life can open a door into one’s own.

✦ Safari in the realm of wordlessness ✧ A guest at a syndicalist party drifts between posters, bookshelves and improvised investigations when language fails, creating a private adventure in the margins of the room.

✦ At New Year ✧ A quiet winter’s day in Alamillo Park unfolds in sun, birdsong, distant fireworks and the shifting presence of one’s children just outside reach.

✦ Zenonaut’s Diary ✧ A solitary astronaut orbits a collapsing empire, stitching embroidery and watching Earth from afar while waiting for a return that never quite comes.

A return to the kind of writing I once loved and was told to avoid, revisiting the childhood moment when dreamlike storytelling first claimed me.

✦ The Elevator Collector ✧ A diplomat with a lifelong passion for elevators reveals a basement of impossible machines, one of which carries the narrator somewhere entirely unexpected.

✦ The Pencil World ✧ A man devotes decades to documenting every memory on slips of paper, creating an overwhelming archive that becomes a world of its own.

✦ Ingarö’s Magellan ✧ A newcomer joins a local trail group and is sent to scout new paths, only to wander into a territorial dispute that shifts from charming to unsettling.

A defence of the generalist’s mind in a world built for specialists.

✦ Russian Roulette ✧ A numbed narrator slips into an underground Russian roulette club, hoping to feel something again.

✦ Where The Story Ends ✧ Two siblings arrive at their late father’s cluttered country house to clear out decades of accumulated objects.

✦ Free Fall ✧ A ten-year-old’s first seemingly harmless ride in an amusement park turns into a bodily shock so intense it feels like dying.

A meditation on memory’s blind spots and why the truest things we write often spring from what never happened.

✦ The Childhood Friend I Don’t Remember ✧ A man meets someone who remembers their shared childhood vividly, while he himself remembers nothing.

✦ Night Bus to Bombay ✧ An overnight bus journey in India becomes a dim, tense memory that resurfaces years later.

✦ All That Slipped Away ✧ A writing-class exercise forces the narrator to recreate a childhood room. Something long forgotten is pushing back.

A reflection on the old childhood habit of staring at maps. The strange joy of discovering that those imagined places now write back.

✦ Hermelin’s Insight ✧ A wandering aristocrat finds purpose late in life by translating Persian poetry in a psychiatric ward.

✦ The Beringians ✧ A portrait of the people who lived on the vanished land bridge between Asia and North America.

✦ The Flight Attendant’s Diary ✧ A cabin crew member secretly writes during long-haul flights, imagining the lives she might have lived in other dimensions.

A defence of letting the so-called Serious Literary Author write fast, weird and a little unhinged, allowing everyday life to tilt closer to Groucho Marx than Marcel Proust.

✦ Stellan Skarsgård’s Netflix ✧ A man realises he has accidental access to Stellan Skarsgård’s Netflix account and slowly lets this secret privilege reshape his social life.

✦ Eva4ever ✧ A routine scam email exposes a very real password, forcing a husband to confront the fact that he has been quietly typing an old love’s name every day of his married life.

✦ The Sabrage Course ✧ A group of tired middle-aged men attend a champagne-sabre course led by a duelling-obsessed Austrian.

A meditation on memento mori through Grim Fandango and its skeletal guide Manny Calavera, considering how to live well in limbo.

✦ Obituary ✦ A grieving son is tasked with writing his mother’s obituary and realises he barely knew her inner life, sending him on a search for someone who might hold the missing pieces.

✦ Change ✧ A woman sheds her earthly body and chooses a new identity from a celestial catalogue.

✦ The Last Impression ✦ A man recalls a brief encounter with a woman at a party, only to learn later of her death, leaving him with a last impression that becomes strangely permanent.

A milestone dispatch about starting over in a new language and finding an unexpected global readership (written in the afterglow of passing one thousand subscribers).

✦ 95 Years of Jealousy ✦ A psychologist mentions ninety-five-year-olds tormented by jealousy, prompting the narrator to imagine the lifetimes of longing, betrayal and private narratives.

✦ The Prodigies ✧ Two young musicians, both lifelong prodigies, fail an audition in Montpellier and share an afternoon of bruised pride.

