World Light

by Halldor Laxness

  When he was eight years old he had read the book of Icelandic Folktales, and Bishop Peter’s Short Stories, and St. Luke’s Gospel, which made him cry because Jesus was so alone in the world. On the other hand he could never get used to thinking of Vídalín’s Book of Sermons* as a book at all. He had a great longing to read more but there were no other books there except one, The Felsenburg Stories,* which Magnína had inherited from her father. No one else was allowed to read that book; it was a secret book. He had a great longing to read The Felsenburg Stories and all the books in the world— except the Book of Sermons.

  “If you mention The Felsenburg Stories once again, I’ll thrash you!” said Magnína.

  Early on, he had come to suspect that in books in general, but especially in The Felsenburg Stories, was to be found that indefinable solace he yearned for but could not name. Magnína wrote out the alphabet for him, but only once; she had no time for more because it took her so long to form each letter. In any case there was no paper, and even when there was, no one was allowed to waste it. He would furtively scratch letters with a stick on bare patches of earth or in the snow, but he was forbidden to do that and was told he was writing himself to the devil. So he had to write on his soul.

  Kamarilla, the housewife, was the implacable enemy of literature. When it became apparent that the boy had an unnatural desire to pore over letters, she told him the cautionary story of G. Grímsson of Grunnavík.* He did not call himself “Guðmundur Grímsson” as other people would; he used only an initial and added a place-name, to imitate the gentry. It was a dreadful story. G. Grímsson of Grunnavík was a good-for-nothing poet and wrote a hundred books. He was a bad man. When he was young he would not get married, but had thirty children instead. He hated people, and wrote about them. He had written a host of books about innocent people who had never done him any harm.

  “No one would have anything to do with a person like that, except the ugly crones he brought upon himself in his old age. In their old age, people get what they bring upon themselves. That’s what comes of thinking about books. Yes, I knew him well in his time, that Guðmundur, always poring over his books, never tried to earn a living for himself or for others. He was a terrible scoundrel. I was just a snotty little girl at the time. He lived all by himself in a hovel on the other side of the mountains, beside another fjord, and God punished him with a leaky roof and various other things. That showed him how much good it did him. He sat in an oilskin in the living room and the rain dripped onto his bald head because he wouldn’t earn a living for himself and for others, drop after drop trickling down his neck because he was always poring over his books. God was punishing him. But his heart was hardened and knew no humility, and he went on writing a hundred books by the feeble glimmer of an oil lamp, two hundred books. And when he dies it’s obvious enough where he’ll go, because God doesn’t like having books written about people; only God has the right to judge people. Besides which, God himself has written the Bible, which contains everything that needs to be written. Those who think about other books sit alone and destitute by a guttering light in their old age, and fiends and devils afflict them.”

  But the story had quite the opposite effect to what was intended. Instead of acting on the boy as an edifying parable, it beckoned him irresistibly to something forbidden and alluring; his imagination dwelt on books with redoubled eagerness after hearing about the punishment of this lonely sage and his hundred books. Often the boy was overwhelmed by an uncontrollable yearning to write down in a hundred books everything he saw, despite what anyone said— two hundred books as thick as the Book of Sermons, whole Bibles, whole chests full of books.

  His name was Ólafur Kárason, usually shortened to Óli or Lafi. He was standing by the bay. There were oyster catchers and purple sandpipers there, too, which scampered a few steps up the beach before the incoming wave whose foam swirled around their slender legs as it broke and soughed back again. He always wore the cast-off clothing of the brothers, who were big men. The seat of his trousers reached down to the backs of his knees and each trouser leg was rolled up at least ten times; the arms of his jersey reached a long way beyond his fingers, and he was always having to roll up the sleeves. He had a green felt hat which had been a Sunday-best hat in its youth before the rats got at it; it came well down over his ears, and the brim rested on his shoulders. He decided to call himself “Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík.” He addressed himself by this name, and talked a lot to himself. “Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík, there you stand!” he said. Yes, there he stood.

  His foster mother was rummaging in the lumber box one day for something she had lost, with the boy behind her, when out of the rubbish came the remains of a tattered old book.

  “Can I have it?” asked Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík.

  “Certainly not!” said Kamarilla. “The very idea!”

  But even so he managed to get hold of the book without his foster mother’s knowledge, and he stuck it under his jersey and kept it at his breast, close to his heart. He tried to read it in secret, but it was printed in Gothic lettering and the title page was missing. Every time he thought he was beginning to understand the book someone would come along and he would have to hide it hastily under his jersey again; he was often very close to being caught. What could there be in his book? He kept his own book against his own heart, and did not know what was in it. He was determined to keep it until he grew up. But then pages began to drop out of it here and there, and it became more and more difficult to read the longer he kept it hidden next to his bare skin. It was as if the book had been dipped into a pot of fat.

  There was often an itch at his heart because of the book, but that did not matter. It was a secret to own such a book; it was really a kind of refuge, even though he had no idea what was in the book. He was sure it was a good book, and it is fun having a secret if it is not anything wicked—one has plenty to think about all day, and one dreams about it at night.

