Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness

A strange sound-whence came this music, which was scarcely music at all? The undersigned is standing out on the farmhouse paving in the night stillness-he thinks it safer to hang around until it's quite certain that these men have lost the desire to go to church. Though I have in fact forbidden them the church as matters stand, I thought it rather perverse of them not to suggest I should be present when the lid of the box was opened. Here's hoping I haven't offended these gentlemen. So I sat down on the church step as if to look after the church, and the step still smells of new-sawn wood; then I hear this faint music coming from around the corner. The semitransparent silhouette of the glacier now looms against the sky as it listens there and waits in the stillness of the night.

This music was like a drop that falls with three different notes, like the drops in a remote cavern. Silence in between. But the silence is of varying length and the note depends on how much the drop has gathered into itself by the time it falls from the rocky vault in the darkness. This musical drop is unique and self-sufficient in the universe while it is wearing a hole in the stone; and no ear nearby, of course. This is music in the same way as eternity is genuine in a shrunken human head. The music with which we are familiar is a gigantic monument-making inspired by national festival tendencies and pontifical mass and other deafening celebrations of despair in the style of the Ninth Symphony, but is it genuine? One can say of this drop, as a poet once elegised the shortest member of parliament: There wasn't much material went into you, but what there was rang true. This lowly headhunter and lute-player from the Andes who has been playing for the calf at Glacier for a while-is he, when all is said and done, the one who plays the music of the absolute? The Langvetningur, the twelve-tonner man, and the leader of the winter-pasture shepherds (who reads books, unfortunately)-these three carried the box between them past the church door where your emissary sat perched on the step; then they went round the corner. The undersigned stood up and strolled along behind it, whatever it was.