Daybook: Swedish Musings 1967-1969

Some would call them journal entries, but these Swedish musings are less so than stray thoughts now and then jotted down in the black notebooks I always carried with me at the time (and which I thought of as daybooks, hence the title).

I was eighteen years old in the summer of 1967 when I began these musings, and I kept them up through the summer of 1969 (when I left Sweden for Africa and places beyond).

In the mid-1970s, on a long ferry ride from Gothenburg to England, I read through these daybooks and typed up (again in Swedish) a generous extract of these musings. Twenty years on I translated these extracts into English—a rough one, as translations go.

In this collection I have made no serious attempt to analyze or clarify the feelings and thoughts behind these entries, but I have, on occasion, clarified and expanded the entries themselves where and as needed the better to let them say what—as it now seems to me—they want to say.

I’ve also corrected what translation errors I stumbled across.

Most of the original entries were undated and I have made no attempt here to date them. I have, however, done my best to sequence them as truthfully as possible, and wherever there is a date, I have included it.

The two sections: Before and After, reference a deeply significant spiritual experience that I had in the early fall of 1968.

This experience was profound. It changed everything.

Everything.