I had been ready for some time, sitting with my spiral notebook in my lap. I noticed that look of concentration come over her face, as if she were juggling things about in her head, already composing subsequent stories while wrestling with the opening of the first. And at the same moment I saw again, quite clearly, although she tried to hide it from me: she was in the depths of despair – like someone who had no idea what she was doing.
The Snow Planet
Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then we will have to begin with a February day in the early seventies, with three lads in holiday mood, standing at Tretten station in Gudbrandsdalen complete with skis and rucksacks. Like all good Taoists, the Three Wise Men often went wandering, but this was more than just a wander: this was a pilgrimage. They were about to head off into the Norwegian countryside. To be perfectly frank, the Three Wise Men had come to Gudbrandsdalen to follow in the tracks of Scandinavia’s greatest cross-country skier.
Before I go on, I ought probably to say something about the Norwegian countryside, because the question is whether the Norway countryside is not more famous than the people inhabiting it, whether the landscape of Norway has not made a greater contribution to the world, not to mention the history of ideas, than the Norwegians themselves. Because we are talking here about Norway as a place or, as they say in the movie business, a location.
To many children in the world, or at any rate to those who grew up in the fifties, Norway was synonymous with a country overrun by lemmings. The mere mention of the word ‘Norway’ conjured up in their minds images of hordes of these little rodents, millions of lemmings all marching in the same direction across a rugged, fjord-side landscape. This can be put down, not to a common intuitive sense of the Norwegians’ innate urge to act as one, but to the influence of a comic strip by the aforementioned Carl Barks, a story about Norwegian cheese and a lemming which, because of a medallion hanging round its neck, was of vital importance to Uncle Scrooge. It later came to light that Carl Barks got the idea for the lemmings and Norway from an issue of National Geographic, although we won’t hold that against him; whatever Norwegians may think, this is how the majority of foreigners have always seen and always will see Norway. As a gaudy colour spread in National Geographic.
One of Barks’s most avid readers in the fifties was George Lucas, soon to become a successful film director. He and another movie giant, Steven Spielberg, were the men behind the Star Wars epic. And now we’re getting to the crux of the matter, because in the second film in the first Star Wars trilogy, which bore the famous subtitle, The Empire Strikes Back, Norway plays a starring role. It was, in fact, in Norway that George Lucas and his team shot the part of the film which takes place on the inhospitable snow planet of Hoth, where the heroes and their rebel forces have sought refuge after the dark side’s temporary victory. Many cinemagoers will never forget those spectacular scenes with the bounding Tauntauns and fearsome battle droids. No, don’t laugh, Professor. This may well be Norway’s most valuable contribution to the world to date: to have fired the imaginations of almost a billion people, given them the illusion of a distant ice age. And when you think about it, it isn’t really such a far cry from fantasy to reality, or vice versa, because no matter how you look at it, this image was only further consolidated by the 1994 Winter Olympics, when Norway provided collective proof of a modified version of Andy Warhol’s theory, by showing that every country gets its fifteen days of fame. Not because of the citizens of Norway – although, with their massive turn-out and energetic use of sheep bells, they yet again proved themselves worthy of the epithet: ‘world’s best spectators’ – but because of the picture-postcard shots depicting Norway as a chilly, sun-spangled snow planet, which were beamed irretrievably around the world by satellite and would remain fixed in the world consciousness, no matter what Norwegians might say or do to try to change that image – for two or three generations at least.
Don’t worry, I haven’t lost my thread: you see it was this same snow planet Norway that the Three Wise Men were going in search of when they got off the train at Tretten station and, after hitchhiking a short distance, found themselves outside the remains of what had, in times gone by, been known as Winge Sanatorium, situated roughly halfway between Tretten and Skeikampen. For it was here, at Winge, that the greatest cross-country skier in Scandinavia had once stayed. And the greatest cross-country skier in Scandinavia is not, of course, either Fridtjof Nansen or Johan Grøttumsbråten, but Niels Bohr.
