World Light by Halldór Laxness

come next; one was a compound of the greatest dissimilarities of existence, one was God, one was eternity, one was a glowing spark or a strange rhythm, one was the stream or the river or a girl, one was a bay down by the sea and there was a bird, one was the part of the homefield wall that faced the mountain. Events were always incredibly varied, one novelty after another, without rule or logic.
    Occasionally he was washed up on the shores of reality, but only for a short spell at a time; he just had time to wonder at how quiet and uneventful everything was in reality. He could not understand how people could live a whole lifetime in this dreary sphere of consciousness called reality, where one thing corresponds to another and night separates the days and everything happens according to the laws of nature, and this is such and such, and that follows this. But fortunately he soon drifted back into the realm of improbability where no one knew what followed which, where nothing corresponded to anything, where everything was possible, particularly the incredible and the incomprehensible. Before he knew it, his being had once again become a welter of hallucination and consolation and lightning flashes and God and release from reality and from human strife and human reason, from life and from death.
    But then he opened his eyes one day and it was all over. It was just like waking up in the normal way, the day was like any other day, and there was a tiny patch of sunshine on the sloping ceiling above him. Magnína had her back to him and was bending over a basin, washing herself and combing her hair, and her outer stockings reached only up to her knees—there were no garters on them and that was why they had slipped down. He thought of sitting up as usual, but he was now so weak that he could not even move an arm. It took an incredible effort even to move one finger; it was best not to move at all, best just to look at that friendly little sunbeam on the ceiling! But he felt he had to say something. He remembered dimly that something had happened but he did not properly know what he ought to say, and he really could not be bothered thinking about it. He was so tired and this was so pleasant. What was it that had happened? It was best to wait. And he waited. At long last Magnína finished washing herself; surely she would turn around now? Then she turned around. She was only halfway through the second braid. She looked at him and saw that his eyes were open.
    “Are you awake?” she asked, and went on braiding her hair.
    “Yes,” he whispered.
    “Have you recovered then?” she said, and put one strand of the braid into her mouth while she combed out the other.
    “Yes,” he said.
    He wanted to ask something but could not find the right question; so he said nothing for fear of asking a wrong one.
    “It’s God’s mercy you didn’t die on our hands,” she said.
    “What?” he said. “Am I not going to die?”
    “No,” she replied.
    “I thought I was,” he said apologetically—he had asked the wrong question after all, and he was sorry.
    “We were quite sure you were going to die, but now I can see it in your eyes that you’re alive,” said the girl.
    He said no more and did not mind not having died. Actually he was a little disappointed, even though that patch of sunshine was on the ceiling; the world of perception was unbelievably poor compared with the world of hallucination.
    “Perhaps you’d like a cup of milk?” asked Magnína. “It’s awful to see how skinny you’ve become.”
    She brought him some warm fresh milk and bent over him and raised his head from the pillow; the smell that gushed up from inside her dress was the same smell as before. Yes, he was sorry he had not died.
    Then he began to get better. His recovery was very slow, certainly; he could not eat much and he dozed a lot, but when he was awake his senses were all there. He was on his way to life again, to stay here for a little longer, the