Quicksand

  Of course.

  39

  The awakening according to Plato

  There are people who think that God is a clock.

  But a clock that has stopped. A clock that used to work, but now stands still, perhaps because it hasn’t been wound up, or the pendulum never started swinging. Or possibly simply because God has never needed a clock himself because he is synonymous with time.

  For these people God is the clockmaker. His heaven is a miniature Switzerland, in which he wanders around watching his angels creating clocks which they then place in human souls by magical means.

  God is time, and human beings have been given the means to measure it, to be frightened by it or to sanctify it.

  Measuring time, calculating time, setting precise points in time – these are all things human beings have occupied themselves with for thousands of years. But those early attempts are only something we can nowadays deduce and measure from archaeological finds. Most probably people with developed brains have always been fascinated by ‘time’. To begin with the instrument was in fact nature itself: the sun rose in the east and set in the west – but not always quite in the same place or at quite the same time as in the previous month. In those early days time was measured in terms of similarities and differences that were repeated from year to year. Nobody knew or imagined that behind these variations that kept repeating themselves was anything but the breathing of their gods.

  The first measurers of time created and constructed by humans were sundials. Nature and the movement of shadows indicated the regularity displayed by the sun and the earth. If one scratched furrows in a circle on a rock, one could see how things repeated themselves. Then these markings were combined with changes in the weather, with heat and cold. It became possible to see when one should sow seeds, when one should go out hunting certain animals.

  It also became clear that animals didn’t have any sundials of their own. They didn’t care about the breathing of the gods. That in turn must mean that they simply didn’t possess a soul.

  We are the only creatures who are aware that it is not possible to separate time and space. Time is in fact space. We cannot see time, but it exists and drives our existence.

  Swedes sometimes say that the dead have ‘passed away out of time’ – which is basically nonsense, of course. Unless it is perhaps a poetic way of saying that our hearts have stopped beating like the biological clock we all have inside us.

  I shan’t have to experience it, but it would feel very embarrassing if when I die, one of my relatives were to say that I had ‘passed away out of time’. I have never lived in time. I have always tried to live in the middle of my own and others’ lives.

  I discovered in Africa that many beautiful women wore watches that didn’t work. They wore them on their wrists solely as pieces of jewellery, not as time measurers. That taught me something about time. That it was not always necessary to be ruled by it.

  Some 2,000 years ago the great philosopher Plato is said to have constructed an ingenious alarm clock in order to wake up his pupils each morning at the Academy in Athens. He used one of the earliest methods of measuring time, namely water. Using two bowls, some scrap iron and regularly dripping water he created a highly effective alarm clock. When the water had filled one of the bowls, it tipped over into the other bowl containing the scrap-iron. That bowl also tipped over, the scrap iron fell out and hit the solid base of the contraption with a deafening crash. Nobody could avoid being woken up.

  The day had begun.

  Plato constructed alarm clocks; but he also thought a lot about what time actually was. If you study the history of philosophy you will be unable to find any significant thinker who didn’t devote a lot of effort to this phenomenon. What is time? What exactly is meant by the passing of time? What is the meaning of time? They have all commented in very different ways on time, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein. But none of them has been able to explain precisely what time means for an individual person.

  You could say that time is what you make it. it’s your own and nobody else’s. What you do with it is up to you. You can shrug off time, or take it with you as a travelling companion on your journey through life, which ends with a return to the same darkness from which it originated.

  But time has not only been measured by hands on a clock face. A picture still hanging on the wall in many a Swedish home is the famous staircase of age. The earliest examples were created in Sweden in the seventeenth century, but the most common versions are based on the highly decorated Dalecarlian floral staircases from the late eighteenth century onwards. Furthest to the left is a cradle, furthest to the right are two hundred-year-olds stepping off the staircase and into death. At the very top of the stairs is a man at the height of his maturity as a fifty-year-old.

  Needless to say, this picture is influenced by the fact that it originated at a period when society was very different. It would be possible to make a better version describing today’s society while remaining true to the basic concept of life and time holding each other by the hand.

  Heartbeats are of course the most common symbol for how time ticks away inside us all. With slightly more beats per minute than a minute has seconds, the heart beats millions of times between birth and death.

  Whatever time is, we always live with time in the past. At the very same moment that I think about a word and then write it down, time has changed it to something in the past. Whatever we do or remember or dream, there is no now, only a past. We always live with one foot in a time that has already passed and will never return.

  Time and our ability to measure it can also disclose secrets to us. Time can be a scale in which we weigh our actions.

  Right now as I write these words, an article in the newspapers tells us that a piece of Greenland ice that took over 1,500 years to form has melted in less than twenty-five years. The increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has disturbed the balance of our climate. Nobody can any longer deny that it has become warmer. The old ice is melting. Nor can anybody deny that this has been caused by the actions of humans.

  Time has thus become a way of exposing the consequences of our actions.

  And what does the future hold? Will there be anybody able to measure the passage of time?

