"It is as well perhaps that this is not the first time I have been swept off my feet. In the days of my blessed youth there were such occasions; in what young person's life do they not occur?"
About this Quote
A little vanity slips in under the guise of humility: the speaker admits to being “swept off my feet,” then quickly domesticates the confession by treating it as a repeatable, almost routine event. The line performs a neat rhetorical dodge. It grants emotion without surrendering control, and it does so by leaning on age as alibi. If this isn’t the first time, then it’s not a scandal; if it happened in “blessed youth,” then it’s practically a rite of passage rather than an indictment of judgment.
Hamsun’s phrasing is doing double work. “Blessed youth” romanticizes the past while quietly putting it at a safe distance, as if ardor belongs to an earlier, forgiven version of the self. Then comes the sly universalizing: “in what young person’s life do they not occur?” It’s a question that pretends to be generous but actually pressures the reader into agreement. If you resist, you’re either dishonest or inhuman. The move is classic Hamsun: psychology framed as inevitability, personal impulse presented as common weather.
Context matters because Hamsun’s fiction often treats feeling not as a moral compass but as a destabilizing force - a gust that reorganizes status, self-respect, and rational plans. The subtext here is not simply nostalgia; it’s self-justification. The speaker wants permission to be undone again, while maintaining the dignity of someone who has seen this movie before. The charm is in that tension: desire rebranded as experience, weakness recast as proof of having lived.
Hamsun’s phrasing is doing double work. “Blessed youth” romanticizes the past while quietly putting it at a safe distance, as if ardor belongs to an earlier, forgiven version of the self. Then comes the sly universalizing: “in what young person’s life do they not occur?” It’s a question that pretends to be generous but actually pressures the reader into agreement. If you resist, you’re either dishonest or inhuman. The move is classic Hamsun: psychology framed as inevitability, personal impulse presented as common weather.
Context matters because Hamsun’s fiction often treats feeling not as a moral compass but as a destabilizing force - a gust that reorganizes status, self-respect, and rational plans. The subtext here is not simply nostalgia; it’s self-justification. The speaker wants permission to be undone again, while maintaining the dignity of someone who has seen this movie before. The charm is in that tension: desire rebranded as experience, weakness recast as proof of having lived.
Quote Details
| Topic | Romantic |
|---|
More Quotes by Knut
Add to List