Now to some people such an assertion – that the Dane Niels Bohr should be the foremost cross-country skier in Scandinavia – probably seems as shocking as proclaiming Denmark’s Kurt Stille to be Scandinavia’s greatest speed skater, but when it comes to the consequences of cross-country skiing, its significance for posterity, this postulate is sound enough. Because there was no talk here of skiing as fast as possible, or of crossing a geographical continent, but of conquering an ideational pole. Niels Bohr’s skiing expeditions in Gudbrandsdalen changed the world. It is as simple as that.
‘I already know all this,’ Axel said as they were standing on the steps outside the Winge. ‘Bohr saw the trees as particles and the landscape as waves.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Jonas. ‘They’ve got trees and a landscape in Denmark too, you know.’
‘Yes, but to talk about something more important,’ said Viktor, turning anxiously to Axel. ‘I sincerely hope you remembered the elixir?’ He was referring, of course, to the aquavit.
Winge Sanatorium had had a chequered history, from its modest beginnings around the turn of the century to its time as one of Norway’s more fashionable hotels; a palatial white building, patronized by royalty, with tennis courts and a golf course, open fires and an indoor swimming pool. Then, in 1957, the main building burned down. A new, less ostentatious building was built; the Winge was sold and converted into a rest home. The Three Wise Men had, however, been in luck, because although the Winge Convalescent Home, as it was now called, was not normally open to the general public, the proprietress did allow them to stay there for a few days, partly because the home was not very busy that week and partly because she was won over by Viktor’s irresistible charm and powers of persuasion. After all you don’t turn away pilgrims.
Not many people, not many Danes or other Bohr scholars even, have taken much interest in physicist Niels Bohr’s four-week trip to Norway in 1927, although it has long been known that it was during this skiing holiday that Bohr gained his momentous insight into the concept of complementarity: a discovery which he presented later that year at the conference in Como in Italy, in a lecture entitled ‘The Quantum Postulate and the Recent Development of Atomic Theory’. Bohr’s theory endeavoured to resolve a conflict, inasmuch as some experiments showed that light behaved like particles, and others that light seemed to be waves. According to Bohr – Bohr after those skiing expeditions, that is – it has to be acknowledged that these two possibilities are mutually exclusive, and yet both are essential to a complete understanding of the phenomenon – a most provocative philosophical and scientific contention, to put it mildly. Bohr’s ‘complementarity’ is history’s greatest argument for having it both ways. A massive expansion.
But why was no one, not even the Norwegians, interested in where this idea had come to him? The Three Wise Men saw it as only natural, not to say their patriotic duty, to find out more about Bohr’s skiing holiday, about the inspiration that Norway must have given the Danish genius. I believe Viktor Harlem should be regarded as a pioneer, for the zeal with which he threw himself into this undertaking, even visiting the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, in whose archive he at last unearthed the location of Bohr’s ‘base camp’ on this expedition to those intellectual peaks. Viktor was not only able to differentiate, at the drop of a hat, between such complex concepts as analytical, phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy, he also managed to lay his hands on a copy of a letter which Bohr wrote from Norway, dated February 25 1927, with a lette
rhead which quite clearly gave his place of residence as Winge Sanatorium, near Tretten Station: ‘…my staying at present here in Norway on a short recreation tour of a few weeks.’ In Bohr’s day – this was another fact thrown up by Viktor’s research – the Winge had been run by Agnes Berle; at that time the place had consisted of one large manor house, built on two storeys.
‘To Agnes Berle!’ said Axel.
‘A credit to Norwegian hospitality!’
‘A woman who did more for Gudbrandsdalen and Norway than Prillar Guri!’ Viktor declared after pouring generous measures for everyone from the aquavit bottle. And in case you still haven’t got the point, Professor, you should know that Viktor Harlem was by far the most important person in Jonas Wergeland’s life; no other person had anything like such a fundamental effect on Jonas. Once, when Jonas was a little boy staying on Hvaler, his grandfather had been in the blue kitchen sharpening a knife with a practised hand, drawing it up and down the steel. ‘That’s the sort of friend you ought to choose for yourself,’ he told Jonas, holding up the knife sharpener, ‘a friend who can hone you.’ Such a friend was Viktor Harlem.