  Or has the clock stopped for good?

  40

  Winter night

  I distrust people who claim they are never frightened. I think they are lying. Not so much to me as to themselves.

  What most people are most afraid of is dying. Looking back, I have quite frequently found myself in situations when I thought my life was in danger, but occasions when that was really true are less than the number of fingers I possess.

  I once fell asleep at the wheel of my car and only just managed to avoid being hit by a lorry whose driver was sounding his horn frantically. I drove into a lay-by and got out of the car. It was in the winter, and nearly three o’clock in the morning. I stood there as one or two cars flashed by on the road. Fear came creeping up on me gradually. It had been so close. Out into the darkness, at the age of thirty-six and a few months.

  But I have experienced worse than that. And I wasn’t the one involved. I recall a night in Kitwe in Zambia when a heart-rending cry for help came from the radio: an Indian woman had been attacked in her own home, and she was convinced she was going to be killed by the robbers. Neither she nor I managed to contact the police. Listening to her terrified voice was among the worst things I have ever experienced.

  I remember being convinced that the Indian woman must have been thinking the same as I was when I was attacked at gunpoint in Zambia. It was a horrible way to die. So young, so unnecessary, such a wasted life. All for a few Zambian banknotes, a wristwatch and a Toyota Land Cruiser that had seen better days.

  Fear protects us, warns us, perhaps it even helps us to endure what is unendurable.

  Fear and oblivion go hand in hand, of course. But no more so than fear and remembering.

&nb
sp; If we hadn’t needed fear in order to survive as a species, we wouldn’t have been able to feel it.

  The same applies to fantasy and imagination, which are also wonderfully precise instruments of survival.

  41

  Relief

  During the early stages of my cancer treatment, I endured many investigations. My head was X-rayed, for instance. The day Eva and I went to the clinic to hear the result of the scan was one of the worst. Had the cancer spread into my brain? If so, it seemed inevitable that my life would soon be over.

  But Mona, who was my consultant on that occasion, said they had not found anything. Eva squeezed my hand tightly and said to Mona: ‘Thank you! Thank you!’

  I felt enormous relief. I remembered that boat journey down the river and the hippos that could have killed me. But I also recalled a football match in Fredrikstad in Norway.

  I was sitting right at the top in one of the stands when I suddenly noticed a little boy down at the bottom looking up at all the rows of seats. His face contorted and he started crying: I understood why straight away. He had been to buy an ice cream or a hot dog, and now when he returned he couldn’t locate his father or whoever it was he had come with. He felt totally alone and lost in this crowd of people. I was just about to go down to him when his father noticed him, stood up and waved.

  I shall never forget witnessing the boy’s relief.

  In 1972 I finished writing the first book I had decided to send to a publishing house. I had written three manuscripts before that, but didn’t think they were good enough. I had made up my mind not to submit anything until I was quite sure it would be accepted and published. That was of course a presumptuous decision. Nobody can be certain about such a thing in advance.

  I took the manuscript to a postbox, but hesitated for quite a while before actually inserting it. It was a spring evening. I can still recall the whole scene – the feeling of loneliness as I stood by the postbox, the manuscript inside a brown envelope, before I dropped my future into a dark chasm. Would it lead to the abyss?

  I waited for several long months. The silence seemed to go on for ever. But one day a postcard featuring a picture of the poet Dan Andersson fluttered down onto my doormat. The publisher to whom I had sent the manuscript wrote that he and his colleagues had now read it, and decided to publish it.

  How did I feel? I remember standing naked by the front door, feeling the cold under my bare feet. Was I filled with joy? Jubilation? What I remember was enormous relief like a hot flush through my body. I had not been mistaken. The manuscript was good enough to be published.

  I sat down on the floor, and took a deep breath. Then I exhaled.

  Relief has been a constant presence throughout my life, at least as significant as feelings of happiness. Every time a theatre production for which I was responsible was reasonably well received, my first reaction has always been relief. Happiness, and perhaps a dash of pride, has been less important and above all short-lived.

  Review days for new books can be painful. If the reviews turn out to be reasonably good, I feel relief again. If they are not so good, I can feel ill for a day or two. But then the unpleasantness fades away. Even in those circumstances a sort of relief ultimately takes over.

  One man who must have felt boundless relief was an English country doctor in Gloucestershire called Edward Jenner. There is a portrait of him in which you can observe his large mouth with full lips, his clear and wide-open eyes, his rather big nose. There is something convincing about his face, and he seems full of self-confidence.

  The portrait dates from after 1797, when he had already felt his great and crucial relief at the age of forty-seven.

  Jenner was born in Berkeley, the place where he ended up working for the whole of his life. He had assisted a local doctor before undergoing medical training in London. At the age of twenty-three, having passed all his examinations, he returned to his birthplace where his father was vicar.

