Look Back on Happiness | Page 2

fitting. I have an ax and a saw and the necessary crockery. And I
have a sleeping bag of sheepskin with the wool inside. I keep a fire
burning in the fireplace all night, and my shirt, which hangs by it,
smells of fresh resin in the morning. When I want coffee, I go out, fill
the kettle with clean snow, and hang it over the fire till the snow turns
to water.
Is this a life worth living?
There you have betrayed yourself. This is a life you do not understand.
Yes, your home is in the city, and you have furnished it with vanities,
with pictures and books; but you have a wife and a servant and a
hundred expenses. Asleep or awake you must keep pace with the world

and are never at peace. I have peace. You are welcome to your
intellectual pastimes and books and art and newspapers; welcome, too,
to your bars and your whisky that only makes me ill. Here am I in the
forest, quite content. If you ask me intellectual questions and try to trip
me up, then I will reply, for example, that God is the origin of all things
and that truly men are mere specks and atoms in the universe. You are
no wiser than I. But if you should go so far as to ask me what is eternity,
then I know quite as much in this matter, too, and reply thus: Eternity is
merely unborn time, nothing but unborn time.
My friend, come here to me and I will take a mirror from my pocket
and reflect the sun on your face, my friend.
You lie in bed till ten or eleven in the morning, yet you are weary,
exhausted, when you get up. I see you in my mind's eye as you go out
into the street; the morning has dawned too early on your blinking eyes.
I rise at five quite refreshed. It is still dark outdoors, yet there is enough
to look at--the moon, the stars, the clouds, and the weather portents for
the day. I prophesy the weather for many hours ahead. In what key do
the winds whistle? Is the crack of the ice in the Glimma light and dry,
or deep and long? These are splendid portents, and as it grows lighter, I
add the visible signs to the audible ones, and learn still more.
Then a narrow streak of daylight appears far down in the east, the stars
fade from the sky, and soon light reigns over all. A crow flies over the
woods, and I warn Madame not to go outside the hut or she will be
devoured.
But if fresh snow has fallen, the trees and copses and the great rocks
take on giant, unearthly shapes, as though they had come from another
world in the night. A storm-felled pine with its root torn up looks like a
witch petrified in the act of performing strange rites.
Here a hare has sprung by, and yonder are the tracks of a solitary
reindeer. I shake out my sleeping bag and after hanging it high in a tree
to escape Madame, who eats everything, I follow the tracks of the
reindeer into the forest. It has jogged along without haste, but toward a
definite goal--straight east to meet the day. By the banks of the Skiel,
which is so rapid that its waters never freeze, the reindeer has stopped
to drink, to scrape the hillside for moss, to rest a while, and then moved
on.
And perhaps what this reindeer has done is all the knowledge and

experience I gain that day. It seems much to me. The days are short; at
two, I am already strolling homeward in the deep twilight, with the
good, still night approaching. Then I begin to cook. I have a great deal
of meat stored in three pure-white drifts of snow. In fact I have
something even better: eight fat cheeses of reindeer milk, to eat with
butter and crisp-bread.
While the pot is boiling I lie down, and gaze at the fire till I fall asleep.
I take my midday nap before my meal. And when I waken, the food is
cooked, filling the hut with an aroma of meat and resin. Madame darts
back and forth across the floor and at length gets her share. I eat, and
light my cutty-pipe.
The day is at an end. All has been well, and I have had no
unpleasantness. In the great silence surrounding me, I am the only adult,
roaming man; this makes me bigger and more important, God's kin.
And I believe the red-hot irons within me are progressing well, for God
does great things for his kin.
I lie thinking of the