Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

  Berkeley, George, 1685–1753, Eng. Philos., Bishop of Cloyne. Denied existence of a material world beyond the human mind. Our sense perceptions proceed from God. Main work: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710).

  Yes, it was decidedly odd. Hilde stood thinking for a few seconds before going back to bed and the ring binder.

  In one way, it was her father who had hung the two pictures on the wall. Could there be any connection other than the similarity of names?

  Berkeley was a philosopher who denied the existence of a material world beyond the human mind. That was certainly very strange, one had to admit. But it was not easy to disprove such claims, either. As regards Sophie, it fitted very well. After all, Hilde’s father was responsible for her “sense perceptions.”

  Well, she would know more if she read on. Hilde looked up from the ring binder and smiled when she got to the point where Sophie discovers the reflection of a girl who winks with both eyes. “The other girl had winked at Sophie as if to say: I can see you, Sophie. I am in here, on the other side.”

  Sophie finds the green wallet in the cabin as well—with the money and everything! How could it have made its way there?

  Absurd! For a second or two Hilde had really believed that Sophie had found it. But then she tried to imagine how the whole thing must appear to Sophie. It must all seem quite inscrutable and uncanny.

  For the first time Hilde felt a strong desire to meet Sophie face to face. She felt like telling her the real truth about the whole business.

  But now Sophie had to get out of the cabin before she was caught red-handed. The boat was adrift on the lake, of course. (Her father couldn’t resist reminding her of that old story, could he!)

  Hilde gulped a mouthful of soda and took a bit of her roll while she read the letter about the “meticulous” Aristotle, who had criticized Plato’s theories.

  Aristotle pointed out that nothing exists in consciousness that has not first been experienced by the senses. Plato would have said that there is nothing in the natural world that has not first existed in the world of ideas. Aristotle held that Plato was thus “doubling the number of things.”

  Hilde had not known that it was Aristotle who had invented the game of “animal, vegetable, or mineral.”

  Aristotle wanted to do a thorough clearing up in nature’s “room.” He tried to show that everything in nature belongs to different categories and subcategories.

  When she read about Aristotle’s view of women she was both irritated and disappointed. Imagine being such a brilliant philosopher and yet such a crass idiot!

  Aristotle had inspired Sophie to clean up her own room. And there, together with all the other stuff, she found the white stocking which had disappeared from Hilde’s closet a month ago! Sophie put all the pages she had gotten from Alberto into a ring binder. “There were in all over fifty pages.” For her own part, Hilde had gotten up to page 124, but then she also had Sophie’s story on top of all the correspondence from Alberto Knox.

  The next chapter was called “Hellenism.” First of all, Sophie finds a postcard with a picture of a UN jeep. It is stamped UN Battalion, June 15. Another of these “cards” to Hilde that her father had put into the story instead of sending by mail.

  Dear Hilde,

  I assume you are still celebrating your 15th birthday. Or is this the morning after? Anyway, it makes no difference to your present. In a sense, that will last a lifetime. But I’d like to wish you a happy birthday one more time. Perhaps you understand now why I send the cards to Sophie. I am sure she will pass them on to you.

  P.S. Mom said you had lost your wallet. I hereby promise to reimburse you the 150 crowns. You will probably be able to get another school I.D. before they close for the summer vacation.

  Love from Dad.

  Not bad! That made her 150 crowns richer. He probably thought a homemade present alone wasn’t enough.

  So it appeared that June 15 was Sophie’s birthday, too. But Sophie’s calendar had only gotten as far as the middle of May. That must have been when her father had written this chapter, and he had post-dated the “birthday card” to Hilde. But poor Sophie, running down to the supermarket to meet Joanna.

  Who was Hilde? How could her father as good as take it for granted that Sophie would find her? In any case, it was senseless of him to send Sophie the cards instead of sending them directly to his daughter.

  Hilde, like Sophie, was elevated to the celestial spheres as she read about Plotinus.

  I am saying that there is something of the divine mystery in everything that exists. We can see it sparkle in a sunflower or a poppy. We sense more of this unfathomable mystery in a butterfly that flutters from a twig—or in a goldfish swimming in a bowl. But we are closest to God in our own soul. Only there can we become one with the great mystery of life. In truth, at very rare moments we can experience that we ourselves are that divine mystery.

  This was the most giddying passage Hilde had read up to now. But it was nevertheless the simplest. Everything is one, and this “one” is a divine mystery that everyone shares.

  This was not really something you needed to believe. It is so, thought Hilde. So everyone can read what they like into the word “divine.”

  She turned quickly to the next chapter. Sophie and Joanna go camping the night before the national holiday on May 17. They make their way to the major’s cabin…

  Hilde had not read many pages before she flung the bedclothes angrily aside, got up, and began to walk up and down, clutching the ring binder in her hands.

  This was just about the most impudent trick she had ever heard of. In that little hut in the woods, her father lets these two girls find copies of all the cards he had sent Hilde in the first two weeks of May. And the copies were real enough. Hilde had read the very same words over and over. She recognized every single word.

