Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

  “She’s sitting on the dock, Albert.”

  Alberto and Sophie stopped the red convertible on the square in Lillesand outside the Hotel Norge. It was a quarter past ten. They could see a large bonfire out in the archipelago.

  “How do we find Bjerkely?” asked Sophie.

  “We’ll just have to hunt around for it. You remember the painting in the major’s cabin.”

  “We’ll have to hurry. I want to get there before he arrives.”

  They started to drive around the minor roads and then over rocky mounds and slopes. A useful clue was that Bjerkely lay by the water.

  Suddenly Sophie shouted, “There it is! We’ve found it!”

  “I do believe you’re right, but don’t shout so loud.”

  “Why? There’s no one to hear us.”

  “My dear Sophie—after a whole course in philosophy, I’m very disappointed to find you still jumping to conclusions.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Surely you don’t believe this place is entirely devoid of trolls, pixies, wood nymphs, and good fairies?”

  “Oh, excuse me.”

  They drove through the gate and up the gravel path to the house. Alberto parked the car on the lawn beside the glider. A little way down the garden a table was set for three.

  “I can see her!” whispered Sophie. “She’s sitting on the dock, just like in my dream.”

  “Have you noticed how much the garden looks like your own garden in Clover Close?”

  “Yes, it does. With the glider and everything. Can I go down to her?”

  “Naturally. I’ll stay here.”

  Sophie ran down to the dock. She almost stumbled and fell over Hilde. But she sat down politely beside her.

  Hilde sat idly playing with the line that the rowboat was made fast with. In her left hand she held a slip of paper. She was clearly waiting. She glanced at her watch several times.

  Sophie thought she was very pretty. She had fair, curly hair and bright green eyes. She was wearing a yellow summer dress. She was not unlike Joanna.

  Sophie tried to talk to her even though she knew it was useless.

  “Hilde—it’s Sophie!”

  Hilde gave no sign that she had heard.

  Sophie got onto her knees and tried to shout in her ear:

  “Can you hear me, Hilde? Or are you both deaf and blind?”

  Did she, or didn’t she, open her eyes a little wider? Wasn’t there a very slight sign that she had heard something—however faintly?

  She looked around. Then she turned her head sharply and stared right into Sophie’s eyes. She did not focus on her properly; it was as if she was looking right through her.

  “Not so loud, Sophie,” said Alberto from up in the car. “I don’t want the garden filled with mermaids.”

  Sophie sat still now. It felt good just to be close to Hilde.

  Then she heard the deep voice of a man: “Hilde!”

  It was the major—in uniform, with a blue beret. He stood at the top of the garden.

  Hilde jumped up and ran toward him. They met between the glider and the red convertible. He lifted her up in the air and swung her around and around.

  Hilde had been sitting on the dock waiting for her father. Since he had landed at Kastrup, she had thought of him every fifteen minutes, trying to imagine where he was now, and how he was taking it. She had noted all the times down on a slip of paper and kept it with her all day.

  What if it made him angry? But surely he couldn’t expect that he would write a mysterious book for her—and then everything would remain as before?

  She looked at her watch again. Now it was a quarter past ten. He could be arriving any minute.

  But what was that? She thought she heard a faint breath of something, exactly as in her dream about Sophie.

  She turned around quickly. There was something, she was sure of it. But what?

  Maybe it was only the summer night.

  For a few seconds she was afraid she was hearing things.

  “Hilde!”

  Now she turned the other way. It was Dad! He was standing at the top of the garden.

  Hilde jumped up and ran toward him. They met by the glider. He lifted her up in the air and swung her around and around.

  Hilde was crying, and her father had to hold back his tears as well.

  “You’ve become a grown woman, Hilde!”

  “And you’ve become a real writer.”

  Hilde wiped away her tears.

  “Shall we say we’re quits?” she asked.

  “We’re quits.”

  They sat down at the table. First of all Hilde had to have an exact description of everything that had happened at Kastrup and on the way home. They kept bursting out laughing.

  “Didn’t you see the envelope in the cafeteria?”

  “I didn’t get a chance to sit down and eat anything, you villain. Now I’m ravenous.”

  “Poor Dad.”

  “The stuff about the turkey was all bluff, then?”

  “It certainly was not! I have prepared everything. Mom’s doing the serving.”

  Then they had to go over the ring binder and the story of Sophie and Alberto from one end to the other and backwards and forwards.

  Mom brought out the turkey and the Waldorf salad, the rosé wine and Hilde’s homemade bread.

  Her father was just saying something abut Plato when Hilde suddenly interrupted him: “Shh!”

  “What is it?”

  “Didn’t you hear it? Something squeaking?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sure I heard something. I guess it was just a field mouse.”

  While her mother went to get another bottle of wine, her father said: “But the philosophy course isn’t quite over.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Tonight I’m going to tell you about the universe.”

  Before they began to eat, he said to his wife, “Hilde is too big to sit on my knee any more. But you’re not!”

  With that he caught Marit round the waist and drew her onto his lap. It was quite a while before she got anything to eat.

