SUMMER

KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD

With illustrations by Anselm Kiefer

Translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey

Lawn Sprinklers

That I have my own lawn sprinkler has never quite dawned on me, it was just one of the many things I acquired when we bought this house, like the lawnmower, the garden shears, the rakes and all the other equipment that belongs in a garden. Though I have fastened the hose to the tap in the porch of the summer house countless times, have heard the water first hiss, then rush through the hose, and then seen the thin jets of water rise in the garden, maybe five metres into the air, often glittering in the sunlight, and, slowly wavering, fall to one side, before rising again and falling to the other side, in a movement that has always made me think of a waving hand, I have never connected it with myself or my life, as if what it represents doesn’t represent me, or in other words that the life I lead here isn’t really mine, but merely something I happen to be doing right now. To draw such a far-reaching conclusion from something as insignificant as a metal arm full of holes through which water flows may seem overblown, but of all the things I remember from the summers when I was growing up, the lawn sprinkler is the most emblematic, it is the single object around which the greatest number of moods and events cluster in my memory and which evokes the most associations. Every household in the development had a lawn sprinkler, and all of them were of the same type, so that these fine, glittering arcs of water could be seen everywhere on summer days when the sun was shining. Often the lawns they stood on were deserted, as if the sprinklers led their own independent existence, like some large friendly water-based creatures. When water landed on the lawn the sound was nearly inaudible, nothing more than a fine light sprinkle, which might be drowned out by the rushing noise from the hose or from the tap if the hose wasn’t screwed on tightly, while the sound could rise to a rustle or even a patter if the sprinkler was positioned so the water struck the leaves of trees or shrubs. These sounds, which rose and fell seemingly methodically and patiently, as if from some painstaking labour, and which also contributed to the feeling that the arc of water was an independent being, could last all day and into the evening, unaffected by the other activities of the residents, sometimes even throughout the night, though that was rare, for some reason or other it wasn’t thought proper to water the garden in the dark. At our house my father was in command of the sprinkler, I can’t remember ever seeing my mother moving it or turning the water on or off, though I don’t know why this was so. The tap was in the basement laundry room and the hose ran out into the garden through the narrow rectangular basement window, which on the inside was high up, right beneath the ceiling, while outside it was low down, just above the ground. That the window couldn’t be properly shut while Dad was watering produced a faint ache in me, while on the other hand the window’s different height above the ground inside and outside the house exerted a magical pull. The arc of water in all its aspects, visual and auditive as well as its usefulness in the garden, represented something unconditionally good. That I myself am now master of a sprinkler and both turn it on and move it around unaided, in my own garden, ought therefore to mean something to me, if not a lot, at least a little, since the life which back then I only observed – the life of grown men and women – has now become mine, something I no longer regard from the outside but fill from within. It doesn’t, I take no particular joy in turning on the sprinkler, no more than I find pleasure in buttering a slice of bread or taking off my shoes as I enter the house. Now it is the world of the child that I observe from the outside, and what more fitting image for this asymmetry in life could there be than the basement window, which is at once high up beneath the ceiling and low down near the ground?

Chestnut Trees

We have a chestnut tree in the garden, it stands in the corner between the two houses and towers more than twenty metres into the air, maybe as many as twenty-five. The longest branches extend at least ten metres from the trunk, and one of the first things I did when we moved here was to saw off the bottom ones, since some of them partially blocked the path between the houses while others had grown across the roof and rested upon it. But even though this chestnut tree is so large – from a distance that is what one sees of the property, not the roofs – and though I have climbed it and sawed into it, I never really noticed it, never thought about it. It was as if it didn’t exist. Now it seems inconceivable that I have lived side by side with such a huge creature for five years without really seeing it. What kind of a phenomenon is that, to see without seeing? Presumably it comes about because the thing one sees doesn’t stick. But what do the things we really see stick to? We say that something gives meaning, as if meaning is something we receive as a gift, but actually I think it is the other way round, it is we who give meaning to what we see. And this chestnut tree, which I am looking at as I sit here writing, I didn’t give any meaning to. It was there and I knew it was there, it wasn’t like I bumped into it on my way between the houses, but it meant nothing to me and therefore had no real existence.

