Siblings...

Ingmar Bergman wrote in one of his books about a meeting with his four year older brother Dag… A meeting between two older men, who had grown apart and had nothing in common. Two complete strangers who had grown up together and shared so much then (their mother's love-affair with a ten year younger man and colleague to their father, which noone spoke about and a lot else), but had nothing to talk about - at all, now as old. The silence was compact? There you could talk of the Wall of Silence?? They had developed in totally different directions (Dag Bergman, the ambassadeur, died fairly early, at 70 years. He was born Oktober 23, 1914 and died December 10, 1984. They had a sister Margaretha born 1922).

Something I think Bergman noted with amazement…

I have also thought for a while: how would the (whole) society react if a woman got nine children with six different men and didn’t take care of them but left them to the mothers?? And entirely devoted herself to the work and to be the best there…

Bergman said that his personal life was an entire catastrophe, but he tried to measure it up by trying to become the best workman…

And if I don’t go further than to my own work: for how many male musicians (and maybe all artists) haven’t work work/the playing/music come in first hand? Entirely? And with no thoughts or guilt feelings? I came to think of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein… He admitted that his (very long) life had been about “wine, women and gesang”!!! How sad if he had sacrificed his talent!!??

But through history there are many male composers who never married or got children: Tjajkovsky, Mendelsohn, Beethoven, Schubert…

Bergman made the film “Autumn Sonata” (“Höstsonaten”) about a female pianist which abandoned her two daughters and the very neurotic and tense relation between the mother and her daughters when they met after many years again…

But what film would it have been if it had been about a male pianist abandoning his children? Wouldn’t it have been entirely different? Why you can wonder about?

And I also came to think how one has viewed things: the work-responsibilities were more important than how the man/father was as father!! So what he did at work was worth to get paid enormously - sometimes!! How one values parenthood, children, human beings…

About Ingmar Bergman's father Erik Bergman. But his mother wasn't actress as it stands in Wikipedia, but nurse.

The female Swedish bishop Caroline Krook in Stockholm about Ingmar Bergman and his influences on the Swedish church.

Addition August 12: cow- (or lingon-) berries from the wood... There are may of them too!!