A Woman in the Polar Night (Pushkin Press Classics)

They have something of the gaiety and simplicity of primitive peoples whose lives are closely bound to nature and who have not lost themselves in the fine-spun intellectualisms of the civilised world. They have the faces of untroubled boys.

But the people who live under the sun seem distant and small to me. With bent heads they are running round in circles, the circles of their anxieties and troubles. Only a few of them see the glory of the sun.

Now I know again who I am. Now I have my boundaries again.

And suddenly I realise that civilisation is suffering from a severe vitamin deficiency because it cannot draw its strength directly from nature, eternally young and eternally true. Humanity has lost itself in the unnatural and in speculation. Only now do I grasp the real meaning and the world-transforming element in the saying: “Become as the peasa

Here we can live; we can also die, just as it pleases us; nobody will stop us.

Up here one must be broadminded enough not to be pedantic.

Completely dazed as I already am, even without this, by the orgy of colour in the scene, the picture they paint of what happened on this once desert expanse makes me dizzier still.

I feel that the limits of my being are being lost in this all-too-powerful nature, and for the first time I have a sense of the divine gift of companionship.

Stoking up the fire, clearing away the ashes, fetching snow, sweeping the floor—these jobs bring back a sense of reality.

Do we really need the force of contrast to live intensively? It must be that. For a gentle song would not shake us if we had never heard a loud one. We human beings are only instruments over which the song of the world plays. We do not create ideas; we only carry them.