Angels of the Universe – Einar Már Guðmundsson
’Life’s but a walking shadow;’ says Macbeth, ’a poor player,/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.’
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’Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,/Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,/Raze out the written troubles of the brain…?’
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The white hems of waves ripple on the sea which is now black and ruffled like the darkness of outer space.
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In fact, time is always short, even though there’s as much of it about as there actually is.
A good knitter sits all day long and knits and makes steady progress, but an author’s job probably involves constantly knitting the same pullover and picking it apart over and over again on the offchance that a real pullover will eventually come out of it.
The disadvantage of novels is how long they are.
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The policy is to make psychiatric hospitals as much like households as possible, perhaps because households have become so much like psychiatric hospitals.
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’Do you reckon’, I said, ’that I cut off my ear in a former life to end up knitting socks in a mental asylum?’
[…]
’If I were a woman’, I said, ’you couldn’t force me to join a women’s society. At the handicraft sessions I feel as though I’m at a women’s society meeting. But I’m not a woman.’
’That’s crap,’ said Brynjolf. ’Give me a better reason.’ Brynjolf often likes to talk things over. I thought for a while, then said: ’Man has seven lives, as many as the days of the week.’
Brynjolf: ’Even if that were true, is that any reason?’
Me: ’Yes. In this life, it’s Sunday.’
Then I went off to my room to fetch the old Bible my grandmother had given me, looked up the Gospel according to St Matthew and read from the Sermon on the Mount.
’Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’
I closed the Bible, and Brynjolf walked away. Later, someone brought a broom and bucket and I was made to clean the floors.
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1
And now, the end is near, the walls are down, the final curtain, I’ll say it clear: I have lived beneath a moon that’s full, travelled each underworld and skyway.
I have loved, I have laughed and cried, and now, as tears pour forth and I find it all so amusing, I say: I did it my way.
No, this grave is not deep enough to accomodate the feelings of us all.
You men and women who jumped into the depths.
You rainy days that wept against the window panes.
Oh how wretched it is, this path of suffering, how little remains and how little exists.
Eternal is the night of silence.
2
No one in my position ought to dream about climbing higher in society than up to the top floor of one of the rehabilitation blocks for the handicapped.
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Actually it’s fine being alone and left to myself. My theory is that the handicapped ought to be able to live as such and not need to do anything else.
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I closed the door behind me and stepped out into the cold, out into Austurstræti which was bathed in darkness and lights, but so incredibly empty that the uninitiated might think there was a curfew in force.
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Not dying suns.
Not eroding sands.
Only words carved in stone above a grave that flies throught the emptiness.
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The book is Sigfús Daðason’s Collected Poems. My mother takes a long look at the book. When she opens it, these words confront her eyes:
Dreams: at the bottom of them we perceive the merciless onslaught of reality.