Professor Andersen's Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

to each other by such strong ties that, for instance, Professor Andersen, who wasn’t a close friend of either Per Ekeberg or Trine Napstad, knew both of them from the university at Blindern in the Sixties, and that at a time when Per Ekeberg and Trine Napstad hadn’t the foggiest notion of each other’s existence, though she, Trine Napstad, easily remembered Per Ekeberg’s first wife, who had been a childhood friend of Nina Halvorsen, at the time when her name was Nina Hellberg, which was still her name when Trine Napstad came to know her. Thus one could look back to the early Sixties, and the random, but strong and active, ties created at the university, where all of them had studied (apart from Judith Berg, who was at the time unattainable, an Air Hostess), and each in some way had become a radical student. None of them, apart from Jan Brynhildsen, had ever ended up on the far left, the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, the Maoists, in the legendary – or notorious, if you prefer – Marxist-Leninist Workers Front known as AKP (M-L); they were, in fact, slightly too old for the likes of that, and too set in their ways when it came to the fore, but they had been anti-NATO and voted against the Common Market, relatively early in the Sixties, and early in the Seventies, and Per Ekeberg had demonstrated against apartheid at Madserud during a tennis tournament between Norway and South Africa, and had been carted off by the police, and Nina and Bernt had been anti-nuclear demonstrators and worn Ban the Bomb buttons on their duffle coats. The nuclear badge, as Andersen, still an undergraduate, had called it, alluding to the swimming badge so popular in their schooldays. ‘I see you’ve earned your nuclear badge,’ he would say, but neither Nina nor Bernt had laughed, for some things were too serious to make jokes about, and thus he had been left standing there with his silly joke, feeling silly himself as well when the others didn’t laugh, for he was radical, too, in his way. However, as an undergraduate, Andersen’s radicalism was mainly expressed through his interest in and his support of people who attacked either in speech or in writing the empirical school of thought, which was then the prevailing approach within philosophy and the social sciences, not to mention his preoccupation with all kinds of avant-garde trends in art and literature.
    While Bernt Halvorsen was deeply preoccupied with the armaments race and the Cold War and was keen to take action, as an undergraduate Pål Andersen sat at home in his bedsit reading strange poems, which he had great difficulty interpreting. Was this his form of political radicalism, which linked him to the same life nerve that surged through Bernt Halvorsen with such unbending seriousness? Indeed, his preoccupation with avant-garde French and Polish films, modern literature and abstract paintings was an attempt, a desperate one at times, to enter the same period to which Bernt Halvorsen already belonged, and which he could defend from the inside with such accuracy. He was zealous in his efforts to understand avant-garde art, that form of art which has really taken hold of our own day and age. He often felt that he had failed to understand it, indeed, more often than he would admit, it left him in a state of incomprehension, confusion, indifference, even after he had used all his astuteness to understand only a snippet of it. It could make him feel desperate. He felt a failure because he didn’t understand the art of his own period, and it can’t be denied that in such situations he often pretended to understand more than he actually understood, and even feigned an admiration for works of art which, in actual fact, left him unmoved. But on the other hand, what pleasure he could experience if, after a long struggle with, for instance, a modernist poem, he suddenly understood it! He had, for that matter, felt the greatest joy when he understood intuitively, directly. Why? Because