What happened is that this spring and summer I have been studying paintings by the artist Edvard Munch. I’ve looked at all his paintings, again and again, and I’ve become familiar with most of them. He painted several chestnut trees, and there was one painting in particular that struck me. It depicts a chestnut tree on a city street and is painted almost impressionistically, in the sense that all surfaces appear as colours rather than as solid objects, they are more for the eye than for the hand, more for the instant than to endure. The chestnut is blossoming and its white flowers are painted like little posts amid all the green, where they shine like lamps. When I look out at the chestnut tree beyond my window, nothing about its flowers resembles the flowers Munch painted – they don’t look like vertical lines but like little puffs of white arranged in four or five tiers, and they are not pure white but tinged with beige and brown. And yet it was Munch’s painting which, when our tree began to blossom at the end of May, made me understand for the first time that a chestnut tree was standing there. The same thing happened with the trees that grow along the pavement on the road into the centre of Ystad, the one that runs along the railway tracks in the harbour, where the big ferries to Poland and Bornholm rear up. But they’re chestnut trees, I thought when they began to bloom. And it wasn’t the name that made the difference, it wasn’t that now I could say that they were chestnuts whereas before I hadn’t known – for I had, I knew all the time what kind of trees they were – it was something else, the chestnut trees now occupied an intimate place in my mind. And I think it is this intimacy we mean when we talk about authenticity. For intimacy radically suspends distance, which is the central element of every theory of alienation advanced in the last century, and which remains an active force in our yearning for the tangible, which we feel to be closer to reality. The opposing poles are not modernism and anti-modernism, progress and retrogression, these are merely the consequences of the balance between intimacy and non-intimacy, a question of where we place the emphasis, and that in turn depends on what we have use for and what we want from our lives. Do we want to take the chestnut tree in, do we want to see it and let it occupy a place within us, do we want to feel its presence every time we pass it, its very own place within reality? What the chestnut tree articulates, what it expresses, is nothing other than itself. And perhaps the same is true of us, that what we articulate, what we express, is nothing other than ourselves? A particular presence in a particular place at a particular time? More and more that is how I think about it, that thoughts are just something coursing through me, feelings are just something coursing through me, and that I might just as easily have been someone else; the crucial thing isn’t who I am but that I am, and the same holds for the chestnut tree, standing there outside the window right now, towering silently amid its whorl of green leaves and white flowers.

Short Trousers

I am wearing short trousers today, they are moss green and reach to just above my knees, and although they are more comfortable than long trousers in the heat, there is something faintly unpleasant about them, it is as if they make me smaller, as if I am too old for them. The very term, short trousers, is infantile in its simple descriptiveness, like a word a child might have come up with, akin to foot ball, tree house, sand box, see saw. If instead I write that I am wearing shorts today, it feels somewhat less childish, and if I add that they are army green it no longer sounds like I am dressed in the outfit of a ten-year-old, more like a young man in his early twenties heading for a music festival. In the mid-1990s I read a novel which made a big impression on me, and which gave form to certain inclinations and zones within me that had remained undefined until then. The novel was The Child in Time by the British author Ian McEwan. The main narrative is about the greatest fear of all parents, a child who goes missing, but what stayed in my mind was one of the novel’s parallel stories, about regression and infantility – a man, who as far as I can remember was a member of parliament, regresses to his childhood, he dresses in short trousers and begins to climb trees, builds tree houses in them, plays the games he played as a boy. It seemed grotesque to me, for his fall was completely stripped of dignity to an extent and in a way quite different from a descent into alcoholism or drug addiction. At the same time it held a certain allure for me, for not only was I filled with a powerful nostalgia for everything to do with my childhood – the smell of melting snow and the sight of the white ice banks from which water trickled into the road beneath a foggy sky, for example, might produce a yearning to return to the time when I experienced the same thing as a child, so strong that it hurt – I also longed to be taken care of as I had been then. Not explicitly, the longing wasn’t even articulated until I read The Child in Time, and all these vague, unacknowledged emotions flowed into the novel’s mould so that I could see them from the outside as something objectively existing in the world. The grotesque side of it was also apparent to me. The adult who wants to be a child is even more grotesque than the old person who wants to be young, an insight I had used to write my first novel, in which the longing to be a child again is transformed into longing for a child – I remembered the intense feelings my very first infatuations produced in me when I was still in primary school, and I let my protagonist go there, into that zone, and fall in love with a child. Now all these yearnings and feelings seem peculiar, and when I put on short trousers this morning, since it looked like it would be another hot day, I felt a little jolt of distaste, for there is something life-denying about always looking backwards, and I had to tell myself, it’s just a piece of clothing that lets you go about bare-legged. But although the nostalgia has passed, or has been weakened to the point where it is no longer recognisable, I know that there are other such unconscious inclinations and patterns within me – my whole adult life, for instance, I have entered into relationships that resemble those I was in while I was growing up, so that the person I loved came to hold the same position my father had had, as someone I wanted to placate, someone I wanted to satisfy, whom I also feared and could be spellbound by – and becoming an adult is perhaps primarily to liberate oneself from these patterns by becoming aware of them and acknowledging them, so that one can live in harmony with the person one is or wants to be, not the person one was or wanted to be in the past. The advantage of maintaining the old patterns is that they feel safe, regardless of how painful or destructive they may be. Freedom is unsafe, when one is free anything can happen, and one of the paradoxes of life, at least one of the paradoxes of my life, is that now, as I head into a free and open existence, I no longer have any use for freedom, it was during the first part of my life, until I reached my forties, while all possibilities still lay ahead of me, that I had use for it and could have enjoyed it. For what use is freedom to a middle-aged man in short trousers?

