World Light

by Halldor Laxness

  “And the use of kerosine beyond reasonable needs I have always criticized, and reserve to myself the right to criticize in the future and take such steps as may be necessary,” said the bailiff. “I am not aware that it is written anywhere that the Icelandic nation should provide lighting and heating for people who, under the pretext of making poetry, think they’re too good to make provision for themselves in the autumn. To the best of my knowledge, the Icelandic nation has never asked for poetry from anyone.”

  “You can take everything from me,” said the poet, “except the freedom to look up at the sky occasionally.”

  The pastor, who until now had been rattling on about various ways of acquiring money, abruptly dropped the subject for the time being and fixed his peering eyes on the poet, not unlike an actor who suddenly forgets his part because of an accident in the auditorium; and into his eyes there came an expression of that rare presence of human characteristics which perhaps belongs nowhere so indubitably and eternally as in the eyes of an old boar squinting momentarily up from its swill.

  “By the way, dear boy, who are your people?” asked the pastor.

  Ólafur Kárason named his parents and grandparents, which was all he knew. But he had no need to go any further back, the pastor had the rest of the family tree at his fingertips. He started droning on again in the same style as before, with the expression of someone reading aloud from a boring book, with occasional grunts and groans in between. “It’s positively a lineage of the highest distinction on both sides, further back, dear boy,” said the pastor, “alternating sheriffs, pastors, and factors of royal estates. You are, like me, descended from Bishop Jón Arason, and at least two other bishops of Hólar. Your poetic gifts you’ve probably inherited from Björn, the son of a bishop, who was the best versifier of his time at Hólar, and sailed to France to study and was drowned at sea. But I haven’t yet mentioned the most important part: your ancestor is the same man as the ancestor of Queen Victoria of England and that family—Auðunn skökull (Shaft), who lived at Auðunarstaðîr in Víðidalur, the father of óra mosháls (Moss-Neck)—and the line of descent from her has been worked out in the newspapers and published in England, although little has been heard from the English on all this.”

  “Sometimes when we meet privately I’ll tell you my late mother-in-law’s life story,” said órður of Horn. “At present I’ll content myself with telling you about my father’s death, in case you would like to compose an elegy for him. Fatal accidents have for long been the favorite subjects of poets. It so happened that he was fowling for fulmar down a cliff and slipped on the rock face just above the farm. He could be heard screaming for twenty-four hours, and people could see where he lay on a ledge. But there was no way of reaching him. The birds could be seen tearing the body to pieces. Next spring, fowlers came from Latrar and collected the bones.”

  With that, the education committee went home.

  A few days later the schooling began. The courthouse stood in the bailiff’s yard, the meeting place of all the tempests of heaven. Twelve children made their way here, blue in the face and a trifle louse-ridden, with colds that went round the group in waves and never quite disappeared. The bailiff had contracted on behalf of the parish to supply the school with peat and droppings, but winter came early and the icy winds blew from all directions right through their meeting hall. The bailiff thought the fuel was disappearing rather quickly and blamed the teacher’s extravagance; teaching soon became a secondary issue in the battle over peat and droppings. And when the school’s weekly ration was exhausted by midweek and the children had aching fingernails, chilblains, pains and temperatures, the poet saw no alternative but to close the school. The bailiff called officially to say that he would not only report the teacher to the education committee and have him dismissed, and to the parish council and have him deported to his home parish, but also to the authorities and have him punished if he did not open the school at once. The poet took this very much to heart, even though he found it difficult to imagine any punishment more severe than having to teach ill, numbed, and therefore dull-witted children in a building where all the tempests of the far north held their assembly. He did not know to whom he should turn for help in this crisis. Finally it occurred to him that perhaps Pastor Janus would give him the benefit of his kinship with órður mosháls and the British Royal Family, and decided to go to see him.

  “What am I to do, pastor Janus? It’s as if the snowstorms blow from all four directions on the courthouse, and the bailiff refuses to supply any more peat this week, so that I can’t be sure of keeping the children alive. On the other hand, the bailiff threatens to dismiss me if I close the school, and even take me to court.”

