World Light by Halldór Laxness

lesson came to an end. But when the reading was over and the last psalm had been sung, old Jósep made one more attempt to sit up in bed. His expression now was that of the dying, transfigured and bright, for the sun of another world was rising for him; his tongue, which had been fettered in his mouth for the last few days, was freed again, and his blurred speech was clear and coherent once more.
    “Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík is a great poet,” he said. That was all he said. These were his last words. Soon he was dead. Kamarilla the housewife stood beside the bed and watched the man dying. He had said his last words. “Yes,” said Kamarilla, “we shall all have to say our last words some day.” She closed his eyes at once. The weather outside was fine; there was no rain. She wiped one eye with the corner of her apron, for appearance’s sake.
    So now Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík had death as a companion in the next bed. There would come moments when this young invalid would have a horror of death, but now he was impressed at how quiet a visitor he was, how natural and straightforward. In reality it seemed as if nothing had actually occurred, it had all happened so politely. Old Jósep’s last words continued to echo through the boy’s mind: Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík. So distinguished was this visitor, Death, that when he approached, people involuntarily blurted out the name they held dearest. For the rest of his life the boy could see in his mind’s eye the old man dying and Kamarilla standing by his bedside, and the name Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík, so hated and so loved, sounding in the air around them. Such has been the conflict over Icelandic poets since time immemorial: some people damned them all their lives, others died with their names on their lips.
    But that night the boy could not sleep. It was autumn, and he could hear the storm raging outside. In the bed opposite him lay a corpse. Yes, in his childhood that man, too, had heard the Revelation of the Deity. His whole mind had been directed toward one single harmony. When he was a child, he had lain in a green hollow in springtime and called out to The One. He had been ill, but later he had got better—for a time. Then he had built himself a cottage and had begotten seven children by his wife, but they all had vanished into the earth or the sea before he went on the parish again. No, nothing had ever happened to him; anyone who imagined that something had happened to him must be a bit lacking. Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík had been his life. Now he was a corpse. What—
who
was a corpse?
    The boy sat bolt upright in bed, terror-stricken, in the middle of the night, because he thought someone was whispering, “Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík is a corpse.” In other words he felt that it was he himself who lay dead at last, on the bed opposite, after this purposeless life of his, with all its dreams unfulfilled. It was so real, so vivid, that he felt compelled to deny it aloud: “My God, my God, no, no, no!” he cried aloud, over and over again in the middle of the night. Someone at the other end of the room stirred in his sleep, and the boy cowered down under the bedclothes with his heart beating furiously. He called upon God hundreds of times because he thought it so terrible to have been struck and pushed into the mud in his old age and to be dead at last without having become a poet. Gradually he became less agitated.
    No, he was not dead. “I shall get well,” he said to himself. “I
shall
. Some day. Arise,” he thought. “Become a great poet.” He tried to forget this autumn night, looking forward instead to the day when he would arise. One morning he would wake up early. That morning he would suddenly have recovered his health. He would get dressed as if the past were over, and walk carefree out into the spring. There would be this strong, tranquil clarity over land and sea, this glossy sheen on the ocean,