Look Back on Happiness | Page 6

in case anyone should come proved he had
forethought, for it was easier to get away scot-free without a burden on
one's back. To stop him from telling me any more lies about his poverty,
I said:
"I expect you've raised plenty of dust in your day? Still do, for that
matter?"
"Well, I do what I can," he replied cheerfully. "I can lift a barrel easier
than most, and nobody was able to dance me off the floor last
Christmas! Hush--is that someone coming?"
We listened. His eyes darted toward the entrance, and in a moment he
had chosen to meet danger halfway. He was taut and splendid; I could
see his jaw working.
"It's nothing," I said.
Resolute and strong as a bull, he crawled out of the hut and was gone
for a few minutes. When he returned, breathing heavily, he said:
"It's nothing."
We lay down for the night.
"In God's name!" he said, as he settled himself on his pine bed. I fell
asleep at once, and for some time slept deeply. But during the night
restlessness seized on the man again. "Peace be with you!" I heard him
mutter as he crawled out of the hut.
In the morning I burned the man's bed of pine needles; it made a lively
fire of crackling pine in the hut.
Outside, the ground was covered with new-fallen snow.

III
There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with
oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to
think idly and slowly as one does it.
There, now I'll fill the kettle with snow, I think, and now I'm crushing
the coffee beans with a stone; later I must beat my sleeping bag well in
the snow and get the wool white again. There is nothing in this of
literature or great novels or public opinion; does it matter? But then I
haven't been toiling just to get this coffee into my life. Literature?
When Rome ruled the world, she was no more than Greece's apprentice
in literature. Yet Rome ruled the world. Let us look too at another
country we know: it fought a war of independence the glory of which
still shines, and it brought forth the greatest school of painting in the
world. Yet it had no literature, and has none today....
Day by day I grow more knowing in the ways of the trees and the moss
and the snow on the ground, and all things are my friends. The stump
of a fir tree stands thawing in the sun; I feel my familiarity with it grow,
and sometimes I stand there loving it, for there is something in it that
moves my soul. The bark is badly broken. One winter in the deep snow,
the tree must have been crippled, and now it points upward long and
naked. I put myself in its place, and look at it with pity. My eyes
perhaps have the simple, animal expression that human eyes had in the
age of the mastodons.
No doubt you will seize this opportunity to mock me, for there are
many amusing things you can say about me and this stump of a fir. Yet
in your heart, you know that I am superior to you in this as in
everything else, with the single exception that I have not your
conventional accomplishments, nor have I passed examinations. About
the forest and the earth you can teach me nothing, for here I feel what
no man else has felt.
Sometimes I take the wrong direction and lose my way. Yes, truly this
may happen sometimes. But I do not begin to twist and lose myself
outside my very door, like the children of the city. I am twelve miles
out, far up the opposite bank of the Skjel River, before I begin to get
lost, and then only on a sunless day, with perhaps thick, wild snow
coming down, and no north or south in the sky. Then you must know

the special marks of this kind of tree and that, the galipot of the pine,
the bark of deciduous trees, the moss that grows at their roots, the angle
of the south and north-pointing branches, the stones that are
moss-covered and those that are bare, and the pattern of the network of
veins in the leaves. From all these things while there is daylight I can
find my way.
But if the dusk falls, I know it will be impossible for me to get home
till the next day. "How shall I pass this night?" I say to myself. And I
roam about till I find a sheltered spot; the best is a crag standing with
its back to the wind. Here I collect