us.
We were almost in eighth grade, and it wouldn’t be long before we’d be having to choose new schools and new subjects. How on earth we were going to manage that with Pierre Anthon reminding us that nothing meant anything, we had no idea. Soon we’d be scattered to the four winds, losing contact with the meaning we had found and lost again without exactly knowing how it all had happened.
As though to reassure us that it wasn’t yet spring at all, March kept sending afterblasts ofwinter. Late snow fell and melted, fell and melted. And once more again, the snow fell and melted, this time faster. Eranthis and snowdrops hid away, closed and frozen beneath the white, and then when the final layer was gone for good, they pushed themselves up to signal renewal and spring flush among the few blades of grass that had stayed the winter out in Tæring.
In 7A we saw neither renewal nor spring flush.
What was spring, when fall soon would come around again and all that now was germinating simply was to wither and die? How were we to find joy in the beech woods bursting into leaf, the starlings returning home, or the sun being higher in the sky for every new day that passed? All of it would soon be turning, running back the other way until it was cold and dark and there were no flowers and no leaves left on the trees. Spring was nothing but a reminder to us that we, too, would soon be gone.
Each time I lifted an arm was a reminder ofhow soon it would be lowered and turn into nothing. Each time I smiled and laughed it struck me how often the same mouth, the same eyes, were to cry until one day they would close, and others would go on laughing and crying until they, too, were put to rest beneath the soil. Only the course of the planets through the sky was eternal, and then only until Pierre Anthon one morning started hollering about how the universe was contracting and that one day it was going to collapse completely, like a Big Bang in reverse. Everything would become so small and so compact as to amount to almost nothing. Not even the planets bore thinking about. And that’s how it was with everything. It was all unbearable.
Bearable. Bearing up. All things, everything, nothing.
We were going around like we didn’t exist.
Each day was like the next. And even though we looked forward all week to the weekend, the weekend was always still a disappointment, andthen it was Monday again and everything started over, and that was how life was, and there was nothing else. We began to understand what Pierre Anthon meant. And we began to understand why the grown-ups looked the way they did.
And although we’d sworn we’d never become like them, that was exactly what was happening. We weren’t even fifteen yet.
Thirteen, fourteen, adult. Dead.
————
Only Sofie still yelled back at Pierre Anthon whenever we walked by Tæringvej 25 and the crooked plum tree.
“The future’s all here!” Pierre Anthon shouted, and waved his hand as if to show us that everything had been done and nothing was left for us but Tæring and the meaninglessness of it all.
The rest of us bowed our heads. But not Sofie.
“The future is what we make of it,” she yelled back.
“Stuff and nonsense!” Pierre Anthon hollered. “There’s nothing to make anything of, because there’s nothing that matters!”
“There’s a whole lot that matters!” Furious, Sofie hurled a handful of stones in the direction of Pierre Anthon. Some of them hit home, though not hard enough to bother him. “Come out to the sawmill, then you’ll see what matters!”
I realized that Sofie really meant what she said.
For her, the heap of meaning was the meaning. Or maybe it would be more true to say that the heap of meaning meant something to her that it no longer did to the rest of us.
“Your junk doesn’t mean a thing! If it did, the world’s press would still be here and all the world’s population would be flocking to Tæring to get in on the
We were almost in eighth grade, and it wouldn’t be long before we’d be having to choose new schools and new subjects. How on earth we were going to manage that with Pierre Anthon reminding us that nothing meant anything, we had no idea. Soon we’d be scattered to the four winds, losing contact with the meaning we had found and lost again without exactly knowing how it all had happened.
As though to reassure us that it wasn’t yet spring at all, March kept sending afterblasts ofwinter. Late snow fell and melted, fell and melted. And once more again, the snow fell and melted, this time faster. Eranthis and snowdrops hid away, closed and frozen beneath the white, and then when the final layer was gone for good, they pushed themselves up to signal renewal and spring flush among the few blades of grass that had stayed the winter out in Tæring.
In 7A we saw neither renewal nor spring flush.
What was spring, when fall soon would come around again and all that now was germinating simply was to wither and die? How were we to find joy in the beech woods bursting into leaf, the starlings returning home, or the sun being higher in the sky for every new day that passed? All of it would soon be turning, running back the other way until it was cold and dark and there were no flowers and no leaves left on the trees. Spring was nothing but a reminder to us that we, too, would soon be gone.
Each time I lifted an arm was a reminder ofhow soon it would be lowered and turn into nothing. Each time I smiled and laughed it struck me how often the same mouth, the same eyes, were to cry until one day they would close, and others would go on laughing and crying until they, too, were put to rest beneath the soil. Only the course of the planets through the sky was eternal, and then only until Pierre Anthon one morning started hollering about how the universe was contracting and that one day it was going to collapse completely, like a Big Bang in reverse. Everything would become so small and so compact as to amount to almost nothing. Not even the planets bore thinking about. And that’s how it was with everything. It was all unbearable.
Bearable. Bearing up. All things, everything, nothing.
We were going around like we didn’t exist.
Each day was like the next. And even though we looked forward all week to the weekend, the weekend was always still a disappointment, andthen it was Monday again and everything started over, and that was how life was, and there was nothing else. We began to understand what Pierre Anthon meant. And we began to understand why the grown-ups looked the way they did.
And although we’d sworn we’d never become like them, that was exactly what was happening. We weren’t even fifteen yet.
Thirteen, fourteen, adult. Dead.
————
Only Sofie still yelled back at Pierre Anthon whenever we walked by Tæringvej 25 and the crooked plum tree.
“The future’s all here!” Pierre Anthon shouted, and waved his hand as if to show us that everything had been done and nothing was left for us but Tæring and the meaninglessness of it all.
The rest of us bowed our heads. But not Sofie.
“The future is what we make of it,” she yelled back.
“Stuff and nonsense!” Pierre Anthon hollered. “There’s nothing to make anything of, because there’s nothing that matters!”
“There’s a whole lot that matters!” Furious, Sofie hurled a handful of stones in the direction of Pierre Anthon. Some of them hit home, though not hard enough to bother him. “Come out to the sawmill, then you’ll see what matters!”
I realized that Sofie really meant what she said.
For her, the heap of meaning was the meaning. Or maybe it would be more true to say that the heap of meaning meant something to her that it no longer did to the rest of us.
“Your junk doesn’t mean a thing! If it did, the world’s press would still be here and all the world’s population would be flocking to Tæring to get in on the
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