The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Brigge admits that he is afraid. He is scared to be taken to a hospital, as he is sure that he would die there. Funeral carriages are seen frequently on the streets of Paris and people are forced to reckon with their own deaths on a daily basis. Death seems to Brigge to be merely a prelude to an inevitable funeral and "the array of amazing rituals that come with it" (51). For the poor, funerals are a case of finding the best, most affordable solution.

Brigge is from Denmark. When he thinks about home, however, he fears that no one is left. He thinks about how his family members all carried their deaths inside them, "as the fruit contains its kernel" (51). Brigge's grandfather, in his final days, was carried from room to room by his servants and followed everywhere by his dogs. When he died, the voice of the man who had "demanded, and screamed" (52) every day was replaced by a terrible silence that affected everyone in the community. The death rules over the community "like a king" (53).

When Brigge thinks about other people who have died, he reflects on how they have borne their deaths within themselves. They carry their deaths while alive, so that the manner of their death reflects the way in which they led their lives. Brigge sits up all night writing. He does this to deliberately exhaust himself as a way to "combat [his] fear" (54). Now, someone else is living in his grandfather's old manor house and he is just a poor nobody.

On a lovely autumn morning, Brigge walks through a public garden and enjoys the way the bright sun shines on the light mist. He sees a tall, smiling man carrying – but not using – a crutch. Brigge thinks about how light can alter his perception of the world around him. One day, he observes a woman pushing a handcart, on top of which is a barrel-organ. When the woman turns the organ handle, her son stamps on his box and makes his sister shake her tambourine.

Brigge is 28 years old, and he thinks about how "virtually nothing" (55) has happened in his life. He has written a few things but without success. He feels that he lacks the experience and maturity to write good poetry, as this is only possible at the end of one's life. The play Brigge wrote, he explains, was guilty of needing a third party to expose the division between the two central characters. He was not confident enough in his writing to allow this division to be evident in its own right. Sitting in his room on the fifth floor, Brigge wonders whether the whole of humanity—not just him—has yet to see, recognize, or say "anything real or important" (56). History may have been misunderstood, he speculates, meaning that no one has ever said anything that delves below the surface level of life. Someone, he believes, must "do something about what's been neglected" (57). Since no one else seems to have noticed the problem, Brigge accepts the responsibility.

Brigge recalls his childhood. At the age of 12 or 13, his father takes him to Urnekloster to see Brigge's maternal grandfather, Count Brahe. Brigge's father and Count Brahe have not seen one another since the death of Brigge's mother, some years before. Count Brahe lived in a castle, but Brigge now only remembers this "remarkable house" (57) as a series of disconnected rooms. Each night, the family dines together by candlelight. The darkness of the surrounding room nauseates the young Brigge, who turns to his father for strength even though they share only a "cool" (58) relationship. Count Brahe, Brigge, and Brigge's father are joined by Brigge's uncle, an older male relation to whom his precise relationship is obscured. The uncle is retired and has developed an interest in alchemy and experiments. Rumors suggest that he is buying corpses and then "dissecting and preparing them in a mysterious manner so that they would resist decay" (58). They are also joined by Miss Mathilde Brahe, a distant cousin of Brigge's mother with an interest in spiritualism, and the frail, small, young son of a cousin named Erik. Brigge spends most of his days wandering the estate with the family dogs. He shares his family's taciturn nature and is surprised by Mathilde's forthright desire to talk constantly. When Count Brahe does speak, he talks about Brigge's mother as though she were still a little girl. To the Count, death is a "minor incident that he [disregards] entirely" (60). He continues to remember people exactly as they were when they were alive so that their deaths make little difference to the way he discusses them. To Brigge's surprise, a ghost interrupts one dinner. A "slim woman dressed in light colors" (60) enters the room and passes silently beyond the table to a door on the other side. Brigge's father is shocked and his face turns "white as a sheet" (61). The Count and the other guests do not react. Later, Brigge learns that this is the ghost of Christine Brahe who died in childbirth. Brigge and his father stay for several more months. They see Christine's ghost three times and, on the final occasion, Brigge's father overcomes his fear and—at the Count's suggestion—raises his glass to Christine. That night, Brigge and his father leave the castle.