✦ A Crow Named Rich ✦ A rescued fledgling becomes a beloved household companion, mimicking voices and joining games.

About my father’s cousin Ola Hermanson. He was the rock star, the scientist, the label founder, and the football sufferer. This is a small tribute to the person who taught me how large a life can be.

✦ The Doppelgängers ✧ A theatre critic discovers that someone identical to him has already collected his ticket and taken his seat.

✦ The Venice of the North ✧ After a meteor shower turns Stockholm’s streets into waterways, a non-swimmer must navigate a flooded city and an unexpected sense of resilience.

✦ Through the Eyes of a Pickpocket ✧ A young drifter teams up with a veteran thief, until a stolen letter forces both to confront the human cost of their craft.

A meeting with my American relatives, descendants of Ossian who emigrated over a century ago, leads to brief reflections on ancestry and a past period living with my grandmother.

✦ Gurli ✧ A portrait of an eight-year-old girl who died becomes a map of generational trauma and inherited anxiety.

✦ When Passion Fades ✧ A relationship shifts in a single passing gesture, when one body turns away and the other realises the gravitational pull between them has changed.

✦ The Endless Construction ✧ A boy on the run meets a hermit building an ever-expanding house in the forest.

A reflection on personal AI boundaries and why writing must remain a private territory.

✦ The Bill Murray of the National Library ✧ A man spends a summer trapped in a single date from 1983, searching old newspapers for meaning.

✦ Stool Psychosis ✧ A woodworking student becomes engulfed in a mania of identical stools, testing the narrator’s composure.

✦ The Dream Archive ✧ After a massage unlocks a strange pressure point, dreams begin flooding back in overwhelming detail, as if an entire hidden archive has been accidentally opened.

A dispatch about searching for belonging in adulthood and stumbling into a very particular community: the bell ringers of Björkhagen.

✦ The Bell Ringers ✧ A summer among volunteer campanologists, where a child prodigy of bells, an artist mother and a talkative ex-sailor orbit the St John’s bell.

✦ Venting ✧ A drunk man hijacks the altar to shout his truths, only to be gently redirected by a young woman who listens long enough for him to feel human again.

✦ Monotony’s Pattern ✧ A former bank security guard and bell ringer recalls how boredom rewired his mind.

✦ The Tiny Bagatelles ✧

A dispatch presenting twenty-eight very short surreal bagatelles, introduced through a reflection on falling asleep by inventing stories at the edge of consciousness.

✦ The Diary Entries✧

A post about how strangers gravitate toward you, and how the most ordinary days become tiny epics when you stay open to the people passing through your life.

✦ Everyone’s Talking to Me ✧ A heat-struck day of buses and trains turns into a cascade of encounters with talkative strangers, each revealing something unexpected.

✦ The Stalker’s Lair ✧ A memory from a long-ago Central Asian Studies course resurfaces, leading to a classmate’s sparsely furnished flat.

✦ The Other Dad ✧ Two divorced fathers sending their children home alone from Málaga end up sharing a drive.

A dispatch about why people write things down, and how diaries become maps of the self. From museum work with thousands of private voices to three intimate entries of my own

✦ A Bit Like George Saunders ✧ A narrator wrestles with admiration, inhibition and accidental kinship after being told his writing resembles Saunders.

✦ Ingemar ✧ A meditation on a friend lost too early, and on how everyday errands, wars, dishwashers and new lives crowd out grief until the memory itself begins to thin.

✦ The Whistlers ✧ A football-stadium moment where a Rossini whistle becomes a duet, then a mystery.

✦ The short stories ✧

A story about trying to return to a year that once felt like the future, revisiting an old flat, and an old self.

A tale about turning forty-two, seeing death up close for the first time in Trieste and being briefly, unnervingly unsure where the border runs between the living and the dead.

✦ The Novels (behind paywall) ✧

✦ BARDO NOIR ✧ A man escapes his life and hides in Kathmandu, where he is drawn into a secretive bureau that guides travellers toward a mythical valley. When a woman named Florence arrives, his past, his identity and the bureau’s true purpose collide.

