Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

  Foto: Niels Halds Fabelverden There are fantastically gifted and fantastically  productive artists who never sell anything in their lifetime. This is usually considered a tragedy. We are not so sure. On a recent visit to one of our oldest friends, we noticed some strange glazed creatures on her shelf - half mythology and half joke, lined up as if waiting for someone to ask. She told us there were maybe a thousand more in a house and garden up in Thy, in northern Jutland. All made by her younger brother, Niels. And he never sold a single one. Niels Hald started drawing almost as soon as he could hold a pencil, and his parents recognized the talent early and never once tried to talk him out of it. He had no formal training, but was inspired by long stays in India, Nepal, and Central America, before he eventually settled in Thy - a stretch of Jutland known mostly for its wind, its emptiness, and its refusal to be picturesque about either. Here he took over an old c...

The view is entirely different now, though the gray, as it happens, is exactly the same. The apartment on Ile Saint Louis - and the elusive agents immobiliers we argued with for months - have receded into the blurry mental space reserved for unfinished things.  We were so close this time finding our Parisian pied-a-terre. It was a small glass-roofed studio in an inner courtyard of a 17th century mansion, just steps from the Seine, where the noon light fell straight down through the panes and made you feel as if you would be living inside a lantern in the very heart of Paris.  We had practically measured the walls for books. But the dream of that apartment did not end because of a failed negotiation. It dissolved the moment the phone rang on a Tuesday morning, pulling us twelve hundred kilometers north to this corner of Jutland. Now we are in Strandby - in the house belonging to Rita's mother. She is ninety-five, and she lives here alone - or she did, until a few d...