Towards the Light with Lydia Sandgren
“Finding out is not necessarily equated with joy. It is often painful to see things for what they are.”
photo credit: Emelie Asplund
Towards the end of Collected Works, when Rakel Berg travels around Europe in search of her missing mother, she makes the following observation:
‘Aside from a general sense of the linguistic structure and a handful of quotes she had with varying success thrown about in bars, her Latin studies had provided the foundation of a lesson she was only now wrapping her head around: there’s not enough time for everything, so you have to choose. Learning Latin properly and then applying that knowledge in a productive way would take years. One term of part-time study was like lighting a match in a pitch-black cathedral and for a few flickering moments realising just how much was still hidden in the shadows. ‘
To study Latin is an idea she has inherited from the mother, or rather: the idea of her, because she left when Rakel was seven years old. But language skills are no more than a spark in the dark, they do not light up the world as Rakel had hoped. If anything, she sees the extent of her ignorance. In this darkness, she stands alone with her box of matches.
Her mother, the headstrong Professor of History of Ideas Cecilia Berg, would probably have pointed out that the image of ignorance as darkness and knowledge as light is one of the great metaphors of cultural history. Thus, The Enlightenment (knowledge, rationality) replaced The Dark Ages (barbarism, chaos), a movement from night to day that recurs in miniature form in individuals.
First, Cecilia would probably say, we have childhood: an uncivilized era populated by heroes and monsters. As a child, you know very little. Imagination takes precedence in one’s understanding of life. Only one’s immediate environment is visible. The world beyond is shrouded in darkness. Adolescence follows, the dawn of adult life. Confusion reigns, not least caused by the collision between what you know and what you don’t know. You may know what it’s like to be in love, but not how to actualize your love. You know that you enjoy reading, but you don’t understand, for example, Wuthering Heights or The Trial. You know that you want to write, but you have no idea how the words in your favourite books have come to life. Evidently, someone has written them, but how? Where? When? Why? And then you tumble into adulthood. The shimmering light of dawn is replaced by a colourless daylight.
Collected Works is, among other things, a book about how people deal with the demands of responsibility and self-sacrifice that adulthood entails. I see it as a form of Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel set among the backpacking summers and underground clubs of the Eighties. The novel follows Marin Berg’s winding path from adolescence to middle age as well as his daughter Rakel’s search for her mother. Cecilia’s absence is the black hole around which everything gravitates. She appears in memories and stories, in her writings, as a figure surrounded by light in her friend Gustav’s paintings – but she is inevitably gone. It is Rakel’s task to try to figure out this enigmatic woman, whom she resembles in many ways, and whom she so far has approached as if she was an antique bust: respectfully, in a low voice, at an appropriate distance.
It is always difficult to start rummaging around in the past, to point the flashlight at dark corners and pull back dusty curtains. In bright daylight, the dirt and cracks are so much more visible. The twilight darkness is more merciful towards shortcomings and failures. Finding out is not necessarily equated with joy. It is often painful to see things for what they are.
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Read the full piece in the Light Issue.