Cats

Yesterday afternoon the head of a hare lay on the lawn beneath the chestnut tree. Its eyes were gone and the face was mangled, so only the long ears allowed me to identify it as a hare. The cat had got it, it was the second hare it had killed in two days, with the same modus operandi, a torn-off head with eyes missing and bloodied fur left in the garden. As I write this the cat is sitting on the windowsill looking into the house and waiting for someone inside to get up, notice it and let it in. It is a Siberian forest cat with long grey-black fur and a bushy tail whom the woman we bought it from called Amaga, which is still her name. Amaga likes to sleep in enclosed spaces, the narrower the better, it seems – crates, boxes, suitcases, prams – but she will also snuggle up on windowsills, stairs, beds, sofas and chairs. More than anything, she lives like a tenant of the house, she comes and goes as she pleases, eats her own food in a special place, sleeps the days away, is out all night. Occasionally acquaintances of hers come to call, sometimes I see them sitting in the garden waiting for her to come out. In the literature the character of her breed is described as sensitive and resourceful, and while the description seems excessively anthropomorphic, it matches my impression of her fairly well. We had several cats while I was growing up and they each had distinct personalities, from the wary but mild-mannered Sofi, a grey long-haired Norwegian forest cat, to her daughter Mefisto, also long-haired, completely black and both more elegant and more devoted than her mother, to her son Lasse, who was impulsive, undisciplined and markedly more dull-witted than his progenitor. He would begin to purr if you so much as looked at him, was never properly house-trained and loved to be petted. Petting was clearly the high point of his existence, he tried to turn it into orgies of bodily contact, his nose would run, he pushed his paws in and out with their claws extended, he turned over on his back, splayed his legs, rubbed himself against everything within reach. Lasse had no dignity and no integrity, and when he tried to chase Mefisto away and take over the house, he was eventually taken to the vet, where he met his fate. Amaga is Lasse’s complete opposite, she has total integrity, and if she is as wary as Sofi was, she is nowhere near as mild-mannered. There is something sharp in her character, noticeable even when she surrenders herself, for if she purrs and closes her eyes when she is petted, the watchfulness never entirely leaves her; at any moment she might twist around, jump to her feet and leap to the floor to walk off by herself. When we got a dog two years ago, the first thing she did was attack it, she scratched it near the eye so that blood ran down its snout, and from that moment the dog was terrified of her, she ruled it entirely. The baby girl we had had the year before she didn’t pay any attention to at first, but when the girl began to walk and toddled after the cat, she would lower herself turtle-like towards the floor and run off, as she always does when she senses danger. ‘The tack, the tack!’ the girl would shout – that was her word for cat, which was felicitous, since tack means ‘thanks’ in Swedish, so that whenever I saw her I could point to her and say, ‘There’s gratitude for you!’ – and try to grab her by the tail. She rarely succeeded, since Amaga was so much faster than her and just slunk away, except when she was sleeping, and if we didn’t get over there quickly enough then, Amaga would hiss at her, and if that didn’t deter the little girl, she would scratch her. It happened twice, and now she has respect for the tack, no longer throws things at it, doesn’t grab its tail, but likes to pet it, which the cat lets her do although I don’t think she gets much enjoyment out of it, for she lies there with watchful eyes, looking somewhat tense as the small hand strokes her soft and often tangled fur. The self-control Amaga displays then is admirable, considering the torn-off heads, the gorging on blood and gouging out of eyes that her instincts can lead her to at other times. In fact, through living with cats I have come to wonder what instincts really are. I used to think they were a form of automated actions, something preprogrammed and ineluctable in animals, separate from what little they had in the way of thoughts and emotions, and that taming animals meant implanting a different system in them, just as automatic, which caused their instincts to be held back or channelled into other directions. And that the instincts of large carnivores such as lions and tigers were more powerful and might therefore more easily break down the wall that their taming had erected, so that without warning they might attack those who had tamed them, who fed and sheltered them, and tear them to pieces. We can call it instinct, we can call it nature, we can call it the animals’ essential being. But when I see a lion or a tiger in a zoo somewhere I never get the feeling that they are ruled by what we call instincts, that they are in thrall to their instincts and thus confined to a limited number of possible reactions. It is more as if they do as they please, that they never consider or judge any action, they just act. That the decisive difference between us and them isn’t that we think while animals don’t, but that we have morals and they don’t. I am certain that Amaga has sized us up, that she knows who we are, the six members of the family that lives in her house. I am also certain that she sees us as some sort of large, stupid cats, slow and dim-witted, and if she doesn’t think that she is superior to us, I am certain she feels it with her whole being.