  Berkeley was a rural town. In his practice Jenner met all kinds of people; most of them were farmers who grew crops and raised livestock. He became familiar with their illnesses, but he also listened to what they had to say about them, and why they thought some people were affected and others weren’t.

  One such story in particular was constantly repeated, and stuck fast in his memory. It was the assertion that many milkmaids, often young women, who had become infected with cowpox appeared to be immune from the fatal epidemic of smallpox. Jenner thought deeply about this, and began to suspect why this was the case. But could he dare to test this suspicion? What would happen if he was wrong? He would be risking a person’s life, as he would need to test his theories on a human being – and a child at that, since they were the ones worst affected by the recurrent smallpox epidemics.

  In 1796 he experimented on an eight-year-old boy called James Phipps. He infected one of the boy’s arms with pus from a cowpox pustule. When the boy was later exposed to infection during a smallpox epidemic, he proved to be immune.

  What Edward Jenner experienced when the boy didn’t fall ill and die must have been the greatest possible form of relief. He had been right. And he had dared to vaccinate the boy – the first time this had ever been done.

  Jenner was subjected to what Schopenhauer would later call the three stages of truth. At first he was universally scorned, then scientists tried to prove him wrong, and finally the truth became regarded as self-evident.

  In a satirical drawing from the beginning of the nineteenth century we can see people whose heads have been replaced by cows’ heads after being vaccinated by Jenner. (Vacca means cow in Latin.)

  As early as 1797 Jenner sent an account of the James Phipps case to the Royal Society: but they rejected it, claiming that his proof was insufficient. Jenner continued with his vaccinations, and even vaccinated his own son who was just over one year old when he was infected with cowpox. In 1798 Jenner presented his results to the Royal Society once more, but it was some time before his revolutionary research and experiments broke through the wall of doubt and prejudice. In the end it became impossible to deny that vaccinations had saved the lives of many people, and Jenner became famous. Truth was victorious in the end. Once again he must have felt enormous relief. He devoted the rest of his life to studying the possibilities of vaccinations and the risks that were also involved.

  He lived until 1823. I imagine that occasionally he must have met, or at the very least thought about, James Phipps who, thanks to him, had been given the possibility of living rather than dying of smallpox.

  Relief is one of the strongest emotions of which humans are capable.

  42

  Getting lost

  I once got lost in a dense and overgrown forest in the province of Västergötland. I danced a sort of ghostly ballet with myself among those trees in the gathering dusk. I was thirteen at the time, and had moved to Borås from the province of Härjedalen a few months earlier.

  For me, Borås was a big city. The first Sunday morning I lived there I went out early for a walk around town with two aims in mind: one was to discover how many cinemas there were, and the other to find my way back to my place in Södra Kyrkogatan. I found six cinemas that morning. I can still remember the names of five of them, but the last one escapes me – perhaps it was the Palladium?

  Later that spring we went off on a school trip. It was the end of April or the beginning of May. It was still chilly in the evenings, but light. I can’t quite remember the reason for the outing, but I do recall that we travelled by bus, and I can conjure up blurred images of the faces of some of my schoolmates. We eventually stopped at a yellow conference centre in the middle of the forest. A very short and chubby man with round spectacles addressed us in a shrill voice about the history of Västergötland. The point of an ancient arrowhead was passed around.

  Then we went for a walk through the trees to what might well have been a ruin – my memory of it is very uncertain. The man with the round glasses wasn’t with us: instead it was a
grey-haired woman who spoke to us about Varnhem. Her talk concluded, one of the teachers who had accompanied us said we should assemble at the conference centre in half an hour’s time. He recommended that we should follow the same path as we had used on the way out – but we could take a short cut if we dared.

  His last comment was sarcastic, of course: there are no predators in the Västergötland forests, and bears and wolves died out there over a hundred years ago.

  I decided to take a short cut. It was about two kilometres to the yellow conference centre, and I was clear about the general direction. I rather fancied the idea of getting there first and waiting for my classmates to appear. I set off at full speed and was swallowed up by the trees after only a few metres. The forest was more dense and undulating than I had anticipated, but I didn’t have far to go after all. I ran around a few little hills, found a passage between various blocks of stone that had been placed among the trees, and expected to see the yellow building at any moment.

  But no building appeared. I was soon forced to accept that I was lost with no idea where I was. The forest was silent; there was only a faint sighing sound in the gathering dusk. No voices of my schoolmates in the distance, no cars, nothing. As it was cloudy and there was rain in the air, I was unable to see where the sun was. I started by retracing my footsteps in order to find the main path, but there were hardly any marks on the ground and I couldn’t establish where I had come from. Gaps in the trees and the blocks of stone seemed to be haphazard, with no obvious pattern. I could be right next to the ruin, or a long way away. The devil had followed me without making a sound, and removed all traces.

  I tried walking in various directions, noting distinguishing features on the blocks of stone or large tree roots, but it didn’t help. I suspected I was committing the usual error made by those who are lost, thinking I was walking in a straight line but in fact moving in circles.