Discussing "Growth Of The Soil" By Knut Hamsun

In this episode of Canonball we discuss "Growth Of The Soil," which was written by Knut Hamsun and published in 1917.

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Chapters

• 0:00 The Places Where Knut Hamsun Was Born And Died
• 3:48 Prizes And Art
• 5:21 Notes On The Title And Historical Context Of "Growth Of The Soil"
• 7:32 "Growth Of The Soil" As A Literary Depiction Of A Recurring Process In History
• 10:12 Europe, Nature, And Industrialization
• 11:16 "Growth Of The Soil" And John Locke
• 15:42 Differences In Technology, Knowledge, And Population
• 19:26 Population Density And Self-Perception
• 27:09 A Few Passages From "Growth Of The Soil"

Transcript

Today we're going to be looking at Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun. In the US I've also heard his name pronounced Hampson, but I'm going to go with Hamsun because I think that's the pronunciation that Norwegians would use. Hamsun was born in 1859 in a town that at that time was part of the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway. So Sweden and Norway were politically united somehow and he died in 1952 in Norway. So by the time he died the borders and the organization of Scandinavia had changed a bit. And if you notice in those two dates 1859 and 1952 he died at 92 years old. So he lived a pretty long life. And of course if anybody lives to be 92 years old they're going to see a lot of change. But between 1859 and 1952 the world changed a lot between those two dates and some of that change appears as we'll see in Growth of the Soil. And the place he was born was called Lom and it was in the province called Gudbrunnsdalen. And the main character of Ibsen's play Pyrrha Gint was inspired by a real or a legendary person who lived in Gudbrunnsdalen. And the composer Edvard Grieg wrote some music for that play that you've probably heard even if you don't know it because it gets used a lot. One part of it in particular gets used in movies or television when they're portraying a very idyllic natural rural scene. And when you look at pictures of Gudbrunnsdalen it certainly looks like that kind of place. And another thing that I found was that starting from around 1865 apparently the population of this area, the phrase I saw, was declined substantially because people were emigrating to North America. Probably mostly the United States, but maybe Canada as well. And there's at least one character in Growth of the Soil who leaves a rural part of Norway to go to the United States and he's never heard from again. But this shows that that was something going on not just in Norway in general, but in Hamsun's hometown starting from 1865 and he was born in 1859 so from when he was very young when he was six or so he would have been aware of that. And the place that he died was called Grimstad and I couldn't immediately find anything especially notable about Grimstad. But it's worth pointing out that a pattern that we often see in the birth and death of these writers in history is that they're often born in a place that we've never heard of but they die in a place that we have heard of. They're born in some small town in France. They die in Paris. They're born in a small town somewhere in the UK or in England. They die in London. And Hamsun seems to be in the category of writers who both was born and died in places that at least for non-Norwegians are relatively well known. Maybe these two places are both very well known for Norwegians or for Europeans, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find Americans who didn't have some special interest in Norway or some reason to know about these places that knew about either Gudbrunnsdalen or Grimstad. And that's relevant to our discussion today because growth of the soil is about not even a small town in Norway, but what is originally unsettled land. And in his long life Hamsun wrote a lot about a lot of different topics, but he wrote this major novel that's about people settling in the wilderness. So whatever he might have thought of urban life or modernity, you can tell from some of how he writes about the people in the setting in the story that he very highly valued the earthbound life. People being close to land and to nature and to the soil. And his spending his youth and his old age in relatively small towns seems to reflect that as well. And growth of the soil won Hamsun the 1920 Nobel Prize for literature, whatever that's worth. I think Nobel Prizes in physics, for example, are more reliable. I think we've talked about that before. I think that physicists are better able to look at what the other physicists have been doing and say, well this year that guy clearly did the most important work. Or not this year, in the past ten years the person who did important work that we haven't acknowledged yet is this guy over here. And they must debate it a lot, I'm sure, but somehow it seems less subjective in physics than it would be in literature. And also if you look at the list of Nobel Prizes for literature, there's a handful of people you've heard of and a lot of people you haven't. And that doesn't mean that they must be bad if you haven't heard of them. But I'm generally skeptical as I think a lot of people are about prizes and writing or even art more broadly. But if you think of them as a way to acknowledge