Campsites

Campsites are delimited areas set off for overnight stays, usually outside cities or small towns, often in the vicinity of beaches or other recreation grounds, where in exchange for payment travellers can spend the night in their own tents or caravans. Other than the small pitch of a few square metres that the owners of the tent or caravan has at their disposal for as long as they have paid for, the campsite also offers visitors certain common facilities, such as toilets, showers, a kiosk where basic necessities are sold, often a playground for the children, and if it is well appointed, a swimming pool. The campsite is akin to the hotel, which is also a place where travellers spend the night, but while the hotel demands that one relinquishes one’s own habitual existence and for a few hours lives one’s life in an unfamiliar room, which over the years has been occupied by hundreds or thousands of people who have all subordinated themselves to its four walls and for a few hours allowed themselves to be framed by their unfamiliarity, the campsite accommodates travellers’ desire for independence by allowing them to erect their own homes and thus to establish an intimate, homely zone amid the unfamiliar. One might think that this possibility of remaining independent would be considered superior to the lack of independence of the hotel, that in our so-called individualistic age we would value the freedom of the campsite more than the constraints of the hotel, but that’s not how it is, the campsite has a low status, and it has been decreasing for several decades. The reason is a simple but hidden and perhaps even deliberately concealed fact: money and freedom are opposing entities. The diminishing status of the campsite has coincided with the rise of market liberalism and privatisation, and money establishes differences between things, it grades and demarcates in a system that restricts access to the world and in which whatever cannot be assigned monetary value is relegated to the outside, so that openness is directly linked with worthlessness. The freedom of the wanderer, the person who goes wherever he wants and sleeps where he happens to find himself, now exists only among the homeless, who occupy the lowest rung of society’s ladder, while driving around from place to place carrying one’s own dwelling and one’s own food, which in one sense opens up the world and retains a remnant of the freedom of the wanderer, isn’t considered enviable either. Just think of the Roma people and their status in society. Thus there is a scale, from the homeless person who sleeps on benches and in gateways, in parks and woods on the outskirts of cities, to the person who lives in an enormous apartment or house, secured with alarms and by guards at the entrance. It is therefore unthinkable that a man like the Norwegian billionaire businessman Kjell Inge Røkke, who comes from a working-class family but is now one of the richest men in the country, would spend his holidays in a caravan, even though he may have done so with his family when he was growing up and thus knows well the smell of dewy tent canvas in the evening and the safe but also exciting feeling of falling asleep to the sound of low voices from outside other tents, where women and men are sitting in their camping chairs, chatting in the gathering darkness of the summer night. The joy of being on the road, for the next day the tent will be dismantled, the luggage will be stowed away in the boot, you will head on to the next campsite, where you never know what you will find: will there be a pool? Will they sell soft ice cream? Will there be other children the same age as you? Will there be trampolines? Is it by the sea, with a sandy beach? Is it by a river, is it near the forest, in the mountains, next to a field where bellicose bulls are grazing? I still remember the excitement of family camping trips in my childhood, in the 1970s when camping was the most common form of holidaymaking and one could see heavily loaded cars lined along the roads next to unfolded camping tables and cooler bags, in an age when it wasn’t yet considered shameful to bring your own home-cooked food (which stands in the same relation to the restaurant as the tent does to the hotel) simply because people then had less money. Campsites still exist, but since people have more money now, the logical thing has happened: slowly the mobile tents and caravans became less and less mobile, gardens sprang up around them, they became filled with conveniences and knick-knacks, TVs and computers, refrigerators and dryers, and became more and more like ordinary homes, into which their transformation has now become complete, so that campsites are now places where people live half the year, fenced in and enclosed and immobile, and the only things which remind one of displacement and mobility are the wheels of the huge caravans, which no longer bring freedom but are merely symbols of freedom. These campsites embody a sort of congealed longing, not unlike the posture of the poet in his tower writing about the open and the free.