  But on the first day of summer the secret was discovered. Kamarilla the housewife made him change his underclothes after the winter; this ceremony took place up in the loft in the middle of the day, and he was taken unawares by it. He peeled off his clothes one by one, and his heart beat furiously; finally he took off his shirt. There was no way of hiding the book any longer. It fell to the floor.

  “My goodness me!” said his foster mother. “God have mercy on me; what the devil’s the child got under his shirt? Magnína, come and see this dreadful sight!”

  The boy stood before them, stark naked and anguished, while the two women examined the book carefully.

  “Who gave you this book?”

  “I sort of just f-found it.”

  “Yes, it’s just as I thought. Not enough to be going around with a book, but a stolen one at that! Magnína, put this devilish thing in the fire at once!”

  He started crying then. This was the first great sorrow of his life he could remember. He was sure he had not cried so bitterly since he was sent away from his mother in a sack one winter’s day, long before memory began. Admittedly he had never understood the book, but that did not matter. What mattered was that this was his secret, his dream, his refuge; in short, it was his book. He wept as only children weep when they suffer injustice at the hands of those stronger than themselves. It is the most bitter weeping in the world. That was what happened to his book; it was taken from him and burned. And he was left standing naked and without a book on the first day of summer.

  2

  Other children had fathers and mothers and honored them, and they prospered and lived to a ripe old age; but he was often bitter towards his father and mother and dishonored them in his heart. His mother had cuckolded his father, and his father had betrayed his mother, and both of them had betrayed the boy. The only consolation was that he had a Father in heaven. And yet—it would have been better to have a father on earth.

  All winter and far into spring there were readings about his Father in heaven, from devotional homilies each eve
ning and from the Book of Sermons on Sundays. His foster mother would assume a solemn, frozen expression and begin to read; she read in a chant that slackened at every pause, rather like a melody ending on a falling note; up and down, up and down, over and over again, until eventually the lesson came to an end. These readings had nothing to do with everyday life, and at other times, indeed, no one on the farm seemed to have any love for God or expect anything of Him except Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík. The brothers sprawled back during the lesson and sometimes kicked one another and cursed one another between their teeth, as each thought the other was in the way; the women stared wide-eyed into the blue as if all this great talk about God struck no answering chord in them. But then the foster mother’s sight began to fail, and little Óli was barely ten years old when he was given the task of reading the lesson on less important occasions. “What a lot of damned rubbish the brat talks!” the brothers would say during the reading, as if the boy himself were responsible for what the man in the Book of Sermons had written. On the other hand it was true that he never achieved his foster mother’s peculiar chant, far less the special expression on her face. But at least he understood God, and there was no one in that house who understood God except him. And though the devotional homilies were tedious and the Book of Sermons much worse, it did not matter, because Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík, you see, appreciated God not according to any devotional homily or Book of Sermons, not according to any gospel or doctrine, but in another and much more remarkable way.

  He was not quite nine years old, in fact, when he first began to have spiritual experiences. He would be standing down by the bay, perhaps, in the early days of spring, or up on the headland to the west of the bay where there was a mound with a rich green tussock on top, or perhaps up on the hill above the homefield when the grass was high and ready for mowing. Then suddenly he felt he saw God’s image open before him. He felt the deity reveal itself in Nature in an inexpressible music, the sonic revelation of the deity; and before he knew it he himself had become a trembling voice in a celestial chorus of glory. His soul seemed to be rising out of his body like frothing milk brimming over the edge of a basin; it was as if his soul were flowing into an unfathomable ocean of higher life, beyond words, beyond all perception, his body suffused by some surging light that was beyond all light. Sighing, he became aware of his own insignificance in the midst of this infinite chorus of glory and radiance; his whole consciousness dissolved into one sacred, tearful yearning to be allowed to be one with the Highest and be no longer any part of himself. He lay for a long time on the sand or on the grass, and wept tears of deep and fervent happiness, face to face with the inexpressible. “God, God, God!” he cried, trembling with love and reverence, and kissed the ground and dug his fingers into the turf. The feeling of well-being stayed with him after he began to come round; he went on lying there; he lay in a tranquil trance and felt that never again could there be any shadows in his life, that all adversity was merely chaff, that nothing could matter any more, that everything was good. He had perceived the One. His Father in heaven had taken him to His heart by the farthest northern seas.

  No one in the house had any suspicion that the boy was in direct communication with the deity, nor would anyone in the house have understood it. Everyone in the house went on listening to God’s Word out of a book. He alone knew that even if these people listened to God’s Word for a thousand years they would never understand God, and anyway it would probably never occur to God to take them to His heart. The boy read aloud from the Book of Sermons, and the people stared vacantly and scratched themselves and dozed and suspected nothing. They thought he knew no more about God than they themselves did.