somebody who did some good work on something that turned out very nicely, then it sort of makes sense. It makes less sense if you're trying to say that this one is the best novel or the best whatever that was written recently. Not because it's impossible to determine what's better and worse in art.certainly is better and worse, but it might be difficult, if not impossible, to decide what's the best. But if we think of prizes as a way to call attention to people who, some people who care about the topic, think are doing good work, then there's nothing wrong with that. But anyway, for whatever it's worth, Hamsun got the 1920 Nobel Prize for growth of the soil. And I read this from a Penguin Classics edition that I found to be very nice. It has some very useful notes in the back, and one of those notes said that the title of the book comes from Leviticus 26, 3 and 4, which in the King James Version reads, quote, If you follow my decrees and are careful to obey my commands, I will send you rain in its season, and the ground will yield its crops and the trees their fruit, end quote. So it sounds like the bit that was taken out for the title is the part that here is translated as the ground will yield or the ground will yield its crops. But it's easy to imagine how another translator might have come up with a phrase closer to growth of the soil. And because of some of the events that happen in the book, they date the action. And of course, it's fiction, but maybe we can think of it lightly as historical fiction because it is pegged to certain things like currencies changing, going from using one currency to another. They date the book from being over the course of about 30 years, starting from the 1850s in Norway. And for Americans, one of the things we know about our 19th century history is westward expansion, the Wild West, people settling land that Native Americans had been on. But apparently something similar was going on in Norway, also in the 19th century. But the area that they were settling was the very extreme north of Scandinavia and of Norway. These are parts of Norway that are in the Arctic Circle. And for reasons that I couldn't quickly find out, they had been mostly unsettled or they were less settled than they had been. And in the 19th century, people started to move up and to settle them. And now there are cities and towns up there. And growth of the soil begins with one guy going up into the woods. And the rest of the book is everything that then happens as a result of that. And I read that some laws changed and the circumstances had shifted somehow to make this more possible or more desirable. But I don't want to say anything definitive about it because I'm not completely sure about that part. But it's enough to say that there was a similar project going on in Norway. While in North America, people were expanding westward in Norway, some people were expanding north. And I found this book very enjoyable to read. It was very relaxing. It's pretty straightforward. There's a lot about nature. There's a lot about these people building their settlements. There is a little bit of inter-human drama, but it always feels like you're looking at it sort of from the community level. You get inside people's heads and hear a little bit about what's going on with them. But it generally still seems like a biography of this settlement. It's not a complete biography because by the end of it, well, I won't give it away, but the settlement has not ended by the end of the book. But I found it very enjoyable for a number of reasons. And I think for a certain kind of reader, it's really just right. I can imagine some people might get into this and say, why am I reading about these people building cabins in the woods? But if you're into that kind of thing, this is perfect. And this kind of very realistic depiction of a type of human activity, this kind of settling of unsettled land happens at different times throughout history. And you kind of wonder what it looked like. And in the American folklore and in history, you can learn about it in a certain way. But it's interesting to think that at some level, this is how every human settlement, including London, started. Not exactly because a lot of them, London included, are on waterways. And so there was some functional reason for people to set up there. And then it grew from there. A lot of big cities are on rivers and on coasts and near ports. And going out into the woods is something different. But still any city that anybody lives in was established at a certain point, whether 100 or 10,000 years ago. And the technology involved might be different. And the number of people and the reasons may have some variation. But this process of people going out and trying to set up shop first, not that they were in a race, but they were just the first people to get there. And the trials that they went through and the work that they did, growth of the soil, for me in my mind, gives me a nice portrait of all of that that you can kind of use in trying to imagine other moments in history. I'm sure, for example, we don't think about this as much in the United States, but in Canada, there must've been stories that were almost the same as what Isak and Inger, two of the main characters in this story, went through. Because much of Canada is within the Arctic circle, but