✦ ZENOPOLIS ✧ A novel about Manuel El Milagro Peláez Sigüenza, a boy raised in a world of women in San Jerónimo, Spain, who grows up believing he is a miracle child. As he begins to question the myths surrounding his family, including the story of his missing father, he discovers traces of a parallel inner world called Zenopolis.

Get automatic access to Bardo Noir and Zenopolis by becoming a paid subscriber.

✦ Naïveté Travels ✧

Naïveté Travels is a story about a young man who becomes fixated on Jan Berger, a once-legendary Swedish dot-com figure he meets in a Belgrade bar. Their brief encounter turns into years of pursuit, self-invention and misdirection, as the narrator tries to become someone larger than the life he’s living.

First three chapters open, the last two behind a paywall (get them for free by filling in the form).

✦ Stories behind the paywall ✧

A dispatch about the long, strange aftermath of breaking one’s brain, where collapse becomes a kind of rebirth and patience the only way forward.

✦ Portrait of a Recovery ✧ A man describes how every mental wire snapped and was reattached in a new order, until daily life slowly returned with a different compass.

✦ A Phone Call in the Garden ✧ An old phone booth rings from 1983, and the person who answers ends up speaking to his own birth.

✦ The Drifters ✧ A library becomes home to a searching youth, until a strange book begins to write itself.

About a man processing address labels in a windowless postal cave who discovers that a package suddenly carries his own name.

A dispatch about returning to Bergman’s island, and confronting the creative intensity of living inside the director’s rooms.

A short-story about a man on the edge who wanders into a Södermalm boxing club and stumbles into a brutal, tender almost-love.

A short novel about a museum worker who drifts into a dream-logic conspiracy involving László Bíró, occult diaries and a shadowy group called The Electric Committee.

Thank you for reading,

Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

This dispatch went out to 1,285 readers across 75 countries. If my writing resonated with you, consider sharing it with a friend who might feel the same, leaving a comment, or recommending it on your own Substack. You can also fill in this form to offer feedback or ask a question.

A warm thank you to the 15 sponsors of The Bagatelles. Your belief in my work keeps me going, and as a paid subscriber you have access to all long-form content, including the novel Zenopolis, all chapters of Naïveté Travels, and my work in progress: Bardo Noir.

✦✧ Archive: All posts can be found here.

A group I no longer visit, but which meant a great deal to me a few summers ago, was the bell ringers. It began when a friend, who is good at keeping herself active, joined the group that had taken on the task of ringing the bells at Markuskyrkan in Björkhagen1. This dark brick building, designed by Sigurd Lewerentz, is not actually particularly old, yet it is still equipped for manual ringing. Many tonnes of bells to be set in motion at fixed hours.

My friend thought I would enjoy the sport, even though I am neither religious nor non-religious. She was absolutely right. Turning the bells was physical in a way you wouldn’t expect. Even with ear protection the sound travelled through your whole body. It felt like a kind of violent meditation.

I also grew to appreciate the people who enjoyed bell ringing, both the ringers themselves and the hangarounds who appeared whenever there was a service. It turned out to be a fairly niche group of people, all with stories to tell. In this dispatch I share a few of them with you.

If you are curious about the ringing process, there is a video at the bottom of this post.

Welcome away ꩜

Jörgen Löwenfeldt

✦ The Bell Ringers ✧

That summer I spent time with the bell ringers in Björkhagen. The task of managing the church bells required volunteers and I was happy to help, though not with any regularity, so I came to belong to the group that circled curiously around those who carried the standing responsibility.

Another hangaround was nine years old and had become utterly absorbed in the bells themselves. He knew everything about their construction, the theories of campanology and now also much about the practice: which levers must be pushed aside at which moment, how many tolls should thunder out before the rotation has to be stopped and how to do this without losing any limbs. His parents escorted him every Sunday to the brick buildings by the reserve to nurture the interest. Probably also to avoid conflicts.