  “To think you’ll soon be forty…”

  When Hilde jumped up and ran toward her father, Sophie felt her tears welling up. She would never be able to reach her…

  Sophie was deeply envious of Hilde because she had been created a real person of flesh and blood.

  When Hilde and the major had sat down at the table, Alberto honked the car horn.

  Sophie looked up. Didn’t Hilde do exactly the same?

  She ran up to Alberto and jumped into the seat next to him.

  “We’ll sit for a while and watch what happens,” he said.

  Sophie nodded.

  “Have you been crying?”

  She nodded again.

  “What is it?”

  “She’s so lucky to be a real person. Now she’ll grow up and be a real woman. I’m sure she’ll have real children too…”

  “And grandchildren, Sophie. But there are two sides to everything. That was what I tried to teach you at the beginning of our course.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She is lucky, I agree. But she who wins the lot of life must also draw the lot of death, since the lot of life is death.”

  “But still, isn’t it better to have had a life than never to have really lived?”

  “We cannot live a life like Hilde—or like the major for that matter. On the other hand, we’ll never die. Don’t you remember what the old woman said back there in the woods? We are the invisible people. She was two hundred years old, she said. And at their Midsummer party I saw some creatures who were more than three thousand years old…”

  “Perhaps what I envy most about Hilde is all this…her family life.”

  “But you have a family yourself. And you have a cat, two birds, and a tortoise.”

  “But we left all that behind, didn’t we?”

  “By no means. It’s only the major who left it behind. He ha
s written the final word of his book, my dear, and he will never find us again.”

  “Does that mean we can go back?”

  “Anytime we want. But we’re also going to make new friends in the woods behind Cinderella’s cafeteria.”

  The Knag family began their meal. For a moment Sophie was afraid it would turn out like the philosophical garden party in Clover Close. At one point it looked as though the major intended to lay Marit across the table. But then he drew her onto his knee instead.

  The car was parked a good way away from where the family sat eating. Their conversation was only audible now and then. Sophie and Alberto sat gazing down over the garden. They had plenty of time to mull over all the details and the sorry ending of the garden party.

  The family did not get up from the table until almost midnight. Hilde and the major strolled toward the glider. They waved to Marit as she walked up to the white-painted house.

  “You might as well go to bed, Mom. We have so much to talk about.”

  The Big Bang

  …we too are stardust…

  Hilde settled herself comfortably in the glider beside her father. It was nearly midnight. They sat looking out across the bay. A few stars glimmered palely in the light sky. Gentle waves lapped over the stones under the dock.

  Her father broke the silence.

  “It’s a strange thought that we live on a tiny little planet in the universe.”

  “Yes…”

  “Earth is only one of many planets orbiting the sun. Yet Earth is the only living planet.”

  “Perhaps the only one in the entire universe?”

  “It’s possible. But it’s also possible that the universe is teeming with life. The universe is inconceivably huge. The distances are so great that we measure them in light-minutes and light-years.”

  “What are they, actually?”

  “A light-minute is the distance light travels in one minute. And that’s a long way, because light travels through space at 300,000 kilometers a second. That means that a light-minute is 60 times 300,000—or 18 million kilometers. A light-year is nearly ten trillion kilometers.”

  “How far away is the sun?”

  “It’s a little over eight light-minutes away. The rays of sunlight warming our faces on a hot June day have traveled for eight minutes through the universe before they reach us.”

  “Go on…”

  “Pluto, which is the planet farthest out in our solar system, is about five light-hours away from us. When an astronomer looks at Pluto through his telescope, he is in fact looking five hours back in time. We could also say that the picture of Pluto takes five hours to get here.”

  “It’s a bit hard to visualize, but I think I understand.”

  “That’s good, Hilde. But we here on Earth are only just beginning to orient ourselves. Our own sun is one of 400 billion other stars in the galaxy we call the Milky Way. This galaxy resembles a large discus, with our sun situated in one of its several spiral arms. When we look up at the sky on a clear winter’s night, we see a broad band of stars. This is because we are looking toward the center of the Milky Way.”

  “I suppose that’s why the Milky Way is called ‘Winter Street’ in Swedish.”

  “The distance to the star in the Milky Way that is our nearest neighbor is four light-years. Maybe that’s it just above the island over there. If you could imagine that at this very moment a stargazer is sitting up there with a powerful telescope pointing at Bjerkely—he would see Bjerkely as it looked four years ago. He might see an eleven-year-old girl swinging her legs in the glider.”

  “Incredible.”

  “But that’s only the nearest star. The whole galaxy—or nebula, as we also call it—is 90,000 light-years wide. That is another way of describing the time it takes for light to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. When we gaze at a star in the Milky Way which is 50,000 light-years away from our sun, we are looking back 50,000 years in time.”

  “The idea is much too big for my little head.”

  “The only way we can look out into space, then, is to look back in time. We can never know what the universe is like now. We only know what it was like then. When we look up at a star that is thousands of light-years away, we are really traveling thousands of years back in the history of space.”