  The pastor replied: “I’m not surprised at anything the bailiff says or does, dear boy, I know his lineage too well for that. You see, he’s descended from the so-called Sperðling family, which wasn’t in fact any family at all, although it can perhaps with some dexterity be traced back to orgils (Knoll-Muck), who was of Danish origin according to some. There’s never been any talent or distinction in that lot, but plenty of villains and riffraff, dear boy, like for instance orgarður drangur (Ghost) and a fellow called Tumi who stole the candlesticks from Sómastaðîr Church and sold them to the Dutch for a keg of brennivín, with his six-year-old daughter thrown in as well; the son of orgarðyr, the son of Smyrill tvítóla (the Hermaphrodite), who flogged at Kollabaíðir Sands; his daughter was Hunda-Karítas, whom everyone knows about, reference the Lives of the Sheri fs. She was convicted of fornication and executed by drowning at the Althing, and her son was Jón sperðlingur (Sheep-Guts) who killed a man at the Eysteinseyrarleitur (Eysteinseyrar Sheep-Drive) and was a notorious sheep-stealer and scoundrel to boot, dear boy, and besides his parents were cousins on both sides and he himself was said to be a changeling.”

  “It may be a consolation to some poor people to know that men of power can be descended from base families,” said the poet. “Unfortunately it needs more than that to bolster up my courage. Though it was sometimes difficult to be a poet and a somebody at Sviðinsvík, where I was a poet for five years although I never succeeded in becoming a somebody, it seems to me twice as difficult to be a poet and a somebody in Bervík.”

  “As you so rightly say, it’s two different things to be a poet and a somebody, and for that reason I shall take the liberty of giving you my answer in two parts, dear boy,” said the pastor. “ Primo, no one denies that it’s difficult to be a somebody in Bervík, nor indeed has it ever been tried to the best of my knowledge since the country was first inhabited. In the year 1705 the parish pastor of Bervík wrote to the authorities about his parishioners, to the effect that they were the very lowest of the low, both in intelligence and conduct. We can expect to find emerging in Bervík, sooner than anywhere else, that animal species which will inhabit the world when men and monkeys have died out as a result of their own actions. It has never suited the Bervíkings to have a school. For more than a thousand years their luxuries have been lice and colds while other nations had plenty of tobacco and brennivín. For that reason you mustn’t be surprised if they keep the school short of peat and threaten to deport the teacher to his home parish. But secundo, dear boy, as for the other point, I disagree with you entirely that here in Bervík it isn’t possible to be a scholar and a poet. I have written thirty books since I was ordained to Bervík forty years ago. One writes books for oneself because one is among people who cannot be classed as human beings. If you feel you lack the courage to write books in Bervík, it would be salutary for you to remember that precisely here, on this harborless coast, was written and preserved for centuries one of the greatest books ever written in the North, namely Korpinskinna, which Árni Magnússon himself called the most important manuscript ever to come into his hands.* He wrote a letter in his own hand to this country, offering not only his own wealth but also the wealth of the Danish crown, without restriction or limit, if it were possible to get hold of the eighteen sheets whi
ch were missing from the back of the manuscript when it was found. In this book, which was found in a poor man’s kitchen in Bervík in 1680, are collected some of the most notable Sagas in the world. It is now kept in a strong underground vault in Copenhagen, and considered so valuable that no greater loss could befall Denmark than to lose this book.”

