The air was crisp; the sun shone dimly. I walked out onto the streets behind the hotel, away from the centre. I passed through a part of town called Majorstuen and began to stumble slowly uphill. Cyclists slipped along the slope, scuffing their heels on the snow. I moved across the ice, making glacial progress, until I could see the silvery sea below, heavy and becalmed. It was a still day, and the ships were hardly moving at all. I noticed as I walked that there were places where the snow was turning to water and the ice was breaking up. A slight fragrance was rising from the earth, where it had been released from the winter layer of snow: a smell of dust and grass, unfamiliar in the sterile air. Across the fjord, I could see a ferry arriving from Denmark, a huge ship with DANSEBATEN on its side. It sounded its horn.
It took a while to walk up the hill. In the suburbs, the whitewash had made everyone vanish into their houses. A few four-wheel drives ground slowly along the ice roads. I passed through a patch of forest, until I arrived at a main road. I padded on for a few more minutes, and then turned left, sliding across the ice until I reached a row of small brown wooden houses, like chalets. Kicking the snow from my boots, I hammered on the door of one of the houses. There was a movement from within, and then, after a long pause, a wiry, slightly hunched man opened the door. He looked astonished to see me, astonished and not yet delighted.
‘Hallo! Are you from the United States?’ he asked.
‘No, Britain.’
‘Britain! Hah! How many of you are there?’
‘Just me.’
He peered around me to check.
‘You have come up the hill?’
‘I walked from Rosenkrantz Gate.’
‘Yes, of course. Come in, come in.’
He welcomed me into a small, cold room. Everything was made of polished wood. There was a sofa, with a small cuddly pig sitting on it. A few books lay on a table—William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, Spinoza’s Ethics, Schopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms . The old man read in English, shoring these fragments against his decline. He had a face of crags and lines, chiselled cheeks and a high brow, a shock of grey hair, and pale blue eyes. He was Arne Naess, the ageing conscience of an oil-rich nation, a philosopher almost as old as the century, born the year after Amundsen arrived at the South Pole. He was a philosopher of the pending eco-apocalypse, sitting it out in a snowfield, waiting for the global thaw, the great change to the climate that would destroy everything. Like an environmentalist Cassandra, he wailed his prophecies to the masses, and they carried on driving around in cars, his government continued exporting rivers of oil. This old philosopher had discerned a threat, stretching as far as the empty lands of the north. The wildernesses stood imperilled. Drastic solutions were required, bold definitions: ‘enlightenment,’ ‘apocalypse’—the big guns of social change. Arne had been living in the mountains, trying out the life of a solitary seer, making his philosophy from scraps of Gandhi—‘self-realization’ through universal realization, minimalism, self-discipline. But now he lived in the suburbs of the city, at the edge of the forests.
Arne was wiry and strong, despite his ninety years, lively and eloquent, despite the fact he seemed to have forgotten that I was coming. I removed my shoes, which were damp from the snow. He sat down on the long, low sofa, wearing a snug woollen jumper, looking extremely warm. A low flame crackled in the grate. The wood on the walls and floor was immaculately polished. He gestured to me to sit near him.
‘This is a beautiful house,’ I said, politely.
‘Yes, yes, beautiful. But so expensive to have all this polished wood. It cost a lot. My wife did it all. Beautiful though, I agree. You are kind,’ he said. And then he looked slightly worried, and said: ‘You have something special to talk about?’
There was a note of challenge to his voice. In Norway, Arne was notorious, a national legend. When I said to the hotel manager that I was going to visit him, he had told me that Arne used to climb up the buildings in the University of Oslo. Students would wait for him in a lecture room, and he would appear through the window. I wanted to ask this old man in the thick jumper if it was true, but something more substantial seemed to be required. He had cocked his head to one side, and his eyes had glazed over entirely; he was staring at a stain on the floor.
I had gone to him to mark the parameters of my enquiry: from the explorers struggling towards the frozen ocean to contemporary concerns about the melting of the ice, the loss of Thule. I was talking about remoteness, the changing sense of the limits of the world, and I said that Thule had once been the last land in the north, a beautiful and forbidding place. A wild place.
He interrupted with sudden enthusiasm, smiling as if I had pleased him.
‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s right. I have used the term “free nature”—it’s a grey area in a sense. In Europe, we should not talk about wilderness—because we can never have this again. We cannot talk of wild nature. We can have small patches—I call them patches—of nature that is not obviously dominated by human activity. When I was young, in Norway, there was a real big difference there—you could see people on the coast of Norway sitting and looking into the water—there was so much to see, so much to see. And also the experience of water—I had a great time sitting and looking at tiny waves—very big ones also—but tiny waves, just little wrinkles. I walked into the water, I was amazed at all the living beings I could see—but not today. Yes, everything is dead. All the things are contaminated, all spoilt. But when I was a child, it was amazing, I was amazed. For instance, there would be little flatfish; little flatfish would be getting away when I was nearly stepping on them, these little flatfish used to get under here’—and he pointed to the bottom of his foot—‘finding it was a nice place to hide.’
The flatfish were quite enchanting him, and his face creased into a smile.
‘I found they liked very much that there was some place they could hide, hiding under me, not really understanding what was going on. But anyhow, in my time all children were experiencing the coast of Norway—an enormous coast—standing in water, finding endless interest in the tiny things of nature—and they got a firm . . . what do you call . . . love of nature.’
There was a pause. He stared at the floor again.
‘So you feel everything has changed?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, firmly. ‘And when we ask will things ever be like that again in the future, so far as I can see it will be very different—and it will take a long time, a very long time, before our nature gets back to this wildness, but it was marvellous and it was one of the pillars of the Norwegian sense of nature—these things that we were experiencing, in the water. Because it seems that we have a special relationship to nature in Norway—even in Sweden, it’s not even the same in Sweden—there is something, something there. And so many Norwegians when they are . . . what is the word . . . wanting to commit suicide—I call it voluntary limitation of life—then they go into nature, and they die. Strange, isn’t it?’
Arne was in mourning for the lost past, the pure past of his country, when the landscape was pristine, he said. In the century Arne had lived through, the remote north had become accessible by plane, by icebreaker. But Arne thought something had happened to the lands closer to home, even to the fjords of Norway, to the empty places of Europe. Even here the century had shifted the scenery, he was saying. There was a pause, and then he said: ‘For many many hundreds of years in Norway you didn’t have neighbours, there were no neighbours, because there were quite big distances between people—so they had either to find themselves lonely or to relate more personally to the nature around them. Otherwise they would be very lonely, thinking, “Oh my God we are so lonely.” ’ And he laughed quietly.
‘But, they didn’t feel lonely, because they had this personal intimate relation to nature. Now people have for the last fifty years or more, more and more gone into cities, and there are very few, mostly old people, who are living out in the rural areas, mostly old people. I am
sorry for that, of course,’ and he shook his head. ‘Really, ’ he said, ‘it is OK that they get neighbours, but they should continue to have this very personal relationship to nature.’ He nodded slowly. He seemed to be thinking.
By Arne’s standards, Nansen lived in benighted immaturity, seeking to claw a path across the indifferent wilderness, to perch his flag on a piece of ice. But Nansen also lived in the golden age that Arne was mourning, ‘when we had so much light, you could see the stars, and children were there under the heaven of stars. You didn’t get smaller, by that, you got greater by that, by being together with the stars—you were greater by being together with the stars.’
‘So have people lost this experience?’ I was asking.
Arne never answered a question directly. It made him slightly gnomic, with his head cocked to one side and a slight smile curling his lips.
‘I want to tell you about mountains,’ he said. ‘I have seen a lot of mountains. In the mountains you have a basic sense of upward, ascent. And this is positive,’ he was adding. ‘ “Ascent” is a positive word. Up and up. A great increase. And so on. So you have feelings there which are satisfied without you knowing it. You see, there is the sky. The bigness of mountains, that’s one thing, and then you have the greatness. There are some mountains in western Norway which are just as great as Mount Everest. But they are not so big, but that is not the essence of mountains, it’s not the bigness, it’s the up, the getting higher, and the broadening of the outlook, seeing vast areas.’
