World Light by Halldór Laxness

Author:Halldór Laxness
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Classics, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307430311
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1937-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

28

He had had his morning coffee in the loft early that morning and everything had been as usual—the woman at her morning tasks, the husband still in bed. When he came back at dusk, hungry and wet from having roamed around in the open all day, the loft was empty of people, all the couple’s household belongings gone. He looked round the kitchen that had been the living room of the home, and although the furnishings had never been extensive and certainly never luxurious, suddenly it was as if a whole fortune had been removed. No plates in the rack, the kettle gone from the stove, the ladle vanished from the wall, the woman’s knitting gone, likewise the cat, the friendly blue-checked curtains removed from the window. The little bench at the window was gone, too, where the poet had sat for his meals, where he had also been allowed to sit on Sundays, and the sun had shone in and white gulls had hovered over the blue fjord. He had also sat there in late summer when the nights had become longer and the moon had lent its reflection to the sea. The atmosphere of tranquil security and culture which creates a home and is above all worldly wealth had reigned there in that room that morning. When he came there tonight it was like any old closet in the loft of an outhouse. Yet the stove was still warm. It was like the corpse of a dead room.

Ólafur Kárason was told that at noon that day the new owner of the Sviðinsvík estate, Pétur Pálsson the manager, had summoned the couple into his presence and dismissed them. The former owner who had employed them was bankrupt and sequestered, and his documents burnt. The new owner could not allow himself the luxury of having unreliable drunkards in his service in these difficult times, much less a poetess who not only refused to support the cultural efforts of the place but was also suspected of corrupting young men and even conspiring against her employer and benefactor. The couple had collected their things in haste and put out to sea in a small boat in bad weather, with one companion.

Everything comes and goes in succession, there is no point in praying for anything, nor in begging to be saved from anything; that was how the summer passed away with everything it had given to the poet Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík. In the end there was nothing left; perhaps they had even been caught by a squall and their boat had capsized. He was left standing alone on the beach; and it was autumn.

That night he crawled into the barn and bedded down in the warm hay as on previous nights. His clothes gradually dried on him while he was thinking about the impasse his life had reached. When he eventually fell asleep he dreamed that he found himself in dire straits on a precipice. He hauled himself along narrow ledges in a vain search for a path, the cliff beetled out above him, the abyss yawned below.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.