The Grand Theme and Other Essays

The Grand Themeand Other Essays is a book of lyrical and critical essays that explores Anders Hallengren’s long-standing interest in the powerful legacy of his fellow countryman, Emanuel Swedenborg. The collection highlights Swedenborg’s diverse influence upon the fields of psychology, art, poetry, history, and music, variously describing Ralph Waldo Emerson and August Strindberg in Paris, court artists in Moscow, visionary composers in Stockholm, Surrealist poets in Mauritius, revolutionary heroes in Cuba, and Linneanists in Botany Bay.
 
The collection contains the following eight essays:
 
• “Verisimilitude and the Portrait of an Angel: On the Fortunes of a Swedish-Russian artist” (on painter Carl August Tholander)
• “The Grand Theme: A Journey in the Musical Universe” (on composer Tommie Haglund, music, and classical philosophy)
• “An Angle of Vision”(on Swedenborg’s clairvoyance)
• “The Heart of the Matter” (on Swedenborg’s influence on psychology)
• “In the Garden of God” (on Swedenborg’s and Carl Linnaeus’s influence in Australia)
• “Jardin des Plantes: The Most Important Place on Earth’” (on Swedenborg, Emerson, Strindberg, and Honoré de Balzac in Paris)
• “In the Shadow of Le Morne Brabant” (on Swedenborgianism in Mauritius)
• “The Oceanic Mind” (on Swedenborgianism in Cuba)