  Dear Hilde,

  I am now so bursting with all these secrets for your birthday that I have to stop myself several times a day from calling home and blowing the whole thing. It is something that simply grows and grows. And as you know, when a thing gets bigger and bigger it’s more difficult to keep it to yourself…

  Sophie gets a new lesson from Alberto. It’s all about Jews and Greeks and the two great cultures. Hilde liked getting this wide bird’s-eye view of history. She had never learned anything like it at school. They only gave you details and more details. She now saw Jesus and Christianity in a completely new light.

  She liked the quote from Goethe: “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.”

  The next chapter began with a piece of card which sticks to Sophie’s kitchen window. It is a new birthday card for Hilde, of course.

  Dear Hilde,

  I don’t know whether it will still be your birthday when you read this card. I hope so, in a way; or at least that not too many days have gone by. A week or two for Sophie does not have to mean just as long for us. I shall be coming home for Midsummer Eve, so we can sit together for hours in the glider, looking out over the sea, Hilde. We have so much to talk about…

  Then Alberto calls Sophie, and this is the first time she hears his voice.

  “You make it sound like a war.”

  “I would rather call it a battle of wills. We have to attract Hilde’s attention and get her over on our side before her father comes home to Lillesand.”

  And then Sophie meets Alberto Knox disguised as a medieval monk in the twelfth-century stone church.

  Oh, no, the church! Hilde looked at the time. A quarter past one…She had forgotten all about the time.

  Maybe it wouldn’t matter so much that she cut school on her birthday. But it did mean that her classmates wouldn’t be celebrating with her. Oh well, she had always had plenty of well-wishers.

  Soon she found herself receiving a long sermon. Alberto had no problem slipping into the role of a medieval priest.

  When she read about how Sophia had appeared to Hildegard in vis
ions, she turned once again to her encyclopedia. But this time she found nothing about either of them. Wasn’t that typical! As soon as it was a question of women or something to do with women, the encyclopedia was about as informative as a moon crater. Was the whole work censored by the Society for the Protection of Men?

  Hildegard of Bingen was a preacher, a writer, a doctor, a botanist, and a biologist. She was “perhaps an example of the fact that women were often more practical, more scientific even, in the Middle Ages.”

  But there was not a single word about her in the encyclopedia. How scandalous!

  Hilde had never heard that God had a “female side” or a “mother nature.” Her name was Sophia, apparently—but she was apparently not worth printer’s ink, either.

  The nearest she could find in the encyclopedia was an entry about the Santa Sophia Church in Constantinople (now Istanbul), named Hagia Sophia, which means Sacred Wisdom. But there was nothing about it being female. That was censorship, wasn’t it?

  Otherwise, it was true enough that Sophie had revealed herself to Hilde. She was picturing the girl with the straight hair all the time…

  When Sophie gets home after spending most of the morning in St. Mary’s Church, she stands in front of the brass mirror she took home from the cabin in the woods.

  She studied the sharp contours of her own pale face framed by that impossible hair which defied any style but nature’s own. But beyond that face was the apparition of another girl. Suddenly the other girl began to wink frantically with both eyes, as if to signal that she was really in there on the other side. The apparition lasted only a few seconds. Then she was gone.

  How many times had Hilde stood in front of the mirror like that as if she was searching for someone else behind the glass? But how could her father have known that? Wasn’t it also a dark-haired woman she had been searching for? Great-grandmother had bought it from a Gypsy woman, hadn’t she? Hilde felt her hands shaking as they held the book. She had the feeling that Sophie really existed somewhere “on the other side.”

  Now Sophie is dreaming about Hilde and Bjerkely. Hilde can neither see nor hear her, but then—Sophie finds Hilde’s gold crucifix on the dock. And the crucifix—with Hilde’s initials and everything—is in Sophie’s bed when she wakes after her dream!

  Hilde forced herself to think hard. Surely she hadn’t lost her crucifix as well? She went to her dresser and took out her jewelry case. The crucifix, which she had received as a christening gift from her grandmother, was not there!

  So she really had lost it. All right, but how had her father known it when she didn’t even know it herself?

  And another thing: Sophie had apparently dreamed that Hilde’s father came home from Lebanon. But there was still a week to go before that happened. Was Sophie’s dream prophetic? Did her father mean that when he came home Sophie would somehow be there? He had written that she would get a new friend…

  In a momentary vision of absolute clarity Hilde knew that Sophie was more than just paper and ink. She really existed.

  The Enlightenment

  …from the way needles are made

  to the way cannons are founded…

  Hilde had just begun the chapter on the Renaissance when she heard her mother come in the front door. She looked at the clock. It was four in the afternoon.

  Her mother ran upstairs and opened Hilde’s door.

  “Didn’t you go to the church?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “But…what did you wear?”

  “What I’m wearing now.”

  “Your nightgown?”

  “It’s an old stone church from the Middle Ages.”

  “Hilde!”

  She let the ring binder fall into her lap and looked up at her mother.

  “I forgot the time, Mom. I’m sorry, but I’m reading something terribly exciting.”

