The Fish can Sing by Halldór Laxness

It is strange, considering how intimately I knew Brekkukot, so intimately indeed that I felt I had lived there even before I was born, and despite the fact that this woman, my grandmother, had taught me how to speak and think and ended by teaching me to read – it came as a complete surprise to me when someone told me many years later that she had never had a bed to sleep in, in her own home. I then had to acknowledge that the only times I had ever seen her asleep were in her kitchen when she was sitting on the lower stone of the hearth, which jutted out a little, and leaning back against the upper stone; her head would sink forward and her hands with their knitting would drop into her lap and the restless needles would be stilled for a while; and there was only a faint glimmer in the fireplace. I am told that no one ever saw her go to bed in the evening; but if there was an empty pallet available somewhere she may perhaps have stretched out on it for an hour or two in the middle of the night, or else contented herself with leaning back against those hearthstones. What is certain is that if she slept, she never went to sleep before everyone else had retired; and no matter how early anyone rose in Brekkukot, she was always up and about already and had made the coffee or even cooked the porridge. And I can remember, too, with absolute certainty that the fire in her hearth never went out during all the time that I was my grandfather's and my grandmother's son there at Brekkukot.

I have already described how this woman impressed upon me never to kill flies in other people's houses. Now I just want to mention one or two other doctrines that she taught me.