Summer Night

One night I sat on a hotel terrace with the woman I loved, we had just been downtown, where we had eaten at a restaurant. I had been uncommunicative and troubled, she had tried to get me to snap out of it but had finally given up, so that we had sat there as two silent people who spoke only once in a long while, to break the silence when it became too oppressive. We had been sitting outside in a yard, rose bushes grew along the fence, the roses were big and blood red. The sky above us had been blue, the roofs of the houses around us shone golden red in the sunlight. The mood at the other tables was good, many had finished their meals and sat relaxing with legs outstretched drinking coffee or wine while they chatted and let their hands toy with something on the table, a box of toothpicks, a glass of cognac, a coffee cup. We paid, the waiter ordered a taxi for us, it happened to be a minibus, and as it tore through the streets leading out of the little town it was as if we, what we were together, disappeared between all the seats. The hotel lay at the end of a long tree-lined avenue, on a low rise above the channel. Our room, which we had hardly been in since we arrived late that afternoon, was white, decorated in nautical style, with a view of the sea. She ran water into the bath, which was so big that there was room for two side by side. I turned off the lights, and we lay down in the warm water. The sun had gone down, but the sky outside was still light and hovered over the dark channel. A big tree stood black and silent on one side, and above it shone a single star. It must be a planet, I said. Yes, it must be, she said. Are we friends? I said. Of course we’re friends, she said. We made love in the bedroom, got dressed and went downstairs to the restaurant, where the door to the terrace stood open. The restaurant was empty, the bartender was tidying up, jazz playing low over the sound system. We went out on the veranda and sat down at a table. The water in the channel lay perfectly still. On the light sky several stars had appeared, and behind the three old trees, which looked like a single tree from where we sat, the moon was rising. I couldn’t see it, only a shining yellow column on the dark water between the leaves, but I knew it was full. A bat flittered through the air. Except for the low music in the bar, the hotel was silent. Everyone was asleep. Down by the water a duck quacked a few times. From the other side of the channel, where a forest grew all the way down to the water’s edge, another bird emitted a long, hissing noise. Then everything became quiet again. I turned my head and looked towards the little town where we had just been. Its lights shone and glittered, surrounded by darkness beneath the light sky. It was a magical night. After a while we got up and walked down the path to the water, the last stretch of a long flight of steps. A wooden pier extended into the water, at the end of it stood a bench where we sat down. We didn’t say anything, we didn’t need to say anything, I thought, it would just spoil it, for the silence was like a vault above the landscape. From here we could see the moon suspended high above the forest, perfectly round. With no competition from mountains or cities it owned the sky. Though the water around us was still and smooth, it seemed to well up, I thought. Now and again a faint splash sounded, from fish feeding near the surface. Isn’t it beautiful, I said. Yes, she said. It’s very beautiful. And soon it will start to get light, I said. Yes, she said. Neither of us knew then that it would be the last night we spent together, but over the next two days everything that had lain unspoken between us came out, and we found no other way to handle it than to break up. It still hurts to think about it, that we were together that night, which is the most beautiful night I have experienced, and that we can’t have shared any of it, as I thought we did. The ‘we’ I had felt so strongly held only me.