  Her mother could not help smiling.

  “It’s a magic book,” added Hilde.

  “Okay. Happy birthday once again, Hilde!”

  “Hey, I don’t know if I can take that phrase any more.”

  “But I haven’t…I’m just going to rest for a while, then I’ll start fixing a great dinner. I managed to get hold of some strawberries.”

  “Okay, I’ll go on reading.”

  Her mother left and Hilde read on.

  Sophie is following Hermes through the town. In Alberto’s hall she finds another card from Lebanon. This, too, is dated June 15.

  Hilde was just beginning to understand the system of the dates. The cards dated before June 15 are copies of cards Hilde had already received from her dad. But those with today’s date are reaching her for the first time via the ring binder.

  Dear Hilde,

  Now Sophie is coming to the philosopher’s house. She will soon be fifteen, but you were fifteen yesterday. Or is it today, Hilde? If it is today, it must be late, then. But our watches do not always agree…

  Hilde read how Alberto told Sophie about the Renaissance and the new science, the seventeenth-century rationalists and British empiricism.

  She jumped at every new card and birthday greeting that her father had stuck into the story. He got them to fall out of an exercise book, turn up inside a banana skin, and hide inside a computer program. Without the slightest effort, he could get Alberto to make a slip of the tongue and call Sophie Hilde. On top of everything else, he got Hermes to say “Happy birthday, Hilde!”

  Hilde agreed with Alberto that he was going a bit too far, comparing himself with God and Providence. But whom was she actually agreeing with? Wasn’t it her father who put those reproachful—or self-reproachful—words in Alberto’s mouth? She decided that the comparison with God was not so crazy after all. Her father really was like an almighty God for Sophie’s world.

  When Alberto got to Berkeley, Hilde was at least as enthralled as Sophie had been. What would happen now? There had been all kinds of hints that something special was going to happen as soon as they got to that philosopher—who had denied the existence of a material world outside human consciousness.

  The chapter begins with Alberto and Sophie standing at the window, seeing the little plane with the long Happy Birthday streamer waving behind it. At the same time dark clouds begin to gather over the town.

  “So ‘to be or not to be’ is not the whole question. The question is also who we are. Are we really human beings of flesh and blood? Does our world consist of real things—or are we encircled by the mind?”

  Not so surprising that Sophie starts biting her nails. Nail-biting had never been one of Hilde’s bad habits but she didn’t feel particularly pleased with herself right now. Then finally it was all out in the open: “For us—for you and me—this ‘will or spirit’ that is the ‘cause of everything in everything’ could be Hilde’s father.”

  “Are you saying he’s been a kind of God for us?”

  “To be perfectly candid, yes. He should be ashamed of himself!”

  “What about Hilde herself?”

  “She is an angel, Sophie.”

  “An angel?”

  “Hilde is the one this ‘spirit’ turns to.”

  With that, Sophie tears herself away from Alberto and runs out into the storm. Could it be the same storm that raged over Bjerkely last night—a few hours after Sophie ran through the town?

  As she ran, one thought kept going round and round in her mind: “Tomorrow is my birthday! Isn’t it extra bitter to realize that life is only a dream on the day before your fifteenth birthday? It’s like dreaming you won a million and then just as you’re getting the money you wake up.”

  Sophie ran across the squelching playing field. Minutes later she saw someone come running toward her. It was her mother. The sky was pierced again and again by angry darts of lightning.

  When they reached each other Sophie’s mother put her arm around her.

  “What’s happening to us, little one?”

  “I don’t know,” Sophie sobbed. “It’s like a bad dream.”r />
  Hilde felt the tears start. “To be or not to be—that is the question.” She threw the ring binder to the end of the bed and stood up. She walked back and forth across the floor. At last she stopped in front of the brass mirror, where she remained until her mother came to say dinner was ready. When Hilde heard the knock on the door, she had no idea how long she had been standing there.

  But she was sure, she was perfectly sure, that her reflection had winked with both eyes.

  She tried to be the grateful birthday girl all through dinner. But her thoughts were with Sophie and Alberto all the time.

  How would things go for them now that they knew it was Hilde’s father who decided everything? Although “knew” was perhaps an exaggeration. It was nonsense to think they knew anything at all. Wasn’t it only her father who let them know things?

  Still, the problem was the same however you looked at it. As soon as Sophie and Alberto “knew” how everything hung together, they were in a way at the end of the road.

  She almost choked on a mouthful of food as she suddenly realized that the same problem possibly applied to her own world too. People had progressed steadily in their understanding of natural laws. Could history simply continue to all eternity once the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle of philosophy and science had fallen into place? Wasn’t there a connection between the development of ideas and science on the one hand, and the greenhouse effect and deforestation on the other? Maybe it was not so crazy to call man’s thirst for knowledge a fall from grace?

  The question was so huge and so terrifying that Hilde tried to forget it again. She would probably understand much more as she read further in her father’s birthday book.

  “Happy birthday to you…,” sang her mother when they were done with their ice cream and Italian strawberries. “Now we’ll do whatever you choose.”