even just in the North in Canada. And people settling what is now North and South Dakota and Minnesota in the North of the American Midwest would have gone through something similar. So I feel like I can take this very nice literary detailed depiction.and use it cautiously when I'm imagining certainly Norwegian history. I was glad to learn about this bit of Norwegian history that I didn't know about, but also other related times and places in history. And this book was also a pleasant reminder of something else that I've been thinking more about recently. And when I was still reading it, I was talking to somebody about it, and I used the word Zen as an adjective. I said, it's very Zen in such and such a way or something. And at some point later, as I was reading it, I was reminded, I've had this thought before, but it's the kind of thing that you forget sometimes, that something being calm in atmosphere or earthbound in that it's close to nature in some way, that is not uniquely East Asian. We don't have to associate that with Japan. There's a perfectly European tradition of being close to nature and living simply and avoiding vices. Now, one of the reasons why we don't immediately think of European culture when we think of that is because industrialization basically came out of Europe and that process and all the accompanying technologies and social structures that come with it have wrought havoc on our relationship with nature. But proximity to nature and to the earth is not foreign to Europe as books like Growth of the Soil show. But another thing this book made me think of is John Locke. And in the second treatise on government, what he says about wasteland. And I used to like Locke more than I do now. I think people who identify themselves with libertarianism are really into Locke. And libertarianism certainly is useful in many ways. I think it has its limits. And I just put that out there because now I'm going to talk about Locke for a bit, but I wouldn't want you to take this as proselytizing. But I think one of the things that's very attractive about Locke, certainly one of the things that attracted me to his writing, and we'll have to look at something before too long, but he has this principle that what a man definitely owns is his body. He definitely owns himself. That belongs to him. And then by extension, if he owns his hands, he owns the work of his hands. And that's a very nice, simple principle that for some reason, when I think about it, I still get a nice feeling that makes me want to go do some good work. And from there, he's a lot more cautious. But one of the things that he talks about is what he calls wasteland, which is uncultivated land. Usually when we say wasteland, we think of a swamp or something, but he uses it to mean land that is being wasted, I guess. Land that nobody is cultivating and developing for crops essentially. And he says with some provisions and caveats that as long as there's enough for other people and this or that is not going on, that if you go out and cultivate wasteland, you take some part of the forest and you make it into a little settlement where you're growing corn and you've got your little house and whatever, then by your work, you make the property yours in some way. And I'm simplifying it a lot. And this part is more controversial because maybe somebody could say, well, what if you've got 5,000 acres and you don't know that you have squatters somewhere on it? Does that mean that if they start working on it and you don't notice that they can just claim it? Now in the United States, we do have something called squatters rights. And there is something to be said for if you have a whole bunch of land that you're not using and somebody else is putting it to some good use. I don't know. There's a conversation to have there. But Locke's point was not about land redistribution, but it was about property and labor in that your labor is your property. And this concept was in the background of my mind while I was reading this book in general. But there's a part pretty early on where Isak has gone up and he's building his little homestead out where there's nobody out there, way out in the woods. And somebody comes along from the government and says, well, you're on government land, so you have to pay some money for it. And Isak is a simple, straightforward guy. So he says, okay, well, tell me what I have to pay. And the government guy says, well, I'll tell them that you've done a whole bunch of work on this land. So hopefully they'll give you a better price for it. And that was also interesting because at least the way that it's depicted in this work of fiction is that it seems like Isak had been thinking faster than the government. This is an example of subsidiarity that people who are closest to the question are the best able to answer it. That somebody far away will be less able to make a good decision about what's going on. And we don't really hear about why Isak goes up into the woods, how he ended up in a position where this seemed like a good idea and then he executes on it. But the fact that he's there first, and then the government guy shows up later, seems to show that him and his environment in some area near the frontier, or what we could call the frontier, this somehow made sense to him. Maybe he came from far away and he said, I'm going