Summer Afternoon

Earlier that day, which would be our last together, we had visited another town, and after strolling through the provincial pedestrian precinct, past the Renaissance-style town hall and the large brick church, we entered a park and lay down on the grass in the middle of it. Except for some teenage girls sitting on a bench in the shade of a tree maybe thirty metres behind us, there wasn’t a person in sight. Birdsong sounded all around us. Usually I don’t notice it, now I heard nothing else. Isn’t it strange that birds sing in ways that we too find pleasing? I said. It didn’t have to be that way. No, it didn’t, she said. In my parents’ garden there are some birds that sound awful. Just hoarse, ugly croaking. And then gulls. They’re the nastiest birds I know of. The really big ones are like dinosaurs. They are dinosaurs, I said. I know, she said. But not all birds bring up that association. The birds here in the park don’t. No, I said and imagined dinosaurs chirping like little birds. That would have changed our impression of them entirely. But I didn’t say anything about that, instead I lit a cigarette and lay back on the grass. A few chalk-white clouds drifted across the blue sky. The leaves on the trees rustled in the wind, which blew stronger now that it was past noon. In autumn and winter the day nears its end in the afternoon, coming up against a wall of darkness, in spring it seems to become diluted, while summer afternoons deepen it and make it richer. The light becomes fuller, the blue of the sky grows more intense, and in the landscape the heat of the sun is preserved throughout the day, in some places by accumulation, as in the sweltering tarmac or the air in little glades in the forest. The sea breeze coming in across the land makes the crowns of trees sway slowly, as if waking from a sleep, while their leaves rustle with a sound like a purling brook or a drawn-out sigh of pleasure. ‘Look there,’ she said, ‘at the tree, do you see how it shimmers?’ I sat up and glanced at the tree she was nodding towards. It grew on the other side of the narrow river that ran along the edge of the park. The course it followed lay too low for us to see the water. Instead the reflection of the light, fragile-seeming and transparent, that flickered over the thick trunk seemed to be coming from the tree itself. We sat there looking at it. The light moved like water, swaying and trickling. I wondered how it is possible to walk into a school and fire wildly at everything around one, to kill everyone in sight, children and adults, when the world is so calm and beautiful, so full of sunlight and birdsong, flowing rivers and unmoving trees. It must be because what is and what happens follow two different courses: that the unchanging and constantly recurring, the immobility and eternal beauty of the world is something the other course, that of actions and emotional drives belonging primarily to humans, only brushes against in passing. If the channels are not kept clear, if they are not left open and free but instead get clogged up and darken, which happens to all of us to a greater or lesser extent, then they become predominant, then they become us. And that – to be merely a human being, not a human being in the world – is dangerous. It has always been dangerous and it always will be dangerous. That’s what I was thinking as I watched the reflection of light from the water gliding back and forth over the tree trunk on that summer afternoon, and at the same time I knew I would always remember it, since I saw it with her.

Intelligence

Intelligence is the term we use for the ability to understand connections. All human beings have this ability, which is perhaps primarily characterised by its being limited: everyone understands something, no one understands everything. But the limits to understanding are drawn differently and are final in each one of us. That traumatic experiences or great sensitivity to external conditions can lower one’s level of understanding and that great efforts of will can increase it doesn’t mean that intelligence is a relative quality, only that it is potential, in the sense that it can be either fully exploited or not used to the full. The concept of intelligence is by its nature comparative, for if the ability to understand connections was equal for everyone, as the ability to scratch oneself is possessed equally by everyone without differentiation, then the concept of intelligence would be meaningless. One is only intelligent if one is more intelligent than others. And since intelligence is itself a connection that must be understood based on one’s own mental ability, those more intelligent than oneself are often difficult, even impossible, to distinguish. The person who is more intelligent will perceive you clearly, all your cognitive limitations will be apparent to them, whereas you won’t see the more intelligent person as being more intelligent than yourself, but only that part of the intelligent person which is visible within the limits to your thought, rather like how a dog sees everyone else as dogs. In egalitarian societies intelligence is one of the most ambivalent entities, since the difference which intelligence represents is insurmountable, and insurmountable differences are of course fundamentally non-egalitarian. In that respect intelligence resembles beauty, which is another problematic entity in egalitarian societies. The solution has been and still is to pretend it doesn’t exist or that it isn’t important, a game of pretence which begins at school, where both intelligence and beauty are communicated through mixed messages: on the one hand one is taught that looks are not important, that what counts is the inner person and that all people are equally valuable, while at the same time this fundamental ethical principle, which everyone agrees on and which pervades every level of knowledge, on the other hand is continually contradicted by the disproportionate attention and better treatment accorded to beautiful pupils over ugly ones by teachers, other adults and fellow pupils. Intelligence also breaches the doctrine of equality, but in a different way, for while beauty isn’t a threat, perhaps because it is so ineluctable and in a certain sense so final, intelligence is threatening, for we all know how to think, we are all able to understand connections, and that some people think better, that some people understand more connections and with greater ease, can be hard to accept. While the threat is constant, it feels more acute during one’s school years, since that is one of the few phases in life during which one’s mental abilities and capacity to understand are not only continually tested but also graded, thus exposing the differences between people in this respect. All the intelligent people I went to school with at some point or other tried to hide their intelligence, to tone it down, since the consequence of appearing intelligent was that they were ostracised, they were unpopular and in a few cases were even bullied. That never happened to any of the beautiful people I went to school with, on the contrary, they were all greatly sought after. In the gymnas the most intelligent pupil was named Gjermund, and during one break we wrote with a black marker in large letters on the noticeboard that ran along one whole wall of the classroom, GJERMUND IS UGLY. We meant it ironically, for that is the kind of thing primary school students would do, while we were in the gymnas and we felt that by parodying primary school pupils we were changing the message and turning it into something else, something harmless. But it didn’t seem that way to Gjermund, his face went white when he saw it, and there were tears in his eyes. He pretended not to notice, however, and so the moment passed, at least for us. But no one removed the letters, so for him it must have been different, since he had to see that sentence every day for the rest of the school year. How he has done later in life I have no idea, but I do know one thing, that society’s view of intelligence changes in adulthood, for even an egalitarian society needs people who distinguish themselves through their superior intelligence, and the function of school is not primarily to convey knowledge but to differentiate, so that the intelligent students end up on the right shelf, while all the others are taught that there is no difference between people, so that later they will accept being governed by the intelligent.

