Johannes V. Jensen
From Philosopedia
Jensen, Johannes Vilhelm (20 January 1873 - 25 November 1950)
The son of a veterinary surgeon, Jensen was born in Farso, North Jutland, Denmark.
Jensen’s Danish novel, The Fall of the King (1900—1901), has been termed by Faith Ingwersen a chilling masterpiece “in which all human aspirations seem ridiculous in view of the very brevity of human life. A human being’s fate, as shown through the symbol of grinding millstones, is simply to be smashed to bits—into nothingness.”
Life, the author warns his readers, is to be accepted in all its beautiful banality, for that is all there is.
Not only did Jensen reject Christianity but also he rejected the melancholy atheism that turns some people into fatalist or nihilists. Adds Ingwersen, Jensen “denounced Friedrich Nietzsche, as well, for being a grand and dangerous seducer who distracts the human mind from this very real world of facts.”
Jensen, who won a 1944 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote a variety of works and is called "the first great Danish writer of the 20th century."
