Viktor Sundström was a self-taught engineer who was married to my aunt. He became a friend of mine when I was a young man because, despite his age – he lived until he was about ninety-five – he was still a political rebel. He never tired of complaining about the terrible conditions in which the poor people in his home province of Värmland had been forced to live at the end of the nineteenth century.
He once tried to explain the universe to me. At that time, in the middle of the 1950s, the Big Bang theory had not been accepted by all scientists as an explanation of the origins of the universe. Viktor maintained that the universe had always existed. When I asked what had existed before that, his answer was that there was no ‘before’.
That was impossible to understand, of course. The whole of my childish image of the world collapsed. I recall vaguely that Viktor realised he had made me insecure and perhaps also afraid when he robbed me of that ‘before’.
‘Nobody knows for certain,’ he said by way of consolation. ‘The universe is a mystery.’
He didn’t believe in God. He approved of the fact that my father had forbidden us to go anywhere near any kind of Sunday school. He never went to church except when he felt obliged to attend a funeral. He was completely indifferent to what would happen to his own body after his death.
For me God was something big and frightening. An invisible being who slunk along by my side and could read my thoughts. I gathered that neither Viktor nor my father believed that this invisible God had created the earth and other planets and stars. For some years this resulted in a feeling of insecurity inside me. I found it unsatisfactory for a universe and all its stars glistening in the cold winter nights to be one vast mystery.
There had to be something else. There had to be a ‘before’.
Even if I had tried I would have been unable in those days to imagine an expanse of time in the future 100,000 years long. I still can’t do it. I can see the mathematics, I can count the generations, but even so I don’t understand it. How is it possible for a human being to imagine a comprehensible world in such a distant future? How could I imagine a descendant of mine 3,000 generations ahead? The future gets lost in the same kind of mist as when we look back in time. We are surrounded by fog, or perhaps compact darkness, whichever way we turn. We can send out our thoughts in all directions and all dimensions of time, but the replies we receive are not worth much. We are unable to penetrate what not even sciencefiction writers manage to depict all that satisfactorily.
Researchers can use mathematical models to calculate everything from when the universe was first created to the day when the sun will expand so much that it swallows up our earth, long after all the oceans have evaporated and all life has ceased to exist. In the end, the life-giving sun will be our death. Like a gigantic fire-breathing dragon it will swallow up the earth and then become one of the cold, dead dwarf stars. But the mathematical models do not make the passage of time any more comprehensible.
There are other ways of approaching the impossible task of trying to imagine a world hundreds of thousands of years ahead of our present day. This is one of them:
Several years ago I asked a good friend of mine who is a glass-blower by profession to make me a glass containing an air bubble. Such a glass would normally be a blunder by a competent and self-respecting glass-blower, and be thrown away without a second thought. But I was interested in the difference between truth and falsehood, between myth and reality. In the back of my mind was also the question of time and eternity.
There is a myth that says that a bubble trapped inside the transparent wall of a glass moves. This happens so slowly that it is impossible to detect movement simply by looking at it – even during the course of a long lifetime the bubble would not appear to have moved at all in any direction – it would take more than a million years for it to return to its starting point. In other words, the bubble has an orbit, just as the planets move in accordance with a set pattern and at set speeds.
Harry Martinson has written impressively about this in his outstanding space epic Aniara. However, if we postulate that this is not a myth but is actually fact, we are faced with another problem: how can we possibly check it? Nobody holding that glass in his or her hand today is going to exist in a million years’ time. Thousands of generations of human beings cannot report on exact memories of what their eyes have seen during thousands of years. We cannot possibly know for sure if the movement of a bubble of air through glass is true or false, myth or verifiable truth.
Needless to say, scientists can create a model and conduct experiments, but that can only give us an indication of probability, never an indisputable truth.
Trying to see 100,000 years into the future is a compromise between what we can imagine on the basis of factual knowledge and what our fantasy and imagination aided by mystical experiences might indicate.
A human being is a creature that has been evolving for thousands of years, developing more and more appropriately practical abilities. We would hardly have been equipped with the enormous creative capacity that comes from fantasy and imagination had it not been for the need to survive, to protect our children and to find new ways of obtaining food when normal conditions become chaotic as a result of drought, floods, earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
The history of mankind, like that of all other living beings on this earth, is based ultimately on the creation of survival strategies. Nothing else is of real importance. This ability enables us to reproduce, and to pass on to new generations ways of handling exactly the same problems of survival that we have faced up to ourselves.
Life is the art of surviving. Nothing else.
The glass containing the bubble of air is still standing on a shelf in my home. If nobody knocks it over so that it falls and shatters, it will still be there long after I have passed away.
And I believe that bubble will move. But I shall not see it doing so.