Foam

Everything happens in accordance with the laws of nature. Air moves because a difference in atmospheric pressure has arisen somewhere and all the invisible particles rush into vast pockets to fill them. The force of this movement drives the surface waters of the sea ahead of it, and since no hollows open into which the water can flow, it piles up instead, forming waves. These waves, driven by the wind, continually fling themselves forward, and every time they strike the surface they pull air down with them. If air and water obeyed other laws, one might imagine that the air dragged down by the waves would gather and form vast underwater shafts, grotto-like systems of air, but of course this isn’t the case, for air is light, water is heavy, so that water immediately fills all the air spaces just below the surface. But this movement is mechanical, the air doesn’t unite with the water, it is just forced into smaller and smaller pockets, which are all of the same shape, namely tiny round bubbles enclosed within fairly thin walls of water. In a matter of seconds these bubbles form enormous structures, which the waves keep pushing up and forward and which we can see every time there is a gale at sea, when white heads of foam spring up and vanish again on the grey-black or grey-green surface. Snorting, hissing, soughing, they surge forward like horses’ heads, go under, then reappear. This foam is extremely short-lived; when the wave is flung forward and disintegrates, the foam may remain in the water for a few seconds as winding veils of white, only to dissolve and disappear in the next instant. What makes it seem lasting is that the same thing happens again and again, in that incomprehensible abundance of repetition which characterises the universe. How infinitely many tiny air bubbles are formed on the ocean’s surface in the course of a single windy day? Nothing is stinted in this explosion of formations, structures, patterns and shapes. It is brief, the next day the sea may lie still as a mirror and every whorl of foam may be gone, but it is brief only to us, just as the universe’s explosion of formations, structures, patterns and shapes seems nearly eternal to us. Rather than in fractions of seconds they disintegrate over the course of billions of years. But it isn’t hard to imagine a being with a different perception of time, one for whom one second is an eternity, and for whom the ocean and its foam therefore appear immobile and crystalline. If one further imagines that not only time but also space is relative, then a whole universe could be contained in one of these air bubbles, which then, to this being, would be eternally immovable and governed by laws that could be observed and recorded but never understood. Perhaps this being would eventually notice that all the heavenly bodies in this infinite space were drifting outwards from the centre and draw the inevitable conclusion that the universe was entropic and inexorably heading towards its end? That the Big Bang was like the pop of a champagne cork and the universe like a mass of bubbles rising through the narrow, chilled bottleneck and down into waiting flute glasses, which sparkling with light were raised in a toast somewhere, in some apartment?

