Ice

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Sort of Books gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of FILI – Finnish Literature Exchange.

No one who’s seen the way a landscape changes when a boat appears can ever agree that any individual human life lacks meaning. The land and the bay are at peace. People gaze out across the water, rest their eyes, then look away. Things are what they are. In every breast there is a longing for something else, and everything we long for comes by boat. It’s enough that what comes is me, Anton, with the mail, for I might have anyone at all in the cabin. Expectation sweeps across heaven and earth when they first catch sight of me. The landscape is no longer quiet, there’s movement everywhere when the news goes round. Some are already running, shouting, “Here they come!”

It’s the same with those who, ancient and invisible, exist beyond our range of vision. When a human being approaches, the air grows tighter, you feel how they crowd forward and want to know something about you, though you suspect that they no longer understand what it means to be human, that they are no longer human, that the shapes you sense no longer resemble us. All the same, you feel their insistent desire to find out who you are.

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