The woman accompanying the child was someone I already knew from the public sphere. She had created the artwork I wanted for the cover of my first novel and whose title had long served as the name for the story. Once, during an important café visit, I had typed in the address, found that she had lived only a few streets away and felt the impulse to seek her out, but I never did. The cover became another, the title became another, yet the designer who was to help me later became my girlfriend. I told the boy’s mother all of this and I saw in her how, at that very moment, I thawed into a person, and one with a Norrköping connection as well.

On the fourth visit to the bells I met the father. He needed no time at all to warm me from stranger to conversational partner. A single glance was enough for him to launch into one anecdote after another: about the summer when the ladybirds swarmed so violently that he had to cycle with his mouth closed. And about the time he was a sailor and worms invaded the deck. There was no way to get rid of them; no matter how they swept, more kept coming, so the captain ordered the crew to paint everything over with white paint, which in fact turned out to be the final solution. All over the deck you could then see the traces of the creatures that had tried to crawl through the paint before finally giving up. He could not stop thinking about the worms, alive or dead, they were still everywhere.

I remember all this a year later when I ask my friend in the bell-ringing group how she is doing, and everything returns: the roar of two tonnes of St John’s bell rushing through my cells, the dense pressure of the ear defenders against my temples, lentil stew in a plastic cup and the summer. Only a couple of months before the great collapse, which I believed at the time I had already left behind.

✦ Venting ✧

In the church on a Saturday morning I am a worn man in his fifties, or older or younger, it is hard to tell with me, because I dress so shabbily, drink so heavily, the alcohol almost bubbles out of me when I speak, you can hear it from far off, hear it like poison, so people keep their distance when they see and hear me, because I remind them of what they might become if they do not stay on the right side of the line, because they sense that I was once another person. There is something about me that speaks of a previously more orderly life, though it is hard to pinpoint. Perhaps I have had a family and children, steady work and a mortgage, but only perhaps. Perhaps not, but probably.

Read more

Naturally, it was exhilarating and unforgettable. Yet the real act of creation takes place elsewhere. It happens here, week after week. Unlike Pynchon and his kind, I have never minded sharing work in progress. If anything, it is readers’ expectations and involvement that sharpen the text and make it better. Less Pynchon. Very internet.

After some time experimenting with this platform I have found a formula that seems to work for me: to keep the shorter pieces freely available to everyone, and to place the longer ones (such as Zenopolis, Naïveté Travels, and others) behind a paywall, as a kind of filter, allowing me to continue publishing semi-openly without burning bridges. It also makes it a little easier to use my full range, knowing I am doing so before a smaller group of benevolent like-minded readers.

This post contains the first chapter of my still only just begun story BARDO NOIR, a piece influenced by films like The Third Man and Casablanca, the TV series Ripley, and the computer game Grim Fandango. Black and white, smoke and mirrors, adventures waiting around every corner.

If you would like to read the next chapter, which is published on a separate Substack, you will need to become a paying subscriber to The Bagatelles. Otherwise, this chapter also stands on its own, as a bagatelle.

Welcome away ꩜

Jörgen Löwenfeldt

* Salka.se was a writers’ community I started with a friend in 2003. A bit like Substack, only without the newsletters. Not a small only, though.

✦ BARDO NOIR: The Beginning ✧

I have sinned, and it feels so desperately good to admit it, to once and for all come out as who I am, not who I appear to be.

It is no small sin either.

But let’s not talk about that now. I just needed to get it out of the way, as background information for why I sold everything. I arranged a yard sale and let go of the amplifier, the freezer, the broom, the heirlooms and the childhood memories. The neighbours were a little bewildered at first, since they weren’t used to such situations, as we had otherwise competed quietly to own the most, and now they could snatch up all my expensively acquired material status. When they realised I’d gone mad they swarmed like vultures over everything, especially when they discovered they could bargain as low as they wished without me refusing. Had they asked for free I would have said free. Then I rented a container, heaved in what remained, and even those things drew the neighbourhood’s treasure hunters at night, so in the end there was just one final trip to the dump before I was emptied. At the viewing the house was a shell, every mark on the wall visible, every water stain on the parquet. I had to accept a shamefully low offer, but after that I was at least empty, light and free. I left the car in the airport car park, with the key inside.

