Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Now, to nip any criticism in the bud, while they might have been a bit on the airy-fairy side, the Nomads were not exponents of some brand of new romanticism, not at all. They knew very well that in many ways they were dilettantes, and that they had a hugely inflated idea of themselves and their own opinions. For all their enthusiasm and hyperbole they were not wanting in ironic objectivity. Alva might suddenly position herself in a gateway and declaim dramatically out of the darkness: ‘I seek the innermost core of the tree of life; what is it that holds the world together.’ They were all well aware that they often cited the wrong names, misunderstood theories and confused phenomena. The point was that that was okay. It was okay to come out with semi-digested, only partially understood ideas. It was okay to drop names they had only ever come across in footnotes. It was okay to refer to authors and tear their works to pieces or praise them to the skies, crudely and unsubtly, without ever having read them. It was okay to conduct a sort of intellectual Guinness Book of Records in which everything had to be the greatest or the least, the best or the worst, with no half-measures. There is a period in the life of every human being when that is how it is: impossible to believe that one can like both Mozart and Beethoven. It was as if every member of the Nomads knew that at some point in life it is necessary, absolutely essential, to be able to spout the most appallingly heretical, half-formed ideas without having to qualify anything. That it is important for one’s mental health. This phase of their lives, those nights roaming the city of Oslo, were not just one long and fruitful brainstorming session, they also constituted a kind of primal therapy, an opportunity to vent their frustrations, their aggression, their crazy notions. Above all else, it gave them a chance to play about with the most unlikely turtles, perhaps even discover one that was more viable than others.

There was only one spot that all of their various routes through the city took in, thereby living up to its name, ‘the Magnet’ in Akersgata: an establishment which, in its heyday, before the advent of the Nomads, had for many years been Oslo’s only all-night café. They had strict rules about who they let in, but thanks to Thomas, who worked a couple of evenings a week for a newspaper which had its offices in the same street, and to his amazing knack of making friends with the right people, they could flash the vital press cards that would open the Magnet’s doors to them in the middle of the night. And even though this bastion’s conscientious guardian, Fru Sommerstad, had a suspicion that something fishy was going on, she left them to drink their coffee in peace alongside the taxi drivers.

I am sure it will come as no surprise to anyone to hear that all of the Nomads, with the exception of Jonas, actually wanted to be something other than what they were studying to be. They wanted to write. Why this should have been was a mystery to Jonas. They wanted to be authors or playwrights, they wanted to write screenplays or poetry, and Thomas — how weird could you get? — wanted to be that most hair-raisingly bizarre of all animals, an essayist. He submitted long articles to the newspapers, on topics more quixotic than even Knut Hamsun’s young hero in Hunger could have dreamed up. All of which were — of course — roundly rejected by all and sundry.

Once inside the Magnet, they each took a seat at a separate table and proceeded to scribble like mad in their respective notebooks, the idea being that everyone should take them for reporters, fresh from doing some sensational nocturnal research and all set to make the scoop of their careers. They jotted down ideas that had come to them in between their discussions on the streets, thoughts generated by something one of the others had said, or by the graffiti on a statue, or quite simply churned out by brains that were running in top gear. And naturally, at that moment, sitting in the Magnet, scribbling down these thoughts as quickly as their pencils could shed their carbon particles, they honestly believed that what they were writing, at any rate after a wee bit of polishing, would cause the Milky Way to vibrate on its axis. They sat there with their fags between their lips, eyes narrowed, as if these notes they were making were of such brilliance that they were almost dazzled by them. Jonas knew that none of them would ever become novelists or writers of any description, but he never made fun of them, quite the opposite; he understood that these notebooks full of presumptuous, high-flying ideas would be worth their weight in gold at later and more disillusioned stages in their lives, that there would come a time when leafing through these little books would prove a more effective way of dulling their depression and world-weariness than all the medicines and pills in the world: to see, to have confirmed that they had once thought such thoughts, so grand, so outrageous, so extravagantly naïve and, above all: so insanely beautiful. Like turtles with gems affixed to their shells.

Jonas Wergeland made no notes. He already had a little book full of them, a golden sheaf of quotations. That was all he needed. That time, many years earlier, when Nefertiti and he were playing cowboys and Indians, and Nefertiti had ranged twenty-odd books side by side on the bookshelf and told him, gravely, that they were valuable, Jonas had automatically assumed that she was referring to their contents. When he was in eighth grade he had flicked through them and discovered that in each book there was one page with a corner turned down and a passage underlined. It was these passages which he had conscientiously jotted down in a little red notebook and in due course, after having them translated, had learned by heart. The quotation he had paraphrased during the Mozart versus Beethoven discussion he had found underlined at the end of — of all things — a totally unintelligible twenty-page article on ‘Diffusion’, complete with all sorts of formulae, written by none other than the physicist James Clerk Maxwell and reproduced in Volume II, a weighty tome in quarto format, of his collected scientific works; an unexpectedly crystal-clear passage which even Jonas could understand and employ — taking people by surprise, especially if he happened to divulge his source — in any number of situations.

Which reminds me that I have not said what Jonas Wergeland was studying, a piece of information which remained a well kept secret for a long time after he became famous; Jonas Wergeland was studying astronomy. Although that may not come as such a great surprise. Even as a boy, reading the following extract from the Kama Sutra , he had perceived the practical value of astronomy: ‘The lovers may also sit on the terrace of the palace or house, and enjoy the moonlight, and carry on an agreeable conversation. At this time, too, while the woman lies in his lap, with her face towards the moon, the citizen should show her the different planets, the morning star, the polar star, and the seven Rishis, or Great Bear.’ I mention this for the sake of any parents who might be under the misapprehension that reading the Kama Sutra would be bad for a child.

Jonas Wergeland himself claimed that he had been leafing through the university prospectus at random, as if the selection of a subject were something of a lottery, when under one course heading he had come upon the phrase ‘celestial mechanics’, and fell so completely for this term that he instantly plumped for the Institute of Theoretical Astro-Physics. Axel received a rather different version of the story: ‘I took all the subjects one by one and asked myself the following question: would I be happy to give this as my answer if I were sitting in a café and someone came up to me and asked what I was studying?’