Birch

In the monochrome majesty of the forest, where almost everything is green or underpins green, like the grey of the spruces’ bark, the birches with their white trunks stand out, and it is easy to imagine that they belong to a finer species, a sort of sylvan aristocracy, erect and stylish, beautiful and highly strung. But beauty and genealogy are both human notions and have little of essence to say about either animals or trees, so when we think of the spruce as sombre and brooding, the pine tree as proud and freedom-loving, the aspen as anxious, the oak as majestic and the birch as sensitive and perhaps in its nature more like a horse than a tree, we are transforming them into ourselves, we are transplanting our inner selves into the exterior world. But even knowing that this is so, that everything which grows in the forest is indifferent to us and our notions about it, including Darwin’s theory of evolution and Linnaean taxonomy, the sight of a forest floor covered with wood anemones, for example, always wakens a thought in me that wood anemones are not merely beautiful but good, while the sight of a birch, like the one that grows in the garden here, right next to where I park the car, is for me always associated with fragility. This is of course precisely because the birch stands out among other trees, and because in the world of humans I have come to expect that those who stand out are also fragile. When I was growing up, I knew exactly where all the birches were, they seemed to define the places they grew in, as did the bus stop, the bridge buttress, the outcrop of rock, the marsh and the pond, each in their own way. I was familiar with the different appearances of birches, how in winter they lost their volume entirely, like dogs or cats with shaggy fur who seem to shrink when they get wet; how their thin twigs were covered with pale green buds in spring, which no matter how old the trees were – and some of them must have been my grandparents’ age – made them look young and bashful; how their small sequin-shaped leaves hung in dense garlands in summer, so that their foliage resembled gowns; and how in the early-autumn storms they could look like ships with sails stretched taut by the wind, or swans beating their wings as they rose from the water. Birches were one of the few trees we didn’t climb, the bark was slippery and difficult to get a grip on with one’s shoe soles, and the trunk usually didn’t divide into larger branches until some way up. Yet birches were not for the eyes alone – every spring we sought them out, selected one and cut off a branch, inserted the stub into a bottle, tied the bottle fast and let it hang there until the next day, when it would be full of a clear green liquid which we then drank, it was as sweet as fruit squash. I don’t know where that knowledge had come from, but everyone had it, this was in the 1970s, so people still picked berries, not just for the sake of the outing but to supplement the household budget – they went fishing for the same reason – and children’s lives were interwoven with this manual world, we made flutes of the bark of willow branches and the stems of dandelions, bows and arrows from young broadleaf trees, we drank birch sap and built huts from spruce twigs, but we also sat in our rooms listening to Status Quo, Mud, Slade and Gary Glitter. The unfathomable age of tree species wasn’t something we related to, but then nor did we relate to the unfathomable age of our own species; for us everything was here and now, everything was contemporary, the birch, the car, the classroom, the forest grove, the blueberry bush, the music, the fish, the boat. And in a certain sense we were right, for with the exception of the mountains and the sea, almost nothing of all that surrounded us lasted longer than a human lifespan, including the birches, which in rare instances can grow to be three hundred years old but which usually live for about a hundred. But while the music we listened to changed from English glam to English punk and post-punk, and the clothes we wore went from the bell-bottoms and knitted sweaters of the 1970s to the black coats and Doc Martens of the 1980s, and we moved away while the children who came after us were no longer drawn to the forest, the birches stood as they had always stood, in poses first struck millions of years ago, in the Cretaceous, when the white and black trunks and tender green leaves of birches began to appear in the forests and their characteristic movements in the wind were for the first time performed on the world stage.

Slugs

All the names we have given the small, soft, slimy, dark animals that slither slowly around on the ground wherever it is moist – molluscs, lung snails, bladder snails, forest snails, nude snails – themselves have something moist and soft about them, it occurs to me, and every time I see a slug these days I am struck by how it inverts qualities that normally belong to the intimate human sphere and there express great beauty – nude is vulnerable, soft is arousing, lungs are the spirit of life, the forest is pure nature – for the slugs’ nakedness, the slugs’ softness, the slugs’ lungs and the slugs’ forest are instead repulsive, deeply undesirable and loathsome. That snails with their shells are less repulsive than slugs, as a turtle is less repulsive than a toad, would seem to indicate that it is the nakedness in itself that puts us off – and that sounds probable, for isn’t the most repulsive thing about a rat its hairless tail? – and yet there are plenty of other animals that lack a clear distinction between their outer and inner body, for instance jellyfish or earthworms, which should therefore seem just as repulsive to us. Could it be because slugs resemble us more, are closer to us than jellyfish? Is it precisely that they have lungs, that they have a heart, that they have eyes which makes their nakedness seem so