  The poet found this remarkable indeed. He had heard of Korpinskinna, of course, as one of the greatest books in Nordic literature, but he had never realized that it had originated here. The pastor brought out his own works, genealogies, historical writings, and philological treaties, to prove that one could still write books on this harborless coast, and soon the poet had forgotten all his difficulties over the school, confronted by these closely written volumes. They talked until the night was almost over about those matters which have always been close to the hearts of scholars and poets in Iceland. In the small hours, the poet walked home in the moonlight and hard-frozen snow; it was as bright as day. From the brow of the glacier there shone the kind of light one can only read about in more advanced doctrines. The poet now felt that it did not really matter at all if the bailiff at Bervík was too mean to supply the school with peat and droppings. He saw this place in the light of Korpinskinna, suffused with incomparable beauty, a literature which would live for as long as the world existed. However wretched human life could be in its retrogression towards monkeys and other creatures, he thought it did not matter so long as poets existed: human life was a minor detail, practically nothing. Beauty was the only thing which mattered, and in reality a poet had no responsibilities to anything except that. He suddenly felt that his finest poems were still to be written.

  3

  There had never been any talent or distinction in that lot, the pastor had said of the bailiff’s lineage.

  On this harborless coast the dignity of human life was an improper concept, no less than the heavenly light; stupidity, servitude and penury were the true virtues of his serious society, its divine Trinity. This dark dictatorship gave each child an impenetrable breastplate to shield it from all danger of talent or distinction, but especially from the influence of beauty.

  It was no wonder that the poet was delighted to see among his group of children a face that was in complete contrast to soot, fulmars, saltfish, cold germs and lice, encouragingly fresh, endowed with the faculty of being exalted to understanding and enlightenment. It was like finding a colorful, tender flower on the moor among the rushes and sedges. Those clear but rather cold eyes constantly sought a purpose in everything they saw, that bright but rather weak face listened by some inner command for every sound that betrayed opposition to the divine Trinity of the place.

  This thirteen-year-old boy came of by no means distinguished parentage, nor had he been reared among wealthy people where more polite manners are found. He was an illegitimate child in the care of his mother who had come to the bailiff’s as a maid; the boy’s father had been residing in the south for a long time now, and had no contact with the mother or her son. Whatever the boy’s origins, there was no concealing the fact that little Sveinn of Bervík was of a different mold than was customary here. Perhaps the reason was that he had a rather special mother who had taught him to wash and wash again, over and over again, and always. One thing was certain, it was as if no dirt could stick to him; he even had clean nails. His hair was combed and, though his clothes were poor, his mother had cut them carefully, and there was never a stain or a wrinkle to be seen on them, and therefore he always seemed to be in his Sunday-best. Cold germs and lice seemed to have a dislike for this boy and gave him a very wide berth.

  Sveinn of Bervík learned naturally without difficulty or effort. But though he surpassed all the others in understanding, there was in his conduct a certain reserve which forbade him to push himself to the front or take the lead. It was his nature to observe unobtrusively, to be a pure voice in the midst of coarse clamor, to have ready the obvious, simple answer, without any conceit, when the others had given up.

  One day Ólafur Kárason asked the boy if he would mind coming with him part of the way home that day after school; he said he had been wanting to ask him something privately for the last few days.

  “No,” said the boy, and blushed.

  But when they were alone in the dusk the poet was tongue-tied. They walked silently side by side for a while. At last the poet plucked up courage.

  “Since I first noticed you, I have wanted to ask you one question,” he said. “I hope you won’t feel offended if you think it rather an odd question. Do you ever hear a strange music when you’re alone?”

  The boy looked up at his teacher, amazed at such a mysterious question, very serious, a little embarrassed and perhaps not entirely unafraid.

  “Music?” he said. “What sort of music? Like, for instance, birdsong?”

  “Like birdsong,” said the poet, and was now in difficulties himself, “and yet not like birdsong. No, actually, not like birdsong at all. Perhaps not even music, but rather a light, an inner light, a joyous light, an omnipotent light, that Light, that Music which no word had been created to describe.”

  “Really,” said the boy.

  The poet was disappointed; he felt he had made a fool of himself by saying so much in one breath. The boy’s reply made him suddenly sad. They walked on in silence for a while. Then the boy said, “Will you teach me to hear this music? And see this light?”

