Jonas sat there, enjoying the smell, the sound, of burning logs, the sight of a rosy rock face, and reading an old paperback, not knowing that he was playing hazard with his life. The first pages were rather heavy going, but he soon became totally absorbed. It never occurred to him that it was an unusual book, he had read very few novels, so he had nothing with which to compare it. He did not wonder at the measured pulse of the opening lines, at the odd way in which the one character’s pages-long reflections were inserted between brief, banal remarks about the weather that fell every few seconds. Jonas simply enjoyed it, he had a pleasant sense of two parallel phenomena moving at different speeds. Jonas was in a cottage on the outskirts of Jotunheim and for once he was reading a book. Outside it was more than twenty below, but he was sitting beside a roaring fire. He was in love, he was happy with his new job as an announcer with NRK, he was in a good mood, he was open, he read page after page with a faint smile on his lips, he entertained no expectations of this novel, he simply read it, word by word, conscious of nothing but a profound sense of well-being. When he looked up — first glancing at Margrete in her mermaid position in the chair next to his, then out at the pink rock face before him — time stood still. He emerged from a maelstrom into stillness. The events described in the book were totally undramatic, and yet when he looked up, his heart was pounding, as if he had been in a state of unbearable suspense. For a second he had the feeling that the rock face before him could open up at any moment, in response to some magic password, like Open Sesame.
He read on, page after page in which a description of various doings was interlaced with a stream of thoughts. He got caught up in his own associations, lost himself completely in his own memories, dreams, what might almost have been perceptions. Every sentence, every word seemed to lead him down a sidetrack and from there down offshoots from this sidetrack. He began to discern the central theme: the transience of all things. That and the eternality of the smallest daily task. Millions of years as opposed to a second. Now and then he had to laugh at a particular formulation. ‘The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare,’ he read at one point. Jonas was filled with a colossal intensity; he sat quite still, but on another level he was firing on all cylinders. By chance he happened to look up again. Two hours had passed. For some time he had had a definite sense, in his mind, of being by the sea; he thought he could hear the waves, the swell. He flinched at the sight of the motionless pink rock face, the freezing winter panorama. The landscape had not opened up, but he had.
And which book was this? It was To the Lighthouse. He read on, conscious of how the author, Virginia Woolf, made him think about thinking, how she could almost catch a thought before it was born. At last, a kindred spirit, his heart exulted; someone who succeeded in showing how thousands of thoughts criss-crossed in one’s mind in the course of a day. Someone who made thought the protagonist. Jonas was bursting with excitement and delight. He did not think that Margrete had read this book. But then he came to a passage which she had marked, he recognised her handwriting in the margin, or a youthful version of it. On the next page he was pulled up short by a metaphor to the effect that in the heart and mind of a woman there could stand tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, like treasures in the tombs of kings. Then came a question which Jonas had also asked himself: was there some art known to love or cunning, by which to push through to those sacred chambers? In the margin he saw a ‘Yes!’ in Margrete’s girlish hand. Again Jonas’s heart began to pound palpably.
He carried on reading, even more engrossed, if that were possible. Little did he know that he was risking his life. He had the feeling that he was not looking down at a book, but down into a brain, a body, a landscape far, far greater, deeper, wider than the scene, Jotunheim, which lay before him when he raised his eyes. Jonas felt the world’s flatness threatening, thanks to a measly book, to give way to hitherto unseen depths. Later he was to believe that he had, for a couple of endless seconds, been only a hair’s breadth away from discovering the true nature of life; it was so clear and concrete that he could almost have reached out and touched it, and said: ‘Here it is!’
Then something happened. He came to a new chapter, totally different. Time sped past, year after year and people departed. All of a sudden things were happening with bewilderingly rapidity and this transmitted itself to his thoughts, they were jammed nose to tail, causing pile-ups. He felt as though he had been sucked into a corridor and God knew what awaited him at the other end. And then — it was like being brutally robbed — the central character died, in a parenthesis, for God’s sake, wise Mrs Ramsey, this was too much, how could the author let her die like that, just by the bye; and then a few pages further on Prue, the eldest daughter, died — this, too, by the bye. When Jonas came to the part where the son Andrew died as well, in yet another bloody parenthesis, he had to stop. He could not take it. That these people to whom, though he did not know why, he had begun to feel attached, should die just by the bye, while that blasted abstract time flowed callously onward, filling page after page.
He had to stop. He could not breathe. The insight was too much to bear. He was in imminent danger of being concussed again. He was being hunted by some monster that he could only escape if he closed the book. Jonas slammed it shut, in desperation almost, smack in the face, so it seemed, of something — something deadly. He remembered how as a boy he had run away from Daniel and only just managed, we’re talking millimetres here, to lock the door against him and his murderous rage. The faint smile still played around Jonas’s lips, as if his body had not yet caught up with his horror-stricken mind. But then: he realised that he was terrified. It was as though a whole pack of wolves had crept up on him unawares and were all suddenly breathing down his neck. Jonas stared out of the window at the rock face, the wintry Norwegian landscape. He was covered in goosebumps. He had almost lost his life. His old life. Had he finished it, that book would have changed his life. He knew it. And he did not want a novel changing his life.
He had closed To the Lighthouse. In the middle of the chapter entitled ‘Time Passes’. He pressed a palm against each cover, as if to stop it from falling open again. It actually took some effort. The bang made Margrete look round, a question on her face. He made the excuse of a sudden headache. ‘I’ll read the rest some other time,’ he said, trying to smile. But he knew he would never pick it up again. He knew that he had come close to making a fatal blunder. He swore to himself that he would never open another novel.
And yet, even though he had put the book down, something had happened. He noticed it later that evening when he got up, still trembling slightly, to light a candle on the dining table. As he struck the match and his hand edged towards the wick, it occurred to him that all life could be contained in that movement, that a person could write hundreds of pages about this simple action and what was going on in his mind at that moment. He had been changed. Not much, but a bit. He was marked for life. Why do you have a scar over your eyebrow? I got it in a fight with Virginia Woolf.