Last Summer in Norway

This summer came too late. But now it is here. Warm. The hills around our village are deep green, and the ripening crops slumber in the burning sunshine. No wind. And the evening is peaceful, when the glaring sun retires but the heaven is still bright and hanging over us in a pale blue.

Now I must remember the happy and peaceful days last year in Norway. Never seen such a beautiful country. They said it rained often in summer, but during my visit I had mostly sonny days. The never ending days of the Norwegian Summer! The sun doesn't sink to the bosom of his bride, but suspends just above their marital bed and projects a long red shadow on the surface of the ocean.

Being alone there and with all the colleagues of the institute which hosted me gone home to their wives and kids, I enjoyed extended walks in the city and in the hills surrounding it. Wherever you are, you get a view of the bays, the Fjords as they call them. Loosed from the embrace of the pine trees you soul flows out to the wide sky and the boundless sea, an unspeaking longing, and free! (And I must recall the painting of Caspar David Friedrich, Kreidefelsen auf Rügen).

The light was so pale there that it deemed everything unreal. A landscape for sleep-wanderers. In the city the youth enjoyed the prolonged day and everyone was celebrating. At 4 o'clock teens and students still roamed the streets. And in the parks they brought casts of beer. But I enjoyed more the loneliness of my walk in areas with no bars but a magnificent view over the city and the bays. But away from the city, in a park alongside the bay, I stopped and observed a party of young men and women who enjoyed their sprouting youth. And suddenly I understood Edvard Munch, who painted series of "the Frieze of Life" with the stretched reflection of the suspending sun over the water a returning motive. It was the force of life they displayed: Sexuality and the lust for life. Today, manifested in a more primitive form than at the time of Munch, but the substance is the same. Do these youth know what melancholy is, or they just drink it away as melancholy is for them painful and unendurable?

Melancholy, the tendency to death, the mother of reflection, is never absent from the earlier paintings of Munch. So the life radiating youth together with me make a full picture of reality. And upon turning away from this scene, I was struck by the sight of a Moslem sitting on a bench just meters away, praying with a Koran in his hands.

(My favourite painting of Munch is: Summer Night, Inger on the Shore, from the Rasmus Meyer Collection).