the curiosity engine 1

Here’s a quote from Hans
Christian Anderson’s novel The Improvisatore

One moonlit evening, on returning with my mother from a visit in Trastevere, we found a crowd in the Piazza di Trevi, listening to a man singing to a guitar- not songs like those which I had so often heard, but about things around him, of what we saw and heard, and we ourselves were in the song. My mother told me he was an improvisatore and Federigo, our artist lodger,
told me I should also improvise, for I was really a poet. And I tried it forthwith-singing about the food shop over the way, with its attractively set out window and the haggling customers. I gained much applause; and from this time forth I turned everything into song.

Hans Christian Andersen spent most of 1848 feeling sorry
for himself. It was not an unusual state for this hypersensitive hypochondriac,
with his conflicted sexuality and his tortured awareness of his own genius. He
had been flung into a gloom that January by the death of King Christian VIII of
Denmark, “whom I loved unspeakably”, and had been unable to shake himself out
of the depression.

The whole world knows that Hans Christian Andersen was
the son of a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman, who through his own efforts and
the kindness of strangers raised himself from the gutter to become a great
poet.

Andersen himself called this
rags-to-riches story “the fairytale of my life”. But fairytale characters
are not always what they seem. At the end of Adam Oehlenschläger’s play Aladdin, a favourite of Andersen’s, it turns out that Aladdin is not the son of a poor tailor, but instead the son of an emir. Andersen’s childish imagination cast himself in the same scenario; he
was, he told his first school friend, a switched child of noble birth.

It is not an uncommon fantasy;
just the sort of thing to expect from a solitary and dreamy boy such as Hans Christian Andersen. But in Andersen’s case it is just possible that behind the consoling fantasy lies the naked truth.

Rumours about Andersen’s true
parentage have swirled around Denmark for a century or more. The most persistent, championed in books published there by Jens Jørgensen and Rolf Dorset, is that he was the illegitimate son of Countess Elise Ahlefeldt-Laurvig
by Crown Prince Christian Frederik, the future King Christian VIII. If true, it
was not just Andersen’s king who died that January, but also his father.

Themes:

§
Being switched at birth and being brought up unaware of
one’s ascendancy[1].

§
Learning to create spontaneously with the world around.
Making up stories/songs/plays in the moment.

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[1] as·cend·an·cy–noun

the state of being in the ascendant; governing or controlling influence; domination.

Also,
as·cend·en·cy, as·cend·ance, as·cend·ence.

[Origin: 1705–15; ascend(ant) + -ancy]

—Synonyms primacy, predominance, command, sovereignty,
mastery, supremacy.

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