to go up into the North and make a homestead. Or maybe he was from somewhere nearby. Maybe I missed that, but it certainly wasn't a big part of the story if it's in there. But he organically, based on his circumstances and what looks like it makes sense to him, goes out into the woods and starts building a cabin. And once he's got some stuff going, later the government shows up and is trying to organize this and saying, oh, there's going to be people going up here and we have to figure out how to do this in a sensible way.because we could imagine the reverse that, for example, the government was all out in front of it and it was recruiting people to try to go up into the North. And it was saying, we've got this piece of land for you. And this is part of what happened in the United States, though it probably came later. People were encouraged to move West by being offered parcels of land at very good prices or for free. The only catch being you have to go live out where there aren't many people and there may be Indians trying to kill you. And probably the Norwegian government then caught up to this being a trend and figured out how to do it at scale and encourage people to come out. But at the stage that Isak is doing it, they don't have that system set up yet. And so they're coming out after the fact and badgering him for money. And another big thing that runs throughout the book is a divide that's a little bit hard to characterize because it has a few different levels, but they seem like they're related. And one way you could talk about it is by looking at the technology. For example, there are telegraph lines gradually coming in or they're trying to build them near the settlement. Later in the story, there's a mining operation that plays a part. At one point, the family gets a, I don't remember what they call it, but it's like a harrow or a tilling machine to turn up the soil. And Isak is very proud to own it and it makes the work easier. And all the people in the settlement come out to see it because they've never seen such a thing before. Though it's interesting, he has to ask his son to read the instructions for him because Isak, the main character of the story, is illiterate. And that gets us to another aspect of this divide, which is older and newer thoughts and ways of thinking. And literacy is part of it. But another prominent example that comes up a few times is how the laws are changing. Infanticide, or women killing their children, plays a pretty big and surprisingly casual role in the story. Maybe calling it casual is too much. It's always a significant component of the story when it happens, but it seems that they relate to it a little bit differently than we would today. It's not the story stopping crux when it happens. But anyway, something that comes up is how the laws surrounding the punishment for that have gradually softened or are softening over time. And people's thoughts about criminal law are shifting a little from punishment even to an early version of what we might call rehabilitation, for better or for worse. And somehow the son knowing how to read and the father not knowing seems related to this. Now, if you're talking about literacy, I think it's pretty much a net good for more people to know how to read. So it's simply better if the son knows how to read than if the father doesn't. Even granting some of the potential perils that can come with literacy that we've talked about before. And the laws softening, I don't think, are as clearly a net good in the same way. Though to be fair, the examples of infanticide in the story, I don't know, I'm trying to talk about this without giving anything away because this is a very nice book and some of you might want to read it. But it's not really a story where twists and turns and surprises are really what's valuable about it. But anyway, the examples of the crime are debatable and indeed the characters in the story debate them. So I think Hamsun deliberately set them up that way. So you have the divide about technology, less and more technology. You have the divide about knowledge or thinking, an older way of thinking and a newer way of thinking. And then you also have an urban-rural divide where there are some characters who come to the settlement either having lived in a larger town. So there's the settlement, which is just a handful of homesteads out in the woods. Then there's the closest village, which seems like it's about five to 10 miles away through the woods. I don't think they ever say the specific distance, but the way they talk about it, it seems like it's about that far. And then there are larger towns that are even further than that, that might have a few thousand people in them. And it seems like pretty much the biggest urban center that even gets mentioned in the story. None of the action takes place there, but the biggest place that gets mentioned is these small towns, not the village and not the settlement, but that town. So no place is particularly built up, but still there are some people who are coming from those towns. And now I'm thinking about it, the guys coming from the mining company, it may be implied that they're coming from a bigger city, but it's not really mentioned. Anyway, the point is there are people who are coming from or spend time in larger built up centers. And Hamsun talks about the