The very next day the Three Wise Men were outside the Winge waxing their skis: because if there was one thing they were sure of it was that Bohr’s vision somehow had to be connected with skiing. Norway was skiing. ‘Ski’ is one of the few words that Norway has given to the world. Even the Norwegians’ most traumatic national experiences are ski-related. In the United States they ask you where you were when Kennedy was shot; in Norway they ask where you were when Oddvar Brå broke his ski pole.
They followed the most commonly used track – a track which Bohr must also have taken – from the Winge, through the forest up to Musdal Saeter. It was a steep climb. And already here Viktor was propounding his first hypothesis: could it simply have been sheer exhaustion, or light-headedness, that had brought the idea of complementarity to the surface.
This suggestion was withdrawn, however, when, puffing and panting after all the uphill stretches, they reached the snow fences below Musdal Saeter – or rather, the tops of the fence posts marking out their course like channel markers in a sea of snow – and then, a little further up, found the splendour of the mountains spreading out before them, with Bjørga’s almost bald summit in the west and in the distance, over by Valdres, Synnfjell shimmering like a pearly mirage. Could it have been this, they whispered in unison, something about this suddenly expanding vista that appealed to Bohr? Or something to do with those vast expanses unmarked by skis making him think of white sheets of paper, a blank page? ‘Or maybe Bohr’s ch’i was actually changed by the mere fact of his breathing this air,’ said Viktor.
They pressed on, much heartened; cutting between the saeter buildings, using their eyes like detectives, fine-combing the terrain for clues, signs. They climbed so high that they could see the imposing profile of Skeikampen on the other side of the valley. The sky was cobalt blue and the snow-laden trees were like something straight out of a postcard entitled ‘Winter in Norway’. But what – what in all of this scene before them – could have acted as a springboard for Bohl’s mental, championship-winning jump? They squinted up at the sun, asking themselves, as the Danish physicist himself might have done, whether the light was hitting them as waves or particles? They imagined Bohr, standing where they were now: how he might even have made some neat drawings with his pole, symbolic attempts, as porous as the snow itself. ‘One thing we don’t know, but which may have been of vital significance,’ said Axel gravely, ‘is whether Niels Bohr also smoked his pipe when he was out skiing.’
They turned north and headed across the marshes beyond Musdal Saeter and before too long had Killiknappen and its marginally smaller counterpart, Roåkerknappen, straight ahead of them. ‘Like Great Ararat and Little Ararat,’ Viktor murmured. Taoists could never get enough of mountains. They rested on their poles and feasted their eyes on the twin peaks, which looked not unlike a pair of white breasts. ‘Who wouldn’t be able to dream up a notion of complementarity when faced with such a sight?’ Jonas said, his thoughts going to his brother Daniel. Viktor broke into an impromptu rendering in faultless English of some lines from Bohr’s speech at Como: ‘In fact, here again we are not dealing with contradictory, but with complementary pictures of the phenomenon, which only together offer a natural generalization of the classical mode of description.’
‘Amen,’ said Axel and Jonas.
Back at the Winge they pursued their speculations in their room, fortified by an excellent trout dinner. Their hostess had put them in the west wing, so they could at least have the experience of living on the site of the old, burned-out Winge. And even if the walls were orange and fitted with green sconce lamps, to them this was a shrine – like one of those garish little Hindu temples – a place over whose lakes the spirit of Niels Bohr hovered. Nevertheless, and despite the festive mood: they were stuck. ‘Things are moving too slowly,’ Axel said, digging a bottle of Linie Aquavit out of his rucksack. ‘It’s time to set sail.’
The next morning they put on their skis again, determined to look under every bush on the slopes above Musdal Saeter. ‘If you think about it, cross-country skiing is in itself a form of complementarity: gliding and walking,’ said Axel, this thought striking him as they were sitting with their backs against the wall of one of the rickety saeter outbuildings, eating oranges. ‘And if you look back you’ll see the continuous line of our tracks and the dots made by our poles, waves and particles! Can there be any doubt?’
