Dag og Tid, another year in Klassekampen, small simple pictures of an industrial worker’s reality which despite their modest proportions had gained a certain prestige in the Hatløy family, where books enjoyed great popularity. When he had a poem published on the back page of the literary journal Vinduet beside a small photograph of himself, and then a few years later his poems covered two whole pages of the same publication he was, in our eyes, a fully blown poet. It was at this time he started reading philosophy. Of an evening he sat in the house high above the fjord fighting his way through Heidegger’s incredibly intricate German in Sein und Zeit — presumably word by word, because to my knowledge he had not read or spoken German since his schooldays — and the poets Heidegger wrote about, especially Hölderlin and the pre-Socratic writers he referred to, and Nietzsche. Nietzsche. He later described reading Heidegger as like a homecoming. It is no exaggeration to say that it filled him to the brim. And that it was a kind of religious experience. An awakening, a conversion, an old world was filled with new meaning. At that time my father had left the family, so Yngve, my mother and I had begun to celebrate Christmas at our grandparents’ where Kjartan, now in his mid-thirties, still lived and worked. The four or five Christmas Eves we were there are without doubt the most memorable I have experienced. Grandma was ill and sat huddled at the table, shivering. Her hands shook, her arms shook, her head, her feet. Now and then she had bouts of cramp and had to be taken to a chair where her legs had to be practically forced into a bent position and then massaged. But her mind was clear, her eyes were clear; she saw us and she was happy to see us. Grandad, small and rotund and lively, told us stories whenever he could, and when he laughed, as he always did at his own stories, the tears rolled down his cheeks. But this didn’t happen as often as it could have done because Kjartan was there, and Kjartan had sat for a whole year reading Heidegger, had been filled with Heidegger amid the grinding pointless working life of his without a soul to share it with, because no one within a radius of several kilometres had even heard of Heidegger, and no one wanted to either, although I had an inkling he had tried various people, he must have done, so taken with him was he, but it led nowhere, no one understood, no one wanted to understand, he was on his own with this, and then in we walked, his sister Sissel, who was a nursing teacher, interested in politics, literature and philosophy, her son Yngve, who went to university, something Kjartan had always dreamed of doing, more and more so in recent years, and her son Karl Ove. I was seventeen years old, at gymnas, and even though I didn’t understand a word of his poems he knew I read books. That was enough for him. We came in the door and his sluice gates opened. All the thoughts that had accumulated over the last year came flooding out. It didn’t matter that we didn’t understand, it didn’t matter that it was Christmas Eve, that the mutton ribs, potatoes, mashed swede, Christmas ale and aquavit were on the table; he talked about Heidegger from within, without a single communicative link to the outside world, it was Dasein and Das Man, it was Trakl and Hölderlin, the great poet Hölderlin, it was Heraclitus and Socrates, Nietzsche and Plato, it was the birds in the trees and the waves in the fjord, it was man’s Dasein and the advent of existence, it was the sun in the sky and the rain in the air, the cat’s eyes and the plummeting waterfall. With his hair sticking out in all directions, his suit askew and his tie full of stains he sat there talking, his eyes aglow, they were really glowing, and I will always remember it, for it was pitch dark outside, the rain was beating against the windows, it was Christmas Eve in Norway 1986, our Christmas Eve, the presents were under the tree, everyone was dressed up, and the sole topic of conversation was Heidegger. Grandma was shivering, grandad gnawing at a bone, mum listening attentively, Yngve had stopped listening. As for me, I was indifferent to everything, and above all happy it was Christmas. But even though I didn’t understand a word of what Kjartan said, and nothing of what he wrote, nor anything of the poems he praised with such passion, I did understand intuitively that he was right, that there was such a thing as a supreme philosophy and a supreme poetry, and that even if you didn’t understand it, were unable to partake in it, you only had yourself to blame. Since then, whenever I have thought about the supreme, I have thought about Hölderlin, and when I’ve thought about Hölderlin it has always been associated with mountains and fjords, night and rain, the sky and the earth and my uncle’s glowing eyes.