differences between them and the people who are just in the homestead or have always been in the homestead or spend more time there. And he does it very nicely in a very subtle way. He's not saying, oh, those evil, selfish people from the city, but there is a little bit of implication that people who spend more time in a more built up area are a little bit more interested in themselves. And that might be in part because cities or concentrated human populations make it easier.to get the things that you need in a certain way. So if you want to get food and you live in a town, you go to the store and give them some money and then you get the food. If you want to get food on the homestead, you have to manage your farm. And it might actually take more time in some cases to get the food by working for money and buying it at the store. You might have to spend more time working than you would spend cultivating a farm. Though I'm not sure. You'd have to look at that case by case because it also might be different in the 19th century than it would be in the 21st century. But one explanation might have been that it's harder to get the food and it also involves working with other people. So if you're spending 12 hours a day doing all the different tasks involved in managing a farm, then you have less time to sit and think about yourself. And more importantly, you are continuously cooperating and communicating with the other people that you're working with. But even if you were to say, no, if you're a factory worker in a town in the 19th century, you have to spend more time to get worse food than you would if you were managing your own farm. Then we could say, well, then it's not necessarily because of the amount of free time. It might be because of the way that the work is done. That if you're working on a farm, you're more directly connected to what you're doing. You're to this complicated system of nature where you have to prepare for it and you are continually in contact with what it might do or might not do and how powerless you are in front of it. It's a big problem if it rains too much and it's a big problem if it doesn't rain enough and you don't have any control over how much it rains. So that might put your focus outward a little bit in a way that if you were a factory worker, you might be working with 30 other factory workers, which first of all, you're not talking to them very much. Though you might be talking to them as much as you would with other people that you're working on a farm with. I would say a little bit less. But anyway, the details of the examples don't matter too much. We're trying to get at something general. But if you're a factory worker, though you might be at the bottom of some hierarchy, your work may be more stable for better or for worse in that you just keep doing the same thing all the time and the outside conditions don't change very much. And that may give you more mental energy to be thinking about yourself, that stability. But really I think the biggest component, and this is all conjecture, but what seems likely to me is that being around other people makes you more aware of yourself. And if you've ever spent some time in the woods with a small group of people, meaning at least days, not several hours, you start to get a small sense of this because you can feel that it's different when you come back to civilization. When you're out in the woods, you know, you're trying to keep yourself well-kept or whatever, but the expectations about how well-dressed you are are radically different from how they are in what we would call normal life. But not only are the expectations lower, but because there are fewer people, presumably nobody except the people that you're camping with, the interacting with strangers part of your mind doesn't really get activated. Whereas if you're in a town, you go into a store and you need to ask them if they have such and such a thing. And so then you're talking to somebody who you don't know probably. And then this very complicated social equipment of your appearance to a stranger comes into play. And probably the baseline human thing here is you want to appear good to a stranger, which is why people shower and they wear clean clothes and they try to be polite when they're talking to somebody. And even people who deviate from this a little bit mostly don't deviate from it a lot. So even if you say, well, I'm going to reject the social game that people play about wearing nice clothes and I'm just going to wear black all the time. That's going to be my uniform. I don't have to think about clothes anymore. I don't want people to judge me based on what I'm wearing. You would still presumably wear clean clothes. And arguably there's certainly a health reason for that. But the point is whether you're aware of it or not, being around other people and probably especially being around strangers flips on some set of considerations in your mind that probably happened so quickly and automatically and they've happened from adolescence so you don't even think about them anymore. But they involve a combination of things like personal hygiene and personal appearance and personal conduct. And since in a town you are more likely to encounter strangers, that thing gets flipped on more often and probably a side effect of that because you have to more often appear