Free Shyness And Dignity by Dag Solstad Page B

dossiers of human thought. But that was, of course, such a high aim that he was reluctant to talk aloud about it, he wasn’t a megalomaniac and was loath to be considered pretentious, being, after all, simply a twenty-eight-year-old from a railway town in East Norway, and he certainly had not seen the truth, in case someone should get that idea, but he was trying to come up with a few modest possibilities within this great continuous tradition constituted by two hundred years of humble and passionate interpretation of Kant. However, to get it right he had to take his time over it. Hence the slow pace of his studies. So slow that at the time he met Eva Linde he had already been studying philosophy for eight years, and even so he was far, far away from seeing the end of his study for the PhD.
    By that time, however, Elias Rukla had seen the end of his study. In the autumn of 1968 he obtained his university degree in the humanities, and in the spring of 1969 he took the so-called pedagogical seminar, to prepare himself for a career in secondary school, the gymnasium . He moved from the student village at Sogn, having found a relatively reasonable three-room apartment in Jacob Aalls gate, took out a bank loan and bought it, even though he had not yet acquired a livelihood. That he did, however, in the course of the spring, at the Fagerborg school, where he was to start teaching in the autumn as a fully trained senior master, with the pedagogical seminar and all behind him. Johan Corneliussen went on as before, as a student admired by his fellow students of both genders. Now he was even a student leader, for a spirit of revolt was sweeping through the European universities at the time, and that turned Johan Corneliussen into a declared Marxist; but since Marx depends on Kant, as we have seen, it did not have any momentous consequences for Johan Corneliussen’s studies. He continued as before. He and Elias still stuck together, through thick and thin. Elias often visited Johan in the student village, and from there they set out on expeditions into the real world. Only one thing was changed, namely, that Johan Corneliussen suddenly insisted on introducing to Elias Rukla a young lady he had met. This was something new, for previously Johan Corneliussen had always kept the ladies ‘apart’ from their friendship. He had constantly ‘hooked up’ with women on their joint journeys through life’s labyrinths, and at student parties, and more than once he had even ‘dated’ one and the same young woman for several weeks, most often a fellow student he had captured, or let himself be captured by, and with whom he let himself be seen in the student canteen or other places, but without making much of it; he would rush straight up to Elias with his young lady in tow and settle down without any fuss, as if all three of them were old friends, and after a few weeks she was usually gone and he referred to her quite naturally as a good friend whom neither of them saw so often any more. But then one day he invited Elias for dinner in his little apartment in the Sogn student village, because he would like him to meet a young woman he had come to know.
    When he arrived at the student village they were waiting for him. On the sofa of Johan Corneliussen’s cramped little apartment. The table was spruced up with a white tablecloth, set with plates and glasses, and with a paper napkin at each place setting. A festive mood. When Elias Rukla saw Eva Linde for the first time. When Elias Rukla stepped into the small room where Johan Corneliussen lived and slept, in order to testify to what he would now witness: the couple on the sofa. She stood up from where she sat beside Johan Corneliussen, and took Elias Rukla’s hand, and he noticed that she gave his hand a warm (possibly imploring) ‘extra’ shake. The new couple seemed anxious, Johan Corneliussen nevertheless expectant. And so he had every reason to be. The beauty of the young lady was such