Independent People by Halldor Laxness

ADVENT.

Bjartur had gone out to the ewe-house. The snow was frozen hard and there was no prospect of pasture. Numb-fingered, the grandmother was fighting her eternal fight with winter's stubborn fire, while huddled up in the smoke lay the children, sleeping or waking the same as last year and the year before, and either listening or not listening to the feeble crackle of the brushwood in the range; and before the grandmother had made her first fruitless attempt to rouse Asta Sollilja, little Nonni was making an attempt even more fruitless to apply his mind to something that might happen at least some time; somehow; somewhere; and, it was to be hoped, when someone or other was present. Last year they had all been living here in the shelter of one living agony, one painful breathing that was as silent now as the violin string of the poem; gone is the anguish that loves us all and gives life to the soul, gone the anguish that gives life even to the inanimate objects within the soul; the wooded cake-dish too has long been broken.