in a store and not look like you just came in from a week-long camping trip or in modern life go into a meeting or give a presentation and how you look matters. That mental equipment getting flipped on makes you think about yourself more often and probably a byproduct of that is that you then think about yourself more often even when it's not necessary. That if you had a piece of property with a pantry full of food and you didn't have to work and you could just spend three months living by yourself, you would almost certainly still take showers.and you would still wear clean clothes. But probably something interesting would happen to your mind where you would be less aware of yourself. And this might be part of why holy men and wise men throughout the ages have often sought solitude. Though also many super smart guys are also found in the middle of giant cities. So it's hard to tell which of those two practices are more fruitful. But anyway, without theorizing too much about what the possible causes of this difference in behavior between people who spend a lot of time in more built-up areas or less built-up areas, we can simply observe that there is some kind of difference. And now the difference that Hamsun is looking at is the one between a very rural environment being a 19th century village in northern Norway and then an environment that's even more rural than that being the settlement that's 5 or 10 miles into the woods from there. So by our modern calibration, this is off of our charts. But the comparison that we can make in our own experiences, I think everybody can notice, I can only speak from experience about the United States, but the difference in general cultural behavior between people who live in giant metropolises and in relatively small towns, let's say maybe a maximum of 100,000 people, but more in the range of 2 to 20,000. It's not a cliche or a stereotype to acknowledge that there are differences on the whole in the behavior and thinking of these two groups. And in the history of the United States, we sometimes will talk about the difference between the North and the South. But I think the urban-rural divide is going to be more accurate because if you went to a place like Atlanta, a big city in the South, I think it would be reasonable to venture that people in towns of comparable sizes in Georgia and Pennsylvania would feel more in common with each other than people from a small town in Georgia would with the people in Atlanta. Now, historically in the US, the North was more industrial and the South was more agricultural. And so by extension, there were denser population centers in what we call the North. But again, I think that's more about population than about geography. And now we can look at a few spots from Growth of the Soil by Knute Hobson. In this first one, a guy has come when he's offering Isak a job checking the telegraph line. And Isak explains why he can only do it in the winter. Quote, Isak thought it over. I could take on the work in the winter, he said. The whole year, the engineer said. Of course, the whole year, summer and winter. Spring and summer and fall, my farm keeps me busy and I have no time to spare for other things. The engineer couldn't help looking at him for quite a while before he asked him the following astonishing question. Can you make more money that way? Money, Isak said. Would you make more money working your farm the days you could be inspecting the line? Well, that I don't know, Isak replied. It's just that I'm here to till the soil. I have many people and even more animals to provide for. We live off the land. All right, I can offer the job to someone else, the engineer said, end quote. And money is something else that comes up a few times in the story. And there, Isak hardly knows what to do with the question because what he's thinking about is that the animals need to be fed and the people in his family need to be fed and he does that by working the land. He doesn't do it by managing a telegraph line. And who knows, it's possible that he could have earned more money or money that would have purchased him more things than he could have continued to do by working the land himself, but that would have been a significant transition. And he, of course, wasn't thinking about it in those terms, but we can see that. Going from doing the work directly that gets you the stuff that you need to doing the work that gets you money so you can buy the stuff you need from somebody else is a significant transition. And it's so big that we're not even sure of all the complications that come with it. And Isak's wife, Inger, spends a while in some of the more built-up places where they are and then she comes back. And initially, she's different. She has something urban about her and Hamsun talks about that, but then she gradually changes back to how she was before, living on the settlement. Hamsun writes, quote, She had become thoughtful. It grew quieter on the farm. The visits decreased and the strange girls and wives from the village came more seldom because she didn't take up with them. No one can live deep in the wilds and keep on playing around. Happiness is not the same as having fun. In the wilds, every season has its wonders, but there is always something unchanging. The immense heavy sound of heaven and earth. The sense of being surrounded on