  “It’s completely incomprehensible.”

  “But everything we see meets the eye in the form of light waves. And these light waves take time to travel through space. We could compare it to thunder. We always hear the thunder after we have seen the lightning. That’s because sound waves travel slower than light waves. When I hear a peal of thunder, I’m hearing the sound of something that happened a little while ago. It’s the same thing with the stars. When I look at a star that is thousands of light-years away, I’m seeing the ‘peal of thunder’ from an event that lies thousands of years back in time.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “But so far, we’ve only been talking about our own galaxy. Astronomers say there are about a hundred billion of such galaxies in the universe, and each of these galaxies consists of about a hundred billion stars. We call the nearest galaxy to the Milky Way the Andromeda nebula. It lies two million light-years from our own galaxy. That means the light from that galaxy takes two millions years to reach us. So we’re looking two million years back in time when we see the Andromeda nebula high up in the sky. If there was a clever stargazer in this nebula—I can just imagine him pointing his telescope at Earth right now—he wouldn’t be able to see us. If he was lucky, he’d see a few flat-faced Neanderthals.”

  “It’s amazing.”

  “The most distant galaxies we know of today are about ten billion light-years away from us. When we receive signals from these galaxies, we are going ten billion years back in the history of the universe. That’s about twice as long as our own solar system has existed.”

  “You’re making me dizzy.”

  “Although it is hard enough to comprehend what it means to look so far back in time, astronomers have discovered something that has even greater significance for our world picture.”

  “What?”

  “Apparently no galaxy in space remains where it is. All the galaxies in the universe are moving away from each other at colossal speeds. The further they are away from us, the quicker they move. That means that the distance between the galaxies is increasing all the time.”

  “I’m trying to picture it.”

  “If you have a balloon and you paint black spots on it, the spots will move away from each other as you blow up the balloon. That’s what’s happening with the galaxies in the universe. We say that the universe is expanding.”

  “What makes it do that?”

  “Most astronomers agree that the expanding universe can only have one explanation: Once upon a time, about fifteen billion years ago, all substance in the universe was assembled in a relatively small area. The substance was so dense that gravity made it terrifically hot. Finally it got so hot and so tightly packed that it exploded. We call this explosion the Big Bang.”

  “Just the thought of it makes me shudder.”

  “The Big Bang caused all the substance in the universe to be expelled in all directions, and as it gradually cooled, it formed stars and galaxies and moons and planets…”

  “But I thought you said the universe was still expanding?”

  “Yes I did, and it’s expanding precisely because of this explosion billions of years ago. The universe has no timeless geography. The universe is a happening. The universe is an explosion. Galaxies continue to fly through the universe away from each other at colossal speeds.”

  “Will they go on doing that forever?”

  “That’s one possibility. But there is another. You may recall that Alberto told Sophie about the two forces that cause the planets to remain in constant orbit round the sun?”

  “Weren’t they gravity and inertia?”

  “Right, and the same thing applies to the galaxies. Because e
ven though the universe continues to expand, the force of gravity is working the other way. And one day, in a couple of billion years, gravity will perhaps cause the heavenly bodies to be packed together again as the force of the huge explosion begins to weaken. Then we would get a reverse explosion, a so-called implosion. But the distances are so great that it will happen like a movie that is run in slow motion. You might compare it with what happens when you release the air from a balloon.”

  “Will all the galaxies be drawn together in a tight nucleus again?”

  “Yes, you’ve got it. But what will happen then?”

  “There would be another Big Bang and the universe would start expanding again. Because the same natural laws are in operation. And so new stars and galaxies will form.”

  “Good thinking. Astronomers think there are two possible scenarios for the future of the universe. Either the universe will go on expanding forever so that the galaxies will draw further and further apart—or the universe will begin to contract again. How heavy and massive the universe is will determine what happens. And this is something astronomers have no way of knowing as yet.”

  “But if the universe is so heavy that it begins to contract again, perhaps it has expanded and contracted lots of times before.”

  “That would be an obvious conclusion. But on this point theory is divided. It may be that the expansion of the universe is something that will only happen this one time. But if it keeps on expanding for all eternity, the question of where it all began becomes even more pressing.”

  “Yes, where did it come from, all that stuff that suddenly exploded?”

  “For a Christian, it would be obvious to see the Big Bang as the actual moment of creation. The Bible tells us that God said ‘Let there be light!’ You may possibly also remember that Alberto indicated Christianity’s ‘linear’ view of history. From the point of view of a Christian belief in the creation, it is better to imagine the universe continuing to expand.”

  “It is?”

  “In the Orient they have a ‘cyclic’ view of history. In other words, history repeats itself eternally. In India, for example, there is an ancient theory that the world continually unfolds and folds again, thus alternating between what Indians have called Brahman’s Day and Brahman’s Night. This idea harmonizes best, of course, with the universe expanding and contracting—in order to expand again—in an eternal cyclic process. I have a mental picture of a great cosmic heart that beats and beats and beats…”