Henrik Ibsen wrote a long poem (later made into a play), called Peer Gynt, in the late 1800’s. The story is about a Norwegian man, Peer, going about his shallow life and eventually face death.

There’s real neat analogy in this story, not sure if Ibsen made it up himself, or if it’s from a Norwegian myth; later in the story, a Devil comes along and he’s looking for souls to take home to hell. The devil says souls have negatives which he processes to make pictures. They’re 3 different kinds people he says, and they produce different pictures. A good person who has been true to oneself produces high quality pictures of good things (these people’s picture, God wants). A bad person who has been true to oneself produces high quality pictures of evil things (these are the kinds that the Devil wants). Then there’s the third kind, people like Peer, whose life of imitation and shallow thoughts and feelings, produce pictures that are fuzzy. What happens to these people is that they are melted and remolded into something else, and their fuzzy memory gets erased.

It was real exciting to find this, a writer from 1800’s use photographs as a metaphor. I’m writing about my pod theory -(I introduced it in a previous post), so it feels like I found a distant friend. Yay!