Martin Birck's Youth by Hjalmar Soderberg

Martin sat alone with his father at the dinner table within the same circle of yellow light which had enclosed the sleepy winter evenings of his childhood. Martin Birck and his father had seldom anything to say to each other. They thought differently about everything except the taxes on foodstuffs. This lack of agreement did not, however, cause them any sorrow; they attached no importance to it. They both knew that different generations think differently, and they found this natural. Nor did they find silence anything painful or oppressive; it was just the self-evident expression of the fact that nothing had happened which could give rise to an exchange of opinions. When they chatted together it was mostly about the improvement of government work and about new houses. For Martin's father was interested in his city. On Sundays he often went for long walks to distant parts of the city and saw how new suburbs shot up out of the earth. He thought of how Stockholm had developed since his youth, and he found all the new houses handsome, especially if they were large and imposing with many windows and small towers at the corners. And when Martin heard his father speak of all these ugly houses and call them handsome, he thought of how unjust life was, since it remorselessly closed the way to the inner regions of beauty for the best and most useful members of the community. For the way thither went through melancholy, there was no other, and it was not idly that the Greek musician answered Alexander, "May the gods never make you so unhappy, my lord, that you may learn to understand music better than I. " Martin's father had had a youth too full of worry and a manhood too full of strenuous responsibility to know anything of the mental depression with which life punishes those who think more about beautiful and ugly and good and evil than they do about their daily bread.

On this day, as usual, Martin's father discoursed about one thing and another over his coffee and cigar. He spoke of a men's dinner he had attended the day before, where he had felt embarrassed on account of his Vasa decoration; for he had gone with the large official medal, which was the only one he had, whereas the other men had had the small miniatures.