Just about six weeks shy of a year since I posted last.  Yes, I read Volume 4 of My Struggle this summer.  Along with a lot of other books.

In Volume 4, he’s a callow young man, just eighteen and graduated from gymnas (I’m glad Bartlett, the translator, chose to preserve the Norwegian word instead of translating it as “high school”–it feels more precise), teaching primary school in northern Norway.

Oh, the muted lights in buses at night and the muted sounds. The few passengers, all in their own worlds. The countryside gliding past in the darkness. The drone of the engine. Sitting there and thinking about the best that you know, that which is dearest to your heart, wanting only to be there, out of this world, in transit from one place to another, isn’t it only then you are really present in this world?  Isn’t it only then you really experience the world?  (162)

Of this passage, a few lines later, he observes, “Only a forty-year-old man could have written that.”

Yes, and so?