“What fools we were when we were twenty,” came Erik’s voice at last. “God knows what we expected and how we had got it into our heads that such things were on earth. We called them by the same names that they bear in reality, but we meant something entirely above and beyond comparison with this tame sufficiency that we’ve got. There isn’t much to life, really. Do you think so?”
“Oh, I don’t know; I take it for what it is worth. We don’t generally live very much. Most of the time we only exist. If you could get life handed to you in one whole large, appetizing cake that you could set your teeth in ... but doled out in bits!—no, it’s not amusing.”
“Tell me, Niels—it’s only to you I can talk of such absurd things; I don’t know how it is, but you’re so queer. Tell me—is there anything in your glass? All right!—Have you ever thought of death?”
“Have I? Why, yes. Have you?“
“I don’t mean at funerals or when a man is sick, but sometimes when I’m just sitting here comfortably it comes over me like—like a despair simply. When I sit here and mope and don’t do anything and can’t do anything, then I actually feel the time slipping away from me. Hours and weeks and months rush past with nothing in them, and I can’t nail them to the spot with a piece of work. I don’t know if you understand what I mean, but I want to get hold of it with something achieved. When I paint a picture, the time I use for it remains mine forever; it isn’t lost, even though it’s past. I am sick when I think of the days as they go—incessantly. And I have nothing, or I can’t get at it. It’s torture! I sometimes get into such a rage that I have to get up and walk the floor and sing some idiotic thing to keep myself from crying, and then when I stop I am almost mad to think that the time has gone meanwhile, and is going while I think, and going and going. There is nothing more wretched than to be an artist. Here I am, strong and healthy; I have eyes to see; my blood is warm and red; my heart beats, and there is nothing the matter with my head, and I want to work, but I can’t. I am struggling and groping for something that eludes me, something that I can’t grasp even if I toil and moil till I sweat blood. What can a man do for inspiration or to get an idea? It is all one whether I concentrate or whether I go out and pretend I am not looking for anything, never, never anything except the sense that now Time is standing up to the waist in eternity and hauling in the hours, and they rush past, twelve white and twelve black, never stopping, never stopping. What shall I do? What do people do when they feel like that? Surely, I can’t be the first. Have you nothing to suggest?”
“Travel.”
“No, anything but that. What made you think of that? You don’t believe I’m done for, do you?”
“Done for! No, but I thought the new impressions—”
“The new impressions! Exactly. Have you never heard about people who had plenty of talent in their first youth while they were fresh and full of hope and plans, but when youth had passed their talent was gone too—and never came back?”
They were silent for a long time.