Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg Read Free Book Online Page B

It’s winter, the wind is blowing, and it’s terrifyingly cold. When the women need to pee, they have to light a Primus stove under a blanket in order to pull down their pants without getting frostbite instantly.
    For some time we’ve noticed that fog is on the way, but when it comes, it comes suddenly, like a collective blindness. Even the dogs huddle together. But for me there really isn’t any fog. There is a wild, bright feeling of elation, because I know with absolute certainty which way we should go.
    My mother listens to me, and the others listen to her. I am placed on the front sled and I can remember feeling that we were driving along a string of silver, stretched between me and the house in Qaanaaq. The instant before the corner appears out of the night, I know that it’s there.
    Maybe it wasn’t the first time. But that’s how I remember it. Maybe it’s wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they are always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.
    There is another image of fog, possibly from that same summer. I have never sailed much. I’m not familiar with the landscape underwater. It’s unclear why they’ve taken me along. But I always know where we are in relation to landmarks on shore.
    From then on they start taking me along almost every time.
    At the American military Coldwater Laboratory on Pylot Island they had people on staff to research the “sense of orientation” phenomenon. There I saw thick books and long lists of articles
about the fact that directionally constant winds blow along the ground, giving ice crystals a particular angle, so that even in bad visibility you should be able to determine the points of the compass. That another, barely noticeable breeze a little higher up causes a definite cooling of one side of the face in fog. That the subconscious subliminally registers even the light not normally noticed. There is a theory that in the Arctic regions the human brain is able to register the powerful electromagnetic turbulence from the magnetic North Pole in the vicinity of Bucha Felix.
    Verbal lectures on the experience of music.
    My only spiritual brother is Newton. I was moved when, at the university, they introduced us to the passage in Principia Mathematica, Book One, where he tips a bucket full of water and uses the tilted surface of the water to argue that there is Absolute Space inside and surrounding the rotating earth and the turning sun and the tumbling stars, which makes it impossible to find any constant starting point or initial system or fixed point in life. Absolute Space—that which stands still, that which we can cling to.
    I could have kissed Newton. Later I despaired over Ernst Mach’s criticism of the bucket experiment, the criticism which formed the basis for Einstein’s work. I was younger then and more easily moved. Today I know that all we did was prove that Newton’s arguments were inadequate. Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition. No one has budged my or Newton’s certainty about Absolute Space. No one is going to find his way home to Qaanaaq with his nose stuck in Einstein’s writings.
    â€œSo what do you think happened?”
    There is nothing as disarming as a sympathetic response.
    â€œI don’t know,” I say. That’s very close to being the truth.
    â€œWhat do you want us to do?”
    My objections suddenly seem so transparent here in the daylight, where the snow has melted, and across Knippels Bridge life is going on, and a courteous person is speaking to me. I have no reply.
    â€œI’ll review the case again,” he says, “from beginning to end, and look at it in light of what you have told me.”

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