Wintering

There are so many similarities between [my father] and me, I can see that. But what I think really scares me are the countless ways I'm not like him. And because the past is getting farther and farther behind me, and the end coming closer and closer, I'm afraid I'll never meet the man in myself that I saw in him.

And though I had misgiving--obvious ones, too--one overwhelming thing drove me on: on the borderlands, my father would need me as much as I'd need him. That's what made me so blindly ready to go off with him. What boy doesn't wait his whole childhood to walk alongside his father on equal terms?

it was merely my nature. I came by it through no choice of my own, just as my father had no choice in his. To get rid of it you’d have to go back a thousand years and across all the miles of the Atlantic Ocean, through all our ancestors and all the qualities of the Northern European people in general.” He smiled. “You know something about this particular quality of our people, Berit Lovig. You know it just as well as I do.

When he looked up again he saw that wilderness as if for the first time. It was the wilderness of the soul. His soul and all the world’s soul. It was untamable and ungovernable and unforgiving and it didn’t give a damn about him and his proud thoughts. It was not an idea. It was real and had to be lived in, not just visited. No, not lived in. Survived. He had to survive. So he took his compass out again and held it once in each direction and reckoned the world was just that simple if you let it be.

My old man had a saying,” Harry told him. “Well, not a saying, exactly, but a question. He asked it of himself and he asked it of me and he asked it of anyone who came to him with trouble: ‘Can you get ahead of it?’ The answer, for him, was always, always yes.

how brave a thing it was for him to try to rediscover something, even if it was only himself, not a continent.

History doesn’t abide acts of the imagination but memories depend on it. And memories are as much what we’ve forgotten as what we recall. History cannot be forgotten.

Every person, I have come to believe, has a moment or a place in life when all four points of the compass converge, from when or where their life finally takes--for better or for worse--its fated course.

History and memory aren't the same thing[...] History doesn't abide acts of the imagination but memories depend on it. And memories are as much what we've forgotten as what we recall. History cannot be forgotten.

And now it's been half a winter since Harry vanished, and I can finally rest my thoughts. I ought to feel relief. Of this I'm sure. But do you know what it's like to hold proof of the last heartache you'll ever know in your own raw hands? I hadn't known, either, not until Gus delivered Harry's red hat yesterday morning, a cork bobber sewed on where the pompom should've been.