  It was the practice there to load him with far more work than he was fit for. During the winter when he was ten years old, he had to carry all the water for the house and the barn. He was slightly built and delicate, pale, with large blue eyes and a reddish tinge to his hair. He very seldom had enough to eat, but he lacked the courage to steal from the larder like Kristjána, the farm girl, who could do as she pleased because she had a mother and had started making eyes at the brothers, besides. Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík was extremely honest, because he had no one on his side in anything. Often he was not served until the others had finished and gone out, just because he was alone in the world. And as anyone who has ever been a child knows, it is a great ordeal to have to wait until the others have finished and not be allowed to say anything, either; he was not allowed to say anything because he had no one. But sometimes it happened that Magnína, the daughter of the house, would give him her leftovers when everyone else had gone out, and sometimes there was a tasty morsel left in her bowl, although no one had noticed how it had got there. In general, the members of the family did most of their eating, in secret, between meals.

  Carrying water: after the first two buckets the boy would be very tired, but that was just the beginning. He carried and carried. He had to fill two large barrels and also carry two buckets for the rams. Before long he would begin to stagger, and his knees and arms would tremble with exhaustion. Often the weather was bad; snow and sleet and storm. The wind tore at the buckets; sometimes it was as if he were going to take off completely, buckets and all. But he did not take off. He put the buckets down while the gust roared past. He tried to tie his green hat tighter under his chin with frozen fingers that were numb from the bucket handles. He asked God to give him supernatural strength, but God was too busy to respond. Onwards, onwards! Twenty more trips to go. The water splashed from the buckets over his feet, all the way up to his knees; he was soaking wet, and there was a frost. He slipped on the icy path, and the water spilled out of both buckets; it spilled underneath him and over him. He began to cry, but he was only crying for himself; nobody paid any attention to what happened to him. He felt that the world was avenging itself on him for something he had never done, perhaps just for the fact that his mother had had an extra child, or that his father had run away from his mother. Then one of the brothers would appear between the barn and the house and shout, “Having a nap, then?” So he would stand up soaking wet in the frost and start to adjust his green hat which had been knocked askew when he fell. And thus each day he was taxed beyond his strength. Every morning he woke up with dread in his heart and nausea in his throat; the divinely merciful hand of sleep was withdrawn, and the day faced him with new water-carrying, new storms, new hunger, weariness, exhaustion, chivvying, cursing, blows, kicks, thrashings. His whole life in childhood was one endless ordeal, like those fairy tales in which men fight with giants and dragons and devils.

  Sometimes he was momentarily seized by a realization, like some deeper insight into existence, that he had a mother; he would stop suddenly, in midbreath perhaps, as this realization pierced him so sharply that he felt faint. He had an overwhelming urge to throw away whatever he was holding and take to his heels, away, away, over mountains and moors, fjords and valleys, through towns and parishes, until he found her. But his feet were fettered. He had to content himself with leaning against God’s bosom. And when least expected, Magnína might give him a piece of flatbread with butter on it. Sometimes when he was toiling outside and she was sitting inside in the warmth of the living room, all fat and comfortable, he would make up his mind to go to her sometime and lean against her bosom and weep. But when he was alone with her in the loft he lost all desire to do so. He doubted then whether she had a human bosom. She really had no body at all, you see, much less an actual figure; she was merely a trunk. There was a smell off her. She was like a wall of treble thickness. He gazed at her and wondered to himself, Can it possibly be that deep, deep inside all that there lurks a soul?

  During the season, one or both of the brothers went to the fishing at the nearest fishing-village and lived away from home. It was the only time of year that there were no sulks and tempers on the farm; the brothers were always spiteful to one another, because each of them wanted to be in sole charge. No one ever knew who was master on the farm;
people came and went, the hired hands for the haymaking or for the spring work, but no one knew who was the master. Brother Júst thought that Jónas, who was older, did not have the brains to run a farm, and Jónas thought that Júst was not old enough to run a farm. Each countermanded the other’s orders. They did not often come to blows in real earnest in front of other people, but they often made threats and looked daggers at one another; it would have done no harm if the Christian ideal of brotherly love had been a little stronger. The housewife herself was evasive when asked to intervene; she was a widow, and the estate was still undivided. The hired hands often walked out. The housekeeper, Karítas, and her daughter were the only ones who had the knack of dealing with both masters without trouble.

  One winter’s morning in his eleventh year the boy was sent to drive the horses out to the pastures. The dog came up behind one of the horses and sank his teeth into its fetlock. The horse took fright and kicked out; the boy was standing just behind, and the hoof caught him a terrible blow on the forehead just above the temple and knocked him unconscious. Someone from another farm happened to pass by and found the boy lying stunned on the ice and thought him dead and carried him home; but he was alive, not dead, worse luck, and came round again. But he was dazed for a long time, his mind in a fog, with terrible headaches and loss of appetite and weakness. He lay in bed for a long time, and no one was particularly unpleasant to him for a while. For more than a whole week the brothers did not curse him to hell, and his foster mother called him her poor little scamp. One day Magnína handed him a piece of buttered flatbread between meals, as if it were a matter of course, and sat down beside him and read to him out of a book she had borrowed from somewhere. It was poetry and he did not understand it, but that did not matter; what was more important was that he now realized what sort of a person this bulky, self-contained girl really was.