Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

I am not so much of a fool that I cannot laugh at it now. Nonetheless, this phase in my life deserves to be described as it was: utterly serious and totally devoid of self-irony. I knew I did not have all the time in the world. Blame my impatience, if you will, on an exceptional teacher from my high school years, a man who may have been a notorious sceptic and atheist, but who, after a terrible disaster at sea in which he lost all of his closest family, became a deeply religious person — which is not to say that he became a sad, old misery guts on that score. He always wore a beret, like a painter. I often thought that he and my neighbour Karen Mohr would have made a good match. ‘Teaching is the greatest of all the arts,’ he said. During those years I did not go to school, I sat at the feet of a guru. ‘Use your head today, tomorrow it may be too late,’ he said in every second class. ‘Right now, you have no preconceived opinions. And only now, for all too short a time, do you have the necessary measure of naivety.’ According to our astute schoolmaster, no one had an original thought after they turned twenty-five. By then one was set. Almost all significant discoveries, particularly within science, were made by relatively young people. Just look at Newton!

All at once the Project was tantalisingly clear to me. I would discover a new way of thinking, a way which lay dormant within us. I would break down the bars behind which human cognition had been confined by the existing categories. I have to restrain myself here — I can see that the more I say, the more overheated and nebulous and crazy it will sound. Let me put it this way: it was a task worthy of Atlas himself, it was an attempt to lift something colossal, to form the basis for a higher heaven. And yet to me it seemed an imperative and manifestly rational task.

Looking back on it, it is easy to see what I was fighting against: Melvil Dewey’s classification system. Because even though it was only a tool for organising books in a library, to me it was the crowning example of a mode of thought which had paralyzed our potential for evolving as human beings. Ever since my visit to Deichman’s Potala Palace with Karen Mohr, clad in sober grey, I had been unhappy about Melvil Dewey’s method of arranging a large collection of books. His system, with its ten main classes had cemented notions of the importance of the different branches of knowledge and of the relationship between them. I was reminded of my own bafflement and lack of vision that time when Granny dragged out all those small boxes full of crystal droplets. Who would ever have thought that together they would form a glittering chandelier?

Dewey’s system belonged, moreover, to another world, not to a life in which people’s thoughts and ideas were forever changing, in which fields of knowledge expanded in the same way as the universe did. I never forgot the class — a Norwegian class, at that, earmarked for a review of adverbial clauses — in which our unconventional junior-high teacher told us about the explosion of life forms traceable in the Cambrian system. I had a strong sense of living in a new and revolutionary Cambria, in an epoch when everything was gathering speed, when new scientific discoveries were piling up all around us. Dewey’s system was based on a simple, single-celled form of life, so to speak. But now new hybrids were bursting forth, fabulous unguessed-at branches of learning.

What interested me, more than the libraries and the classification system as such, was the organisation of human knowledge. I wanted to promote a different understanding of the collective power of all the arts and sciences; I meant to draw up a new map, on a new projection, with different names for all the regions; I wished to create a springboard for unforeseen discoveries. In glimpses I saw, with a shudder of apprehension almost, the Project’s aim: a new unity. New connections between the various parts of the whole. The chance of a new kind of dialogue. If mankind was to unfold, then our knowledge would also have to be unfolded. Maybe Project X was born on that day in my childhood when I unwrapped a beautiful map of the world from what everybody thought was a filthy, crumpled wad of cloth.

This task instinctively appealed to me. It was all about depth. I wanted to be a person who worked in depth. I often thought of another of the many keen assertions made by our master in junior high: no one now had the energy to care about the big picture, he said, standing in front of a blackboard covered in circles and dotted lines. Any expert today who claimed to know more than one per mil of the existing knowledge in his field was bluffing. And if you were not even anywhere close to knowing your own discipline, how were you supposed to understand the relationship between your subject and other subjects? The sciences in our day were incapable of communicating with one another, our teacher said. And this was catastrophic. Most fruitful theories sprang from the wedding of two ideas from two unrelated fields. He was right. At my best moments I felt a kinship with Thor Heyerdahl.

My life has been a balancing act between the hope of being a wonder, and the fear that I was a fool. I remember how sometimes in maths tests I could juggle quite brilliantly with abstract quantities, while at others I could make the most unforgivably stupid mistakes, could hardly add two and two together.

I once asked Margrete why she had kept those four butterflies, the ones she had caught as a child, hanging in a frame on the wall. ‘I like butterflies,’ she said. ‘And I’m interested in them from a medical point of view, too. They have the most amazing immune system. It has us stumped. We can inject them with cholera or typhus bacteria. But they don’t get sick.’ I tended to think of Margrete in much the same way. She was a doctor, there was no way she could ever get sick.

Luckily, my choice of life project went well with a need for concealment which had not lessened with the years. As an astrophysics student I had access to the big reading room on the top floor of the Physics Building, a lofty, bright, square room. Here, in the yeasty atmosphere generated by the deep concentration of countless students, I could wrestle with my Atlas project, well-hidden, but at the same time situated on a vital axis. Beneath me lay the entrance to the campus, a portal through which thousands passed every day. And from the terrace outside the reading room I could drink in the inspiring view of the city and the fjord.

This was the most unsociable, most reclusive phase of my life. And possibly the only time when I actually did some hard work. I can shake my head at it now, but I cannot deny that I was very content. I had a tiny flat in Hegdehaugsveien, but spent most of my time in the reading room surrounded, for appearances’ sake, by astrophysics textbooks, while reading other works entirely and jotting down, or occasionally sketching out, thoughts and ideas on sheets of paper which gradually grew into a pile as bulky and fanciful as an old Family Bible.

My frame of reference was the Dewey Decimal System, and in order to know what exactly I was protesting against and wished to improve upon I learned the names of the ten main classes, the hundred subdivisions and the thousands of sections or subjects by heart. I can still remember a lot of them, 786: Keyboard Instruments, 787: Stringed Instruments, 788: Wind Instruments. Or 597: Fish, 598: Birds, 599: Mammals. To begin with, I put a lot of effort into tossing these topics around in my head, to see if they might fall into other constellations, with other names. Since, on paper, I was studying astronomy I thought of the stars, thought to myself that this was like drawing new lines between those points of light, creating different signs from those which had been employed ever since the days of the Ancient Greeks. Why 295: Zoroastrianism, 296: Judaism, 297: Islam? Why not invent a new group in which string instruments, birds and Zoroastrianism were put together.