While Bernt Halvorsen was deeply preoccupied with the armaments race and the Cold War and was keen to take action, as an undergraduate Pål Andersen sat at home in his bedsit reading strange poems, which he had great difficulty interpreting. Was this his form of political radicalism, which linked him to the same life nerve that surged through Bernt Halvorsen with such unbending seriousness? Indeed, his preoccupation with avant-garde French and Polish films, modern literature and abstract paintings was an attempt, a desperate one at times, to enter the same period to which Bernt Halvorsen already belonged, and which he could defend from the inside with such accuracy. He was zealous in his efforts to understand avant-garde art, that form of art which has really taken hold of our own day and age. He often felt that he had failed to understand it, indeed, more often than he would admit, it left him in a state of incomprehension, confusion, indifference, even after he had used all his astuteness to understand only a snippet of it. It could make him feel desperate. He felt a failure because he didn’t understand the art of his own period, and it can’t be denied that in such situations he often pretended to understand more than he actually understood, and even feigned an admiration for works of art which, in actual fact, left him unmoved. But on the other hand, what pleasure he could experience if, after a long struggle with, for instance, a modernist poem, he suddenly understood it! He had, for that matter, felt the greatest joy when he understood intuitively, directly. Why? Because then his own searching and restless and frequently maladjusted soul melded, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, with the greatest minds of his time. He had felt enlightened, and at the very highest level. It gave him a deep, tranquil satisfaction, as he had been moved by reality, and he hoped intensely that someone would pay a visit to his bedsit right then, so he could have read this poem aloud to them. That this reality had dissolved all conventional and normal reality, and depicted a quite different and often uncompromising reality, where ordinary things had ended up in unaccustomed and frightening positions, often accompanied by black humour, on this passage through a landscape of deformity and impossibility, of anxiety and pent-up screams, cynical and relentless, disparaging and dissolved, unnerved and alcoholised, fatally wounded by the belief in total happiness, none of that diminished Pål Andersen’s pleasure at being able to understand the most outstanding achievements of his own day and age, but that the young man who took all this to his breast could, simultaneously, identify with serious and morally incensed political radicalism may well strike one as rather mysterious. But that is how it was. Pål Andersen’s rare moments of happiness when he thought he understood the chaotic and iconoclastic form of an avant-garde work of art strengthened, rather than weakened, his confidence in his own impossible life, as a young man with the future ahead of him. He didn’t seek comfort, but relentlessness. He didn’t seek the structure he was brought up to see and understand, but the disintegration of that structure. He didn’t turn to art in order to receive, but to see. He couldn’t imagine using the word ‘rewarding’ about a work of art — for instance, that such and such a book has given me so much, taught me so much, etc. etc. — but thought solely that it enlightened him, made him see, cynically and without false expectations, so that he felt he was alive, something that young men often struggle to feel clearly, and which very easily makes them become maladjusted. Actually, it is not all that difficult to see that as a young man Andersen must have been a snob. If he were to become a part of his own day and age, with all his maladjustments, then it would have to be through reaching the highest level of enlightenment, through an understanding of this day and age’s most outstanding achievements within the arts. But Professor Andersen would probably in any case have asked us to bear with him, especially when we now see his desperate attempts to relate to the avant-garde movement of his period, which for him was identical to modernity; being a young man of his own day and age, as he painstakingly tried to understand a poem by, for instance, Pound or Elouard, by Celan or Prévert, and then managed it, he succeeded, perhaps even intuitively; can’t we visualise the leap in his own self-esteem when it takes place, and let us grant him that, and thereby the pride which rushes through this callow young man, who, in his deeply tranquil satisfaction, now has only one wish beyond the one which has already come his way, that someone would come and visit him, so that he might have someone to share this satisfaction with, therefore he wishes that someone would come, so that he can read this poem aloud for them here in his simple bedsit. Two youths, one of whom reads poetry to the other, two young students, one of whom reads aloud to the other from the works of their common youthful contemporaries with the most outstanding awareness of life as it is, and thereby also of life in the future. Pål Andersen wasn’t young in the sense that he felt life-giving sap threatening to burst his veins. He didn’t feel particularly strong, with unparalleled vigour, which was straining to get out, the way young people are often portrayed by older people, as a measure of youth, and which consequently has to be demonstrated through youthful conduct. He was a sallow youth, who smoked forty cigarettes a day, and drank five or six pints of beer in smoky, muggy bars three to four evenings a week, and who woke up with a hangover at least twice a week, so that it was a painful effort to drag himself up to the university at Blindern and his daily toil in reading rooms and in lecture theatres. He spent his life in stuffy surroundings, with flagging, aching limbs and endless brooding; nonetheless, it was beyond doubt that his young mind could respond, and that due to this responsiveness a promising future lay ahead of him. Now and then he was visited by his total opposite, the medical student Bernt Halvorsen, and then he read him poems, by Georg Johannesen for instance. Or by Stein Mehren, two Norwegian poets who were only a few years older than himself, and whom he admired enormously. Sitting on his unmade bed, with bedclothes that were never aired (but now and then actually washed), he read poems for Bernt.