Vägmärken

The journal was discovered after his death, with a covering letter to his literary executor, "a sort of White Book concerning my negotiations with myself – and with God.

[4] As van Dusen writes: "His last night had been spent in the residency of Sture Linner, head of the United Nations mission to the Congo.

He left there the copy of the German original of Ich und Du (I and Thou) presented to him by Martin Buber and the first dozen pages of his translation into Swedish...Beside the bed was the cherished copy of Thomas à Kempis' The Imitation of Christ which was always on the table of his New York City apartment next to his bed where the manuscript of Markings was found.

The last entry of Markings is dated 24 August 1961: "Is it a new country/In another world of reality/Than Day's?/Or did I live there/Before Day was?/ I awoke/To an ordinary morning with grey light/Reflected from the street,/But still remembered/The dark-blue night/Above the tree line,/The open moor in moonlight,/The crest in shadow,/Remembered other dreams/Of the same mountain country:/Twice I stood on its summits,/I stayed by its remotest lake,/And followed the river/Towards its source./The seasons have changed/And the light/And the weather/And the hour./But it is the same land./And I begin to know the map/And to get my bearings.

"[9] Markings was described by the late theologian Henry P. Van Dusen as "the noblest self-disclosure of spiritual struggle and triumph, perhaps the greatest testament of personal faith written ... in the heat of professional life and amidst the most exacting responsibilities for world peace and order.

"[13] Markings is characterised by Hammarskjöld's intermingling of prose and haiku poetry in a manner exemplified by the 17th-century Japanese poet Basho in his Narrow Roads to the Deep North.

It is also an historical document of the first importance as an account—and I cannot myself recall another—of the attempt by a professional man of action to unite in one life the Via Activa and the Via Contemplativa.