Dear Henrik Pedersen

Hei,

I am going to spare you the details of my current life and skip the expected "How are you," talk. Things like these have no meaning to me right now, Henrik. This will be the last letter I write to you. I feel like the only way to continue is to separate myself from you. You're just as stuck as I am, and talking is no longer helping. Even if you write a letter back, I will issue no response.

I've been thinking about myths. Not just the ones that the elders taught us, but the ones from far away that came here a long time ago on ships from across the sea. They are ingrained into our soil and are as native as the wolves and spruce trees that litter themselves across the landscape. Holy books of other peoples that we once fought against have now become ours.

The theory of the origin of man across lands and cultures is perplexing. Nobody knows how humans came to be. Nobody even knows how we as nations came to be. And maybe we'll never know. But some say that Adam and Eve were kicked out of paradise because they gained knowledge and we fell along with them.

People deemed that foolish. By knowing too much, by knowing what is black and what is white, their childlike folly was ripped from them. To take a bite of an apple is to be burdened with thought and memory.

They were simply a man and a woman, equal.

Like us, they made mistakes.

You can say sorry a thousand times, but that doesn't erase what happened.

I think that it wasn't your fault that you were greedy for land and soil. It's natural to consume more to become stronger, to become unstoppable. Our leaders tell us that it is the right thing to do rather than to be content with what we have. We are moved by force and by false reason to behave this way.

But you bit off more you could chew. You couldn't swallow the sun, and you fell, waxed wings melting off of your back like Herakles's Icarus, plummeting towards the wild ocean.

And I couldn't help you. None of us could.

I can't say that things will go back to the way they were. To purposefully forget would be wasteful, and although it would make life easier, would make life less meaningful, I feel. Knowing what doesn't work is as important and as knowing what does.

Maybe it is wrong to say that Adam and Eve got kicked out of Heaven, having learned that knowledge is sin.

I don't believe sin exists. Good and bad are relative. "Thinking makes it so," Hamlet said.

Maybe it is more correct to say that Adam and Eve moved on to a place that was harsher, but where life was more fulfilling. I've come to realize that hardship only makes you stronger, as much as it breaks you too. Without the negatives, there can be no positives. Libra's scales are not always balanced. Like a pendulum, life swings.

And maybe Icarus fell upwards, if you looked at him from another angle.

I'll see you again some distant day in the future, but for now this is goodbye. I wish you the best of luck sorting your problems out, and know that I will be just as busy sorting mine.

Halvard Sørensen

24 August 1866