The Fish can Sing by Halldór Laxness

I came once a week or more for tuition with this kindly man with the long face and brown eyes and the huge Adam's apple in which dwelt the gentle bass voice I had sometimes heard trembling in the breeze from the churchyard when I was small; there was a cleft in his collar for the Adam's apple, like those pictures of Danish composers; and his good wife gave me coffee with bread and cheese. I was so entranced by the study of music that if I started on the harmonium under Kristín's sloping roof at bedtime, I would often sit there throughout the night until it was time to go and meet Grandpa Jón next morning. The precentor's instruction had little form and bore no relation to actual music lessons; it was like an extension of casual gossip about this and that, or as if we were amusing ourselves with an innocent pastime because we had nothing else to do. There was never any suggestion that this musician, who was then the finest musician in Iceland, thought it a waste of his time to be teaching such a lout the scales. We had one thing in common, teacher and pupil: neither of us ever mentioned payment. I never realized until many years later that the actual time of this composer – the only Icelander who could compose music in those days, who was the Cathedral organist as well – could be reckoned in money; yet perhaps it was not so after all.

But though this house of sunshine was so far beyond me, it nevertheless drew me so irresistibly that the Grammar School faded away into the twilight even though I was attending it. Most other things paled beside music. I would much rather have gone to that house every single day.