every side. The darkness of the forest. The friendliness of the trees. Everything is heavy and soft. No thought is impossible there, end quote. I like that description of nature and how he says, happiness is not the same as having fun. That's worth thinking about.Later talking about the effects of the town, or the possible effects, Hamsun writes, quote, Isak understood work to carry on his trade. He was now a wealthy man with a large farm, but he made a poor use of the many cash payments chance had brought his way. He put them away. The backland saved him. If Isak had lived in the village, the world at large might have influenced even him a little. There were so many fine things, such genteel surroundings, that he would have bought unnecessary things and gone around in a red Sunday shirt every day. Here in the backland, he was protected against all excesses. Living in clear air, he washed Sunday morning and bathed when he was up by the mountain lake. Those thousand dollars, well, a gift from heaven. Every penny to be put away. What else? Isak could manage his ordinary expenses and more simply by selling the yield of his animals and the soil, end quote. So different things happen in the story, so he gets some cash, but he basically never uses it. He just puts it somewhere and forgets about it. And because he's out in the woods, he's not tempted to wear a red Sunday shirt every day to these unnecessary luxuries. Later, Hamsun is writing about one of Isak's sons, Elysius, who gets an opportunity to go into town for a while, and maybe it turns out to not be good for him. Hamsun writes, quote, "'Poor Elysius, he's so frittered away, so topsy-turvy. He probably should have been a settler from day one. Now he is someone who has learned to write the letters of the alphabet. He is without initiative, without depth, but he is no pitch-black devil of a man. He is not in love and not ambitious. He is next to nothing, not even a great nuisance. The young man seems doomed, haunted by misfortune. It is as though he has suffered some internal injury. Perhaps the good district engineer from the city shouldn't have discovered him as a child and taken him into his house to make something of him. The boy probably got his roots torn and fared badly. Whatever he now undertakes can be traced back to something defective in him, something dark on a light ground," end quote. So Hamsun is wondering if this opportunity of sending Elysius to go live with an engineer in the city, which looked like a good opportunity, maybe actually was a bad one for him. It separated him from his roots. And later, a character named Geisler, who's a pretty important and interesting character, is talking about Salonra, which is the name of Esauk's farm, but he's also talking about the settlement in general. And he says, quote, "'Let's take you people at Salonra. You look every day at the blue mountains. They're not invented things. They're old mountains rooted deep in the past, but they're your companions. There you are living together with heaven and earth, at one with them, at one with the wide horizon and the rootedness. You have no need of a sword in your hand. You walk through life barehanded and bareheaded in the midst of a great kindliness. Look, there is nature. It belongs to you and yours. Man and nature do not bombard each other. They are agreed. They do not compete or run a race for something. They go together. You Salonra folks have your being in the midst of all this. The mountains, the forest, the moors, the meadows, the sky, and the stars. There is nothing paltry or apportioned about all this. It is without measure. Listen to me, Sievert. Be contented. You have everything to live on, everything to live for, everything to believe in. You're born and you bring forth. You are vital to the earth. Not everybody is, but you are vital to the earth. You sustain life. You go on from generation to generation, fulfilling yourselves through sheer breeding. When you die, the new brood takes over. This is what is meant by eternal life. What do you get in return? An existence that's just and strong. An existence based on a true and trusting relationship to everything. What you get in return? You Salonra folks can't be pushed around or bullied. You enjoy calm of mind and authority. And this great kindliness all around. That's what you get in return, end quote. And later, Hamsun is talking about Isak again, and he writes, quote, he is a settler in the wild through and through. A tiller of the soil without mercy. A figure resurrected from the past and pointing toward the future. A man from the first farm, a land nomsman, 900 years old. And again, the man of the hour. Skipping ahead, nothing grows here. Everything grows here. Man and beast and fruit of the soil. Isak sows. The evening sun shines on the grain, which radiates from his hand in a circle and sinks like a spray of gold into the ground. There comes Sievert to harrow. Later, he will use the roller and then harrow again. The forest and the mountains are watching. It is all sublime and majestic. There is meaning and purpose, end quote. And in that passage and in the previous one, the text mentioned Sievert, who is Isak and Inger's second son. And as always, there's a lot more that we could talk about, but we can leave it there for now. Farewell until next time, take care, and happy reading.