Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

But above all it’s through your severe eyeslits, captain, that we can see you’re proud of being an empty suit of armour; an empty suit of armour can’t be afraid, for instance, it can wander through any forest you like without being worried, without being afraid that a snake might wriggle up through the heather and wrap itself around its leg. You think it’s an advantage, an enormous advantage not to be able to feel afraid, and in your emptiness you are laughing away at all the many people who are terrified at the prospect of dying of hunger, dying of thirst, dying of loneliness, dying of paralysis, dying of wounds, but if you pause and think about it then maybe it’s not as much of an advantage as you think. Your lack of fear isn’t in fact due to your store of courage, but rather to your inability to feel anything at all, to your not being able to feel anything because you haven’t had anything to feel with for the last four hundred years, and your memories of the time when the armour was bristling with life just fill you with ridicule and sterile defiance.

That’s why it’s right to say to you what someone once said to somebody else: I say unto you, the man who fears not life shall not love life, the man who does not harbour fear, neither shall he harbour courage, the man who fears not death shall not be enabled to die with dignity, the man who fears not himself, neither shall he love another. But let’s not talk about that, captain, you can’t be opened up with words, you can only be opened up with a tin opener or a five-inch nail, and when you have been opened up, people will only wonder why they bothered.

Perhaps the suit of armour heard what he’s been thinking, for suddenly the captain looks him in the eye, thrusts his gaze into Lucas Egmont’s eye like a lance and breaks it and leaves it sticking there and suddenly they’re united by a warm current of animosity. Lucas Egmont would like to sit close up to him and clutch his arm and his hands and thank him for giving him his animosity. After all, it’s so comforting to know one has a steadfast enemy in this vacillating world. And eventually, the next minute or in an hour’s time or some time before darkness falls, they’ll face up to each other and they both feel that strange feeling of dull gratitude and fear that grips you just before a terrible confrontation.

But it was a medium he wanted to be, an anti-spiritualist medium for all the others, for the salvation-seekers who still didn’t know where their enemy was, and that’s why he wanted to defeat the captain first, really flatten him, on behalf of the others.

There’s a while to go yet before dusk, and far away to the west clouds are being sprayed in through a hole in the horizon like puffs of steam. Somebody suddenly gets the idea it’s the smoke from a steam ship cruising towards the island, and gazes at the spot where the black funnel will first appear like a periscope, but the clouds just keep on rising and turn into mountains and then even bigger mountains and all hope is dashed.

‘I don’t believe it’s as meaningless as you think, captain,’ says Lucas Egmont. ‘You say it’s pointless to make that statue just because nobody will see it when it’s ready, always assuming of course we really could make a statute, but I can’t believe it would be as pointless as that, even if the situation is so awful that no boat will ever go past and be attracted to the island by the wreck. The way you think, the way you argue, anybody who’s alone would never be able to act at all just because he knows that nobody else in the world will ever get to know about it, and so anybody who’s alone ought to be completely paralysed and think he might just as well put an end to such a meaningless existence.’

‘That’s exactly what I do think,’ said the captain, with a hint of hostility, ‘that’s my way of looking at it exactly. Life is completely meaningless for a solitary person, in fact, and he would die, might just as well die as you put it, if it weren’t for one thing, if he didn’t have one thing to live for, namely: his solitude. It’s in order to be able to make the most of that solitude he chooses to stay here for a while and carry out all the meaningless acts life demands of him. Great and formless meaning-lessness, that’s the price of a ticket to solitude.’

‘But in that case,’ counters Lucas Egmont, ‘I don’t see why you object so much to the meaningless nature of the statue. To dedicate a statue to solitude is surely no more pointless than, for instance, opening a gate even though there are so many gates open already, or building a road to add to the many unnecessary ones that exist already.’

‘For the solitary person,’ replies the captain, pulling off his boot with a sigh and placing it on his knee, ‘for the solitary person there’s only one kind of permissible meaninglessness, and that’s the kind of meaningless acts which help him to achieve his solitude, and there are many impermissible, indeed forbidden meaningless acts, and the most meaningless of all these meaningless acts are of course the ones which take him back to any kind of threatening, all-consuming, inexhaustible fellowship.’

‘But there’s something there which doesn’t hold water,’ Lucas Egmont points out. ‘You maintain that everything we do in this life is meaningless, but on the other hand you claim that in so far as you’re a solitary, life actually has a meaning, and that is, solitude for its own sake. But solitude which can be compared with a blissful existence in a combined snake pit and concert hall, this state doesn’t just take possession of you for no reason, it’s no good just lying down in a basement and waiting for it to come over you from out of the darkness; oh no, the most craved-for demands the most positive action on your part, demands that you should play a positive role in what you called the meaning-lessness of the world — but that’s where I think you make a big, terminological error. In so far as they assure you of the meaning of life, unshakeable solitude, it can’t really be true that these actions are as meaningless as all that, not for you that is; in fact they’re on the contrary very important and meaningful actions, and it seems to me what you should be drawing distinctions between is not meaningless and very meaningless actions, but meaningful and meaningless actions. Although you’re so keen to deny it, therefore, there are meaningful actions even for you, just as in my view there are others for whom there are meaningful actions in life, even if life itself is meaningless. Of course, no doubt there’s nothing here which is meaningful in itself, or we’d never be able to forgive life; but everything we do and everything we have done is surely meaningful for ourselves, for our own feelings of fear, for our own feelings of guilt. Hence action, ridiculous, meaningless, paradoxical action, is so full of meaning, so weighed down with responsibility even for the many of us who are longing for fellowship but wandering around as isolated as heavenly bodies in space which is growing more barren for every pulse-beat that passes. That’s why one has to carve one’s bit out of the world’s meaninglessness and confess before one puts the knife between one’s teeth for good: I believe in the meaningless nature of the whole, but the unintentional meaningful nature of the part.

‘And since we’ve got a rock,’ he goes on, and they all stand up and look down at this white rock, this white, virginal back which has become so endlessly white by dint of having spent a few hundred thousand years waiting for the sun, ‘since we’ve got a rock, it’s pointless not to use it, but extremely pointless to do anything with it. There can be no question of a statue, of course, as, apart from anything else, we don’t have the necessary tools; but we should be able to do something else. You can carve things into a rock, for instance. There are white rocks that, with a bit of effort, you can scratch black or green lines on to if you use sharp enough stones.’