When this wizened philosopher could still climb, he refused to reach the tops of mountains, renouncing the quest for domination over the natural world, he claimed. A sense of the smallness of the self, the vastness of nature, he seemed to be saying, was somehow revitalizing, a healthy experience to have from time to time. Arne thought that the only goal of his submission was to find unity with nature, and he started to tell a story about when he climbed a series of peaks, across the Mediterranean.
‘I started getting to the summit of each mountain, but after about thirty summits, I could go just because of the beauty and the greatness. And even though the summit was only ten metres from me, I would not take those ten metres, to include that summit also in my list of summits. I would just go where it was great to go. I was getting more mature. Going for days and days and days, I got more mature. What is really here? What’s the greatness, what’s the greatness? What’s the greatness in my experience of these mountains? And then of course the summits were not counted any longer, at all.’
Arne was winding up, his words no longer falling into sentences, instead he was sounding a little like a hippie Beckett—‘When you have something like this, you know this is—I will be in this, yes I am at this moment, no more, you are—what I do now—breathing deeply, breathing deeply, and feel this different relation to time; something gets away from you—time-bound no longer—it’s just timelessness. You get a little feeling of timelessness. Slower, slower, take time, take time.’ Like Krapp’s last tape, he was concluding, a tone of determined finality to his voice.
‘I invite people to be more aware of the sense of timelessness,’ he said. Then he stopped talking, and smiled at me.
It seemed to be a hint that I should disappear, and I stood up. ‘And now we must hug,’ he said. ‘For three seconds only. To fully engage with each other.’
He put his arms around me, and counted to three loudly. Then I was moved quickly onto the steps of the house. He smiled, and waved, his wave like a child’s, emphatic and staged. Then he shut the door.
There will come a time, Nansen had thought, when the goal that was the Arctic wilderness will have been explored, and there will be nothing left to find. But our longing for a simple life will be unsatisfied; we will continue to search for silent places. Even as everyone set off on their wilderness holidays, Arne and the prophets were telling them it was doomed. Wherever they went, they would find traces of humanity and signs of future destruction. It made for a forbidding doctrine. It was nostalgic; it preferred things as they were a hundred years ago. Nansen had seen the beginning of the descent, Arne was saying; nature was now measurable, the furthest north was barren and hostile but somehow less mysterious. But there was a guarded optimism to Arne’s talk. He refused to believe it was over; he shied away from sounding the final mournful chord. Even as he talked of a wake for the wilderness, Arne was preaching the consolations of emptiness. He couldn’t let go of the dream of Thule, even as he said the northern wilderness was endangered.
I walked along the snow-mountain, with the lights of the city like distant fires lining the fjord. The trees were hissing and the wind felt harsher than before. The sun was sinking towards the horizon. The snow coated my feet, and the darkness in the forest made me hurry towards the incandescent platform. I stumbled under the bridge, running to beat the sunset, as the air grew colder.
Because I grew up in the countryside, in a verdant part of Britain, my early memories were entwined with the seasonal change of the fields, the fires which purged them after the harvest, the smoke lingering along the streets, the sound of tractors sowing new seeds, the corn turning golden and then being harvested. Before I understood anything about time, I was aware that things recurred, that there was a pace to nature, a particular sort of process, immutable, reassuring in its regularity. I knew that as leaves fell from the trees combine harvesters would churn through the fields; I knew that an acrid taste in the morning meant that winter was coming. The cornfields were at the end of my street; it was a walk of a few minutes to the first line of trees, with the fields stretching beyond, immense to a child. There was a dust track through the fields called the Donkey Track, with a stream running alongside, and I used to run along there with friends, dimly aware of the colours of the crops, the foliage of the hedgerows, the sound of the birds. We made dens in the streams, piling up hay to dam the water; rummaging around by the sides of the streams we would find field mice, quantities of baby rabbits, curled in small huddles. Because I was young, it seems when I remember that the skies were a particularly brilliant shade of blue, the summers particularly hot, the evenings particularly long, the shadows still lengthening along the garden when I was summoned to bed, my bedroom a dim orange as I put my head under the pillows to sleep.
