Read Online The Great Weaver From Kashmir by Halldór Laxness - Free Book Online Page B

world who understood you. That was incredible exaggeration; I often understood you only halfway, sometimes not at all. You never suspected how hard I tried to become your spiritual companion, ever since I was twelve or thirteen until the time you left. I hid all my efforts from you. Actually everything I busied myself with, either consciously or unconsciously, was aimed at trying to make myself fit to understand you, but in the end my thoughts were nothing but a weak echo of you. I drank up poem after poem, read author after author, everything that I thought would make me more worthy to follow you, which is also why I started taking French and German classes on my own initiative when I was just thirteen. For an awful long time I felt that I’d never be able to learn those complicated, peculiar languages; I was so slow; no one knew how much energy I put into them or how often I despaired. But I was driven by the conviction that the one thing that could make me worthy of your friendship was knowledge and understanding, and I vowed never to give up. But it was like you knew everything and understood everything automatically; it was easy for you to learn a whole language in a few days; while I was trying to break through the German verb declensions you amused yourself by reading Unamuno in Spanish and Pirandello in Italian.
    The summer that I was fifteen years old you were overseas again with your parents, but I’d been sick that winter and had gone upto Borgarfjörður for the better part of the summer to recuperate. I stayed at a nice farm and the children there were wonderful; there were four, all under ten years old. And what do you think I started doing there in the blessed countryside? I started writing stories for the children. They were incredibly simple and foolish, but I was proud of them, and I looked forward to showing them to you in the fall. I rewrote them again and again, wanting to make them as beautiful as possible, and finally I copied six of them in a little book, not larger than half the size of my palm, with pink pages gilded on the edges, bound in blue velvet. I wanted to give you this book when you came. One longs so much to be like those whom one believes in. I both looked forward to it and shuddered at the thought that you might read my little stories. When I came to Reykjavík in the fall you’d already arrived, two days ahead of me. You came to visit us as soon as you heard that I was home.
    Imagine that fall evening when I saw you again! You came suddenly into the room where we were sitting. I said hello to you and blushed. I’d been in the countryside during the summer and was tan and fat, my hands red and ugly. And there you came into the room, like a phantom, and walked straight toward me like lightning. You’d grown taller, I hardly recognized you. And you were wearing summer clothes with a tiny checkered pattern, a green necktie and green silk socks, and your collar was in a style I’d never seen before. The curls in your hair were like a work of art, your hands snow-white, and your nails shone as if you’d made a habit of going to a manicurist; you smoked perfumed cigarettes. While I’d been strolling alone in the Icelandic mountains, up ravines and slopes covered with heather,up along streams or in birchwood copses, you’d been in Madrid and Barcelona, Paris and London, writing voguish poetry in hotel parlors in the mornings, dancing at five o’clock teas in the afternoons, listening to concerts in the evenings, and driving home in an automobile at midnight.
    You brought back with you a fresh breath of air from out in the world. You’d devoured the latest works of the modernist masters, and now no poetic style was worth anything to you except for Dadaism and Expressionism, which you called “Essentialism.” You reeled off to me from memory whole pages of word games by Max Jacob and Mayakovsky, talked about André Breton, Soupault, and