Independent People by Halldor Laxness

IN its own way misery no less than revelry is varied in form and worthy of note wherever there lurks a spark of life in the world, and these children who for some mysterious reason were still alive on the moors had experienced many of its noteworthy phenomena, not only during festivals, but between festivals as well. It is always very instructive to lose one's mother in the first sunshine of the haymaking; and when one's father goes away after one's eldest brother's disappearance, then that too is a special kind of experience, a new type of misery, quite the same as in revelry, where people are said to draw an enormous distinction between song and dance. A little loss borrows its power from the greater loss, and so, after their father's departure, their motherless-ness comes like a creditor clamouring its demand upon memory; few like father, none like mother; and in the depths of winter the children see once more in imagination that summer day when their mother was laid on a bier out in the lamb-house, among the toadstools at noon, and still the sun went on shining. Yes and the blowfly had gone on buzzing in its sunbeam, in the shelter of the window-frame, unmoved by the fact that the loving agony of life was no more on the croft and that it was the silence of death that reigned upstairs, unrelated to the silence of the heart-that song-loving insect which restricts itself to one single note. Today this song returns, this other world, which is one immutable note, loveless and remote-today it sings once more in their minds, when the window is deep in snow. They consider it separately, without looking at one another, sky and glacier-mountains in flames on the horizon at midday, the Bluefell peaks white-glowing in the burning frost. And their life, which was already without sheltering walls, is now all at once without a ridge-beam, like a roof that is broken down. The sheep standing in sanctity by the hole in the brook stares bleating over its frozen hills, unable to impart to the children of men the virtues of its mentality. So when they have given the stock their last feed of the day, the two boys sit down on the snowdrift, without understanding one another, and gaze with little energy over the same hills. It is hard never to be allowed a moment's rest, but harder still to be alive when there is no longer anybody to tell one what to do-for how in such a case is one to be able to keep on doing something? Then the younger brother suddenly remembers his grandmother, she who knows everything if one can only fathom what she says, and he tells his elder brother that whenever anything happens she knows it all beforehand and keeps on knitting.

"Yes," said Gvendur, "it's easy enough if you're nearly a hundred years old and needn't do anything but knit. But what about us? How are we going to manage things?"