The customs officer grew suspicious of me. I had arrived in Kathmandu in the middle of the night on a sparsely filled flight. The other passengers were seasonal labourers from Qatar who looked as though they had been working for half a year straight, and probably had. It wasn’t my fair skin that made me stand out, but my lack of luggage. Not even a cloth bag. Not even a toothbrush. The officer asked me to come with him, and I was led to a windowless room with metal walls. “So, what’s this about?” he asked indifferently, stifling a yawn. “Nothing in particular,” I said. He continued: “You know we mostly deal with backpackers from your country? The odd hippie too, and then the junkies, those who arrive empty-handed but try to leave bursting.” He tapped his fingertip against the table, as if sketching a mind map and adding the decisive arrow. “So which category do you belong to, sir?”

That was when I had to explain in what way I had sinned. He listened with increasingly glazed eyes, and when I had nothing more to say he concluded grimly: “That was no small sin either.” The interrogation had gone on for several hours already, dawn had almost turned to morning, and I think his shift was nearly over, because suddenly he became impatient. He summed up the night’s dilemma with the words: “It’s not illegal, after all, to own nothing.” The room was unlocked and I was released. It would probably have been appropriate to claim that I had a plan, that I would seek out this or that person, sort everything out and build myself a life, but I was hollow inside as well, assuming things would change over time once I changed my surroundings. Then I could become someone else, and as someone else I would not need a plan, because the plan would not be mine. Something like that had gone through my head as I swirled up and down through Himalayan turbulence, to and from K2, more than once thinking that I would be the first to be eaten in the event of a crash.

I wandered via Ring Road and Pashupati, Dillibazar and Lainchaur, and at the beginning there were no pavements, but since it was so early the traffic was still sparse and the air not yet filled with smog. Only after an hour or so of walking did lines of cars and scooters start whizzing past just inches away, but I wasn’t especially worried about being run over, because worrying wasn’t my game anymore. From the Pashupatinath temple towards the centre I began to look less of an odd bird. Business had picked up in the shops, traffic lights flickered irrationally, the scent of incense mixed with diesel and cardamom. Stray dogs tried to beg from me but they too soon understood I had nothing to offer. At Thamel Chowk I reached a more international area, probably where the backpackers preferred to end up, and I was about to walk on when someone spoke to me. My mother had taught me always to answer when addressed, and I hadn’t yet lost my sense of manners.

It was a bit tiresome to tell every stranger about my shortcomings, even if transparency might have been the honest thing, so I refrained this time, also because this Australian seemed rather talkative. He was chewing on a juicy chicken wing that he waved in the air like a confused conductor, and when he saw that I was staring more at what he held than at him, he offered me the other wing. “Hungry, eh?” he said as he watched me devour the meat. “Know your type. Takes one to know one. Felt exactly like that myself nine months ago.” I nodded and smiled, grease smeared across my cheeks. “Can I buy you a beer?” he asked, hoping to convert me to an extrovert. I had in fact intended to give away all my money, but I hadn’t decided for what purpose, so I postponed the decision, thinking I might meet someone along the way who needed it more than the Red Cross HR department. A struggling farmer with nine children, I had thought, prejudicedly. A version of the noble savage, perhaps. But that was how I imagined it, that the people here didn’t think much about how they lived, because they were too busy simply living.

There was money enough for many thousands of bottles of Gorkha, but I let him buy me one anyway, for he didn’t need to know that, it would change the mood too much. The whole experience of seeing himself in me would vanish, and I had no one else to turn to in this city. It felt like a positive sensation, I concluded. To need someone, because it implied a future where someone was needed, one in which I was included. We sat down at the corner bar, and he talked on about women (many) and the price of Ethereum (the sky was the limit), without caring that I offered only monosyllabic answers, which was probably why he jumped when I suddenly exclaimed: “Now I know who you look like.” “Oh yeah? Who?” “David Foster Wallace, the writer,” I said. “Almost exactly.”