7
Last will and testament
One day, in the spring of 2013, I write my last will and testament. There are still seven months to go before I start feeling pain in my neck, and I have no physical or mental indications that such problems might be in store. I am not ill, and do not suspect that death might be already standing in the porch, waiting to come in.
The reason I write my will is quite different.
When my father died many years ago he had left detailed instructions about what should be done with his belongings after his death. This meant that my siblings and I never needed to worry about what he would have wanted. Which bundles of letters should be burnt? Which should be kept, and even read? What should happen to his furniture and books? Was there anybody who should receive a legacy? It was easy for us to sort and distribute his estate, and then devote ourselves to the much more important matter of mourning his passing.
Writing one’s will is to acknowledge one’s mortality. To some extent, of course, one does it for highly egotistical reasons – but mostly, I think, it is to make things easier for those left behind.
Once you are dead, you are dead. You can no longer influence earthly things. Being alive is being able to say yes or no. Being dead is to be surrounded by silence.
—
When did human beings start writing wills? When they began to own things that could be of value to those left behind, of course. Owning things in accordance with the law brings with it the need for a written statement of what should happen to those items after the owner’s death.
No doubt most people think they ought to write a will – but they never get round to it, apart perhaps from a few sketchy points in a notebook. They keep putting it off. In many cases it is probably due to a naive superstition: they are afraid that writing a will might entice death, and encourage him to come immediately and collect them. For others it may well be a feeling that there is no big rush: they are still young, after all. There’s plenty of time left in which to do it.
People create the greatest of all illusions: if I die. Not when I die.
/> But suddenly they are killed in a road accident. Or they are stricken with aggressive cancer, and all thoughts of making a will simply disappear. Fighting to survive takes up all their energies.
Civilisation leaves no wills behind. That is something only individual human beings do. Neither the Mayans nor the Incas, the Egypt of the Pharaohs nor the Roman Empire, vanished at a stroke. The decline came slowly and stealthily, and was ignored for as long as possible. It was simply unthinkable for such a dominant civilisation to collapse. The gods were a guarantee for that. As long as you made sacrifices to them, followed the advice and demands of the priests or shamans, you belonged to a civilisation that would last for ever. That seems to be a characteristic common to all great and classical civilisations: they seemed immortal to those who lived in them.
A striking example of a culture that collapsed is the one that faded away on Easter Island. Today Rapa Nui, as it is called in Polynesian, is a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. It is completely without trees. Scattered around in the undulating grass-covered landscape are gigantic sculptures of the former civilisation’s gods. Ever since Easter Island was discovered on Easter Day in 1722 by the crew of a Dutch ship commanded by Captain Jacob Roggeveen, people have been astonished by these sculptures. Some have fallen, others are still standing, precisely where they were once dragged into place and raised. But most remarkable of all are the quarries where the statues were originally carved out. There are several half-finished statues still lying there, including one that would have been bigger than all the rest.
It is an unfinished god, not sufficiently complete to be transported – with enormous effort and brilliant contemporary engineering skill – to the place where the priests had decided it should be raised.
The quarries on Easter Island are a sort of cemetery for dead gods that were never actually used. The quarry workers suddenly abandoned their half-finished works of art.
Did somebody compel them to stop work? Or did they do so of their own accord? Did they flee in a sudden attack of panic? Did their belief in what the gods represented suddenly fail them? Nobody knows for certain.
Nevertheless, today it is possible to establish with a fair degree of confidence what caused that rich culture to collapse. Or at least the alternatives can be reduced to a small number.
A significant number of researchers believe that the people who originally colonised the island brought with them – presumably unintentionally – rats, which had no natural enemies on the island. As a result the rats multiplied dramatically and were able to live on seeds from the palm trees that were widespread on the island at that time.
Easter Island had been populated by people from the Pacific Ocean archipelago, who undertook long voyages to the isolated island. The forests were presumably one of the assets that induced the sailors to stay on the island. Many researchers suggest that the ravaging of the forests eventually led to the collapse of the civilisation that developed on the island over some 400 years because the inhabitants were no longer able to support themselves. Without trees it was impossible to build boats to use for fishing or, towards the desperate end, to travel away from the island, perhaps back to the coasts from which they had originally come. The forests had been stripped bare in order to provide fuel, but also to create wooden rollers to transport the gods to the places where they would be raised and worshipped. The soil that had previously been used for growing food blew away without the tree roots to keep it in place on the rocky ground. And of course the rats ate all the seeds, so that the trees could not reproduce themselves.
We do not know what happened during the last years of the Easter Island civilisation. There are no written records. But wooden sculptures that have been discovered suggest that the inhabitants starved to death. The carved figures depict emaciated, hungry people. Their protruding rib bones are as significant as their facial expressions.
The struggle to find food might well have led to fights between various groups. It is not difficult to envisage the social chaos, the religious despair and the brutality into which people descend when there is only enough food for a minority.