  “That’s something that cannot be taught, my dear,” said the poet. “All the world’s wealth, all the earth’s luxuries are only a poor imitation of it and recompense for it. But sometimes when I look at your face in class, I feel as if you were born to hear it and see it.”

  “I’m so sorry I haven’t heard it and seen it,” said the boy, and felt utterly shattered.

  “My friend,” said the poet, and decided to try once again. “If you stand by the sea on a calm summer day and look at the clouds mirrored in the deep, or lie in a green dell at midsummer, with a brook purling by, or if you walk on the withered grass on the banks of a stream on the last day of winter and hear the first barnacle goose honking—don’t you feel anything special then?”

  Then the boy said, “Always when I see or hear something beautiful I forgive everyone everything; I want then to be a great man so that I can do something good for everyone.”

  Then the poet seized his friend’s hand and said gratefully, “Thank heaven you have understood me after all.”

  But the boy was not quite clear what he had understood, and wanted to clarify it, and added, “I want so much to be a scholar and a poet.”

  At that the poet fell silent again. In reality, this was not what he had been asking about. But though he had suffered another disappointment, it would be wrong to show it; as a matter of fact he had expected something from the boy which a poet has no right to demand from anyone else.

  “You must come home with me and have some coffee,” said the poet, to change the subject.

  “I have to feed the horses,” said the boy. “If I shirk, I get into trouble.”

  “I understand,” said the poet. “I, too, was beaten by gods, men and horses. But you have a mother and perhaps even a father. Perhaps you will one day become a scholar and a poet.”

  But though Ólafur Kárason had been a little disappointed in his pupil, particularly over the Music, he could not avoid being interested in this young man. Their friendship grew and throve for a while like a seed which has found a handful of soil in a desert. The poet had never before been aware of being at the giving end of a friendship, and the knowledge of this gave him confidence in himself at a difficult time. How would this winter ever have passed without Sveinn of Bervík? He forgot all his other pupils and saw only him and talked only to him. He put those tedious Jewish chronicles on a shelf along with the rest of the Bervík bailiff’s favorite subjects, and brought out the Núma Ballads and the Poems of Jónas Hallgrímsson, and turned the talk to the sanctity of poetry and the omnipotence of beauty; nor did he forget the m
ajesty of transience.

  One day the teacher noticed that the boy did not want to stay behind at the end of the class, but hurried away without saying Good-bye. When he kept this up, the poet waylaid him one day and asked him why. The boy would not talk. But when he was pressed, he admitted that he had been thrashed.

  “What for?”

  “For talking about poetry,” said the boy.

  “I, too, was beaten at your age,” said the poet. “It was gods, men and horses. But poetry is the Redeemer of the soul, and it never occurred to me to break faith with it.”

  The boy wanted to run away despite all persuasions.

  “Don’t run away,” said the poet. “My wife will give us coffee. And we’ll read a love song by Sigurður Breiðfjörð.

  “There is no beating that can affect a poet,” said Ólafur Kárason. “Poets are stronger than gods, men, and horses.”

  “I can’t stand being beaten,” said the boy.

  Then one Sunday morning the bailiff appeared in the yard at Little Bervík. He asked the poet to come outside.

  “You are corrupting the children,” said the bailiff. “You’ve filled the head of the most promising boy with such nonsense that he’s started to make strange remarks; and even started to mess about with pen and ink. But I’m not having any ink-work in my home. I’m not having any weird speculations in my home.”

  “Is that so?” said the poet.

  “If you carry on like this you’ll turn the boy into a useless wretch like yourself and the same sort of criminal as Sigurður Breiðfjörð, who sold his wife for a dog and was sentenced to twenty-seven strokes of the lash.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said the poet.

  “I’ve come here to tell you that if you go on leading the children astray with worthless speculations instead of teaching them honest conduct, then you’ll be in for it. We here in Bervík believe in Christ. We have agreed to build a twenty-thousand-krónur church and we stipulate that others should believe in Christ. We oppose tooth and nail those who want to turn the young from work and honesty and to indolence and crime under the pretext of poetry.”