My village was hardly a rustic idyll. It was more of a rustic commuter belt, a strip of suburbia disguised as villages and fields. The village feigned pastoral autonomy; there was a commune, which grew vegetables, and every year an Albion Fayre was set up on the fields around the village—stalls selling rosehip wine and home-baked cakes, to the soundtrack of Steeleye Span. People had boats on trailers parked in their drives through the winter, which they towed away to marinas for the summer. The daily momentum went towards London; each morning people stepped into their cars and commuted away, down the A12, arriving in the evening again. It was a compromise, too subtle for a child to understand. I saw only the winding lanes and the green banks of trees, the yellow ripeness of the corn, the blueness of the sky against the vivid fields. I knew nothing about the commuting files to London, cars moving bumper to bumper, hold-ups and jams, the tailbacks from Kelvedon to Capel St. Mary. I walked with my grandmother around the village as she pointed out the flowers in the hedgerows and made me listen to the different songs of birds.
I can’t remember when I first understood that there were worlds outside my village, places which moved to a pace of their own, irrespective of the seasons. My other set of grandparents lived on the Wirral, which supplied a holiday experience of somewhere else. These grandparents lived on a street opposite a bank of factories, in an interwar house. I remember staring through my grandparents’ kitchen window at a line of railings separating their road from the factory grounds. A broken umbrella had been hung on the railings, like a black rook, fluttering in the wind and the rain. The wind had blown piles of litter against the railings: cigarette packets with their shiny foil papers, crisp packets softened by rain, and lines of cans and bottles. My grandmothe
r and I would sometimes take the bus into Birkenhead, sitting on the top floor staring at the traffic. There were days when we took the ferry to Liverpool, watching the churning wake and the gulls behind the boat. Liverpool would appear ahead, and I remember my grandparents telling me about the Liver Birds looking across the city, turned green by the weather.
I associated the Wirral with my grandparents specifically, as if it was their land, a land run under their rules, as distinct from those of my parents. This was why the houses were grey, and the umbrella rook hung from the railings, and why the factory had a gas container, shaped like an immense golf ball, which my grandfather said would take the whole of Merseyside with it should it ever explode. When I saw the golf ball, and the corrugated iron of the factory buildings, I knew I was near my grandparents’ house, and these decaying pieces of industrialism became a part of their world, serving only as signposts to their home, the final stage of a long journey. Everything in their house was novel: the shape and feel of the beds, the creak of the stairs, the smell of dust on the bars of the electric fire, the cupboard under the stairs, where my grandfather kept a World War Two flying suit. The cigarette lighter hidden under a model of Dick Turpin. The tins of barley sugars and mint imperials. The miniature forklift truck on a stand, which had been presented to my grandfather when he retired. The garage with the trapdoor, which opened onto steps going down to a shelter they had built during the war, tunnelled out under the garden. The urban environment was the exotic landscape of my grandparents’ lives, and of my mother’s past.
When I was ten, my parents moved to the Midlands, to a market town near Nottingham. It was the first time I remember disliking the view around me, noticing its plainness. The lines of interwar housing seemed limitless—buildings with ugly brick archways, hedges pruned into shapes, ornamental jugs and stools. The houses were crushed together, separated by brutal little walls, overgrown fir trees which looked like the fringes of graveyards. The surrounding countryside was undulating and forested, but I was too young to know what lay beyond the grey streets of our part of town. There was something tacky and bland about our house; the ceiling of my bedroom was covered with polystyrene, occasionally chunks would fall onto my bed, and I would cut them into shapes, the roof of the living room was flat, and fell to pieces one day. The garden was organized in neat rows, a fifties’ patio, rows of rhubarb plants, apple trees. I survived the transition, writing it out in a diary, quietly defiant: It is A.W.F.U.L., I wrote, a dozen times, across an entire day. The woods were too far away and I was never allowed to walk there. The only area worth spending time in, I had decided, was a field behind our house, a patch of grass which my brother and I shared with football teams on Saturdays, burly blokes shouting as they churned into the mud, sparse crowds cheering from the sidelines. One night, after staying for dinner at a friend’s house, I took a shortcut across the field, back to my parents’ house. The field was dark, muddy and uneven underfoot, and the stars were vivid in the sky. I stood for a while in the centre, furthest from the patches of light, looking at the shadows of the darkened grass, the ditches appearing as chasms in the darkness, the trees rustling gently. I was intrigued by the unfamiliar look of the field, the empty darkness, the quietness of the evening.
The Ice Museum Page 5