But he had no idea who that was, even though he’d nailed the look perfectly: the bandana, the glasses, the stubble, the greasy hair, and the torrent of words. Perhaps it was a fashion I didn’t know about, like most fashions really. When I explained how the author had described Roger Federer’s tennis game, he became a little more interested, since I’d touched on sport, though unfortunately not hurling. He was on the board of the Queensland federation, ran the meetings remotely, as the distances were so vast down there it could just as well be done from Nepal.

Only after an hour did he tire of talking about himself. “What about you?” he mumbled. “What do you do all day?” “I work in aid,” I said. It was a lie, absolutely and unconditionally, but it didn’t feel like one. Deceptive only in that he took it to mean I represented some charity organisation, but not in that I intended to practise charity, so that would have to do. “No offence,” he said, “but you look like you could use some aid yourself, mate.” I turned towards the window and saw a translucent mess of my reflection stare back, and yes, indeed, he was right. “A shower would be nice,” I said. “Low expectations, that’s what we like,” he said.

More people began to arrive. They appeared as if from nowhere, since I had kept an eye on the entrance and no one had gone in or out. Only when the fifth apparition turned up did I realise they had all entered through a secret door, hidden behind the totem pole by the bar to provide an easier passage from the neighbouring collective, where people stayed anywhere from a night to several decades, depending on need and convenience. They probably had their breakfast and other meals here as well, I concluded from how easily they moved about the place. The newcomers gathered in small groups along the walls. A scruffy man who looked as though he had once had a wife sat down beside us without saying a word. Visually speaking, he seemed to belong to the place more than the rest of us, could almost have been Nepalese.

The Australian tried to draw him into the conversation. “Naipul, we’ve got a visitor from the land of the living.” But the newcomer said nothing. “What did you mean by that?” I asked. The Australian began talking about the phenomenon of bardo, which I wasn’t familiar with but which the Tibetans apparently believed in. It concerned the intermediate world the deceased wanders through before they can truly disappear. A forty-nine-day journey towards peace. “What are you insinuating?” I asked, but was interrupted by our tablemate, who until now had been silent, suddenly releasing with unexpected enthusiasm what he had apparently been brooding over all this time. He stared deep into my eyes and asked: “Do you think I should buy a stuffed lion?”

What followed was an anecdote about how, as a child in the West Indies, he had been fascinated by the busts and animals his English teacher decorated his colonial villa with, and which he later came to associate with success, without thinking much of it until he realised that the natural history museum was currently clearing out, having had to downsize after the earthquake. A stuffed lion was up for auction. Unfortunately a female, but a lion nonetheless. “Yes, if you’ve waited that long, I think you should buy it,” I said. “Are you mad? It costs two months’ salary!” he exclaimed, as if questioning how I could be so reckless with money as to consider such a risky investment.

When I went to find the toilet the Australian followed to explain. He dried his hands with paper towels and said: “Sorry, mate, bit of an odd character, that one. We don’t even know his name. So we call him Naipul, after the only celebrity from his homeland. Kind of like how people call me Croc. You’ll have to be Björn, I guess.” Only in the fluorescent light did I notice that his pupils were wide open, as if he were staring into the sun. “I was just about to leave anyway,” I mumbled. “Shame, I actually needed your help with something,” he said, suddenly sober. I almost expected a business card and a pitch, but he only patted me on the shoulder, as if no words were needed, since we understood each other so well, as if we’d played this scene before and never forgot our lines. “We’ll sort it next time, Björn,” he said, and winked. It took several seconds for the wrinkle around his eye to ease.

Note: Parts of the opening sentences are borrowed from an essay by Eric Schüldt. He has approved my use of them.

If you want to read the next chapter, and the still unwritten, you have to be a paid subscriber to The Bagatelles.

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Thank you for reading.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

This dispatch went out to 1,230 readers across 69 countries. If it resonated with you, consider sharing it with a friend who might feel the same, leaving a comment, or recommending it on your own Substack.

A warm thank you to the 14 sponsors of The Bagatelles. Your belief in my work keeps me going, and as a paid subscriber you have access to all long-form content, including the novel Zenopolis, all chapters of Naïveté Travels, and my work in progress: Bardo Noir.

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✦✧ Looking for the archive? You can find every post here.