‘No, I think Bohr must have set off a harmless little avalanche,’ Viktor said. ‘Experienced an instance of non-locality, seen how with one innocent step he affected something in an entirely different spot.’
They racked their brains incessantly, for three days they racked their brains. On their last evening they stayed in their room, firing off suggestions that got wilder and wilder as the stock of aquavit in Axel’s rucksack dwindled. What if he ran into a tree, and this made him see double? Viktor ventured. Could it have been something to do with his skiing gear? Axel wondered. His poles would have been of bamboo and of a thicker sort than today’s. Axel made a long, impassioned speech on the bamboo as a possible source of inspiration – a typical five-aquavit argument.
They were growing more and more desperate. ‘Say it was misty,’ Jonas said, already in a fog of his own. ‘Just think: all that whiteness. Like walking through nothingness. Or being on another planet.’
‘That’s it! Another planet,’ said Viktor. ‘It’s an image you often find in the work of revolutionary artists. Arnold Schönberg said something similar when he devised the dodecaphonic technique. One feels the air of another planet. Maybe that’s how it was for Bohr.’
Axel suddenly remembered the tracks of a hare seen down by Abbot Tarn, at the foot of Killiknappen. ‘It made me think of formulae written in the Sirian alphabet.’
Deep down inside they were all afraid that the whole thing was just a coincidence, that the idea could have come to Bohr anywhere, but they refused to accept this. It had to have something to do with Norway.
They drank on and had reached the stage where Axel was dead set on having a contest to see who could sing ‘I Love You Because’ in the deepest voice, when Viktor started flicking through a book he had borrowed at random from the bookcase in the smoking room, which also functioned as the ‘library’. The minute he saw the blessed Christian Winge’s name written neatly in ink on the flyleaf he guessed that in his hand he held a key, and when he realized that the book was Aasmund Olavsson Vinje’s Memoir of a Journey, or at least his Selected Writings Volume 2 from 1884, he felt even surer. This book must have been rather like the baton in a relay, passed from owner to owner, a cornerstone which had survived the Luftwaffe’s presence here during the war and subsequent fires: a true memoir of a journey, the perfect travel account.
Viktor leafed through it and came to the part where Vinje writes about ‘Capital People’. ‘Listen to this,’ he cried, jumping to his
feet with his glass in his hand in his excitement: ‘“Were I to name some differences between we people from the capital and other city folk, then the greatest would have to be that we are more liable to see everything with a kind of double vision, at one glance we seem to see both the right side and the wrong of life’s tapestry…”’ Viktor stopped, went on reading to himself and then as this same thought crystallized inside his head into a single word: ‘That’s it!’ he cried. ‘Duality!’
And as if that weren’t enough, they then found something scribbled in the margin in pencil next to Vinje’s paragraph on ‘duality’. Viktor promptly dug out the copy of Bohr’s letter, a treasured relic, and compared the writing. With a bit of good will one could see a resemblance. And with a little more good will one could swear that the letters formed the following words: ‘complementary but mutually exclusively characteristics’ – a phrase which Viktor immediately recognized as coming from a key passage in the Como lecture.
The Three Wise Men were able to crawl into bed, very drunk, but with clear consciences. They had proved that Norway, the Snow Planet, was at least good for something. Although it was never uttered out loud, all three fell asleep with a ten-aquavit argument on their lips: the concept of complementarity was Norwegian! In fact the whole of quantum theory could be said to be Norwegian! Bohr’s epoch-making concept was nothing other than Vinje’s duality, transcribed into cosmopolitan and scientific terms.
‘Well, the holiday’s not over yet, so while we’re here why don’t we stop off in Lillehammer for a day or two,’ said Axel the following morning, when they were standing at Tretten station, all feeling slightly hung-over. Jonas was all for it. Viktor wasn’t so sure – it was almost as if he sensed that this would be pushing his luck, that the Snow Planet might have a chunk of ice all ready and waiting: that the Snow Planet not only imparted ideas, it also snuffed them out.
The Conqueror Page 41