Nobody wrote a will, of course. Neither a personal document nor one that could be a source of information enabling us to understand what was happening during that final period before Easter Island became as deserted as it had once been. What the last inhabitants left for us to interpret was a silent warning. The deserted island, the overturned or unfinished statues were the nearest they came to leaving a will. Confirmation that in the end, even the most advanced cultures decline and disappear.
There are no last wishes left behind by the cultures and civilisations that preceded our own time. By means of archaeology, palaeontology and other aspects of research, and with the aid of increasingly sophisticated technical aids such as microscopes and telescopes, we can dig deeper and further back in time and understand more about the past.
But two concepts sum up all that has been discovered, and probably all that will ever be discovered: survival and extinction.
By examining the world in a rear-view mirror, as it were, we can see what we are also heading towards. Naturally, nothing will be exactly the same – history never repeats itself as a mere imitation.
But in our case we can say that we have already established what will be the ultimate record of our civilisation.
Not Rubens. Not Rembrandt. Not Raphael.
Not even Shakespeare or Botticelli, Beethoven, Bach or the Beatles.
We are leaving something completely different behind. When every other aspect of our civilisation is dead and gone, two things will remain: the spaceship Voyager on its never-ending journey through space and the nuclear waste hidden away in the mountain caverns.
8
The man in the window
One evening I am sitting at home, thinking about how the illness known as cancer entered my life.
When I was nine years old I developed a pain in my stomach that was so bad that I was taken into Sveg’s little hospital. The doctors suspected that I had appendicitis and would need an operation. I didn’t, in fact. The pain eased and the consultant, whose name was Stenholm and who frightened everybody he came into contact with, concluded that I had merely got a little fluid in my appendix that gradually dried up and disappeared of its own accord.
But I was kept in a general ward for three days. At the far end next to the window was a large man with thin hair and a pot belly. He had cancer. On the left side of his bulging stomach was a festering, purulent sore. The wound was dressed every morning and every evening, and the bloodstained, pus-soaked bandages were thrown into a tin bucket and taken away. I gathered from the patients in beds closest to him that the wound gave off a very unpleasant smell. Once, when he had gone to the toilet, I heard people whispering about the wound being cancerous: the whole of his stomach was being eaten away by tumours, and one had forced its way out of his stomach and through his skin.
Nobody said as much in so many words, but even a nine-year-old like me realised that the man was dying. He was a horse dealer and used to buy and sell Northern Swedish horses, and occasionally also Ardennes from Belgium. I think his name was Svante, and his surname might have been Wiberg – or was it Wallén? But I know for a fact that he bought and sold horses.
Nobody came to visit him during the days I spent on the ward. When he wasn’t lying immobile in his bed, he used to stand in front of one of the tall windows. He would stand there in his ill-fitting nightshirt, his belly hanging awkwardly and his hands behind his back, staring out of the window like a policeman on patrol. It often seemed as if he stood there for hours on end.
The day I was discharged I went over to the window to see what it was he had been looking at.
The window overlooked the hospital mortuary – a small, whitewashed building lying alongside a shed for storing rubbish and an old abandoned stable. Perhaps he once used to keep his horses there? By the time I left the hospital I knew that cancer was something with a nasty smell, and i
t produced bloodstained and pus-soaked bandages. It had absolutely nothing to do with my own life apart from being a distant threat hidden away in the general ward of an insignificant hospital in the north of Sweden.
I remain sitting there in my flat in the darkness. It is half past four in the morning. Another memory has just cropped up inside my head. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I had taken it down from a shelf inside the archives of my memory. I start thinking about something that happened exactly twenty-one years ago.
I remember very clearly the last cigarette I ever smoked. I smoked it just outside the entrance doors to Johannesburg International Airport. In December 1992 it was still called the Jan Smuts Airport. A few years later, when the apartheid system had disappeared once and for all into the rubbish dump of history, it was renamed after the heroic freedom fighter Oliver Tambo.
I had been wandering around in Maputo for a month, feeling more and more out of sorts. For a long time I thought I was suffering from some persistent virus, or an attack of malaria that had not yet come to a head. I was busy rehearsing a new play at the theatre. Every afternoon when I got into my old Renault I had to force myself to start the engine. Tiredness was beginning to feel crippling, irrespective of how long I slept.
One day I pulled up outside the theatre and switched off the engine. But I didn’t have the strength to get out of the car. I gave up. I shouted for the theatre’s stage manager Alfredo, who was standing outside the entrance, putting up a poster.
‘I don’t feel well,’ I said. ‘Tell the actors they can have a reading day today.’
I drove back home and fell asleep as soon as I lay down on the bed. In the evening I went out to buy some food. In the shop I happened to bump into Elisabeth, a Swedish doctor and a friend of mine. She looked me up and down.
‘You’re all yellow,’ she said.
‘Am I?’
‘Yellow all over. Come and see me tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock.’