By then many years had passed, and Singer had turned twenty-eight, and you might well say that with his writing he had both walked a long road and gone far. He had learned from his own interior efforts to rely on a cliché, and he’d done so simply because he liked the wording. He had also managed to unite it with something else he’d come to love, meaning he had linked the memorable sight with a fall. It’s true that he still thought “it knocked him flat” was a temporary solution, but by working more on the phrase, he might be able to find a linguistically viable expression for this. It all depended on what constituted the “memorable sight.” Oh, if only he knew. From the age of twenty he’d been trying to find out what the memorable sight might be. The first time it occurred, he wrote: “The sun flowed across Byg­land Fjord.” This sentence had simply come to him, and he wondered why, since he’d never been to Byg­land Fjord or to the Setesdal region in southern Norway. But that’s what he wrote, and he thought it was lovely. “One fine day he stood eye to eye with a memorable sight. The sun flowed across Byg­land Fjord.” As you can see, this was written at an early point in Singer’s youthful literary brooding, because he hadn’t yet become skeptical about “eye to eye.” He was surprised by this sentence, because it spoke of something he hadn’t personally seen. But was that what made it a memorable sight? He doubted it. The memorable sight had to constitute something beyond the fact that he’d felt surprised by his own sentence. So he gave up. He couldn’t ignore the fact that the memorable sight might be a landscape, even a landscape that he hadn’t personally seen, but it could not be sunshine flowing over Byg­land Fjord, because even though he assumed that would be a beautiful sight, he couldn’t call it that, at least not when a memorable sight had to be such that it justified him spending his young life obeying something he regarded as his secret calling.

  So he tried to find it in something else. For long periods he tried to describe a leaf on a tree. He tried to describe the way the leaf trembled, that infinitesimal moment when the wind touched the leaf and rushed through it. But he couldn’t do it. Autumn came and he kept trying to describe that leaf, which had now turned reddish-brown and was slightly stiff, though in the morning, and even far into the afternoon, it was wet with dew, shining through the stiffness, but he still couldn’t do it. If he’d been able to, it would have been a memorable sight, of that he had no doubt during the year in which he tried to describe the leaf, not knowing back then that few people, if any, had ever managed to describe a leaf on a tree.

  “One fine day he stood eye to eye with a memorable sight. The sun flowed across Byg­land Fjord.” “One fine day he stood eye to eye with a memorable sight. A leaf. On a tree. The wind moving through it.” Was this his entry into what would become his calling? It wasn’t. He rejected both possibilities: “The sun flowed across Byg­land Fjord,” because he didn’t know how to go on, and because, when it came right down to it, the image — the sunrise over a body of water in Setesdal — didn’t engage him enough; his fascination with this phrase was primarily based on his surprise that he’d been able to write about a sunrise in a place he’d never visited, nor did he have any intention of visiting it. And “A leaf. On a tree. The wind moving through it,” because he wasn’t able to describe a leaf the way he’d seen the leaf.

  But he didn’t give up. It wasn’t that he sat day after day with that sentence in front of him, pondering what the memorable sight could be, when he really should have been studying. It was only sporadically that this matter occupied his time, and even then he didn’t go back to this sentence but instead fantasized freely about all sorts of things, depending on what sort of impression he’d had on the previous occasion. But in hindsight it’s still accurate to say that at the core of all his writing plans was this sentence, with the idea about a memorable sight. For example, for a period of time he was preoccupied with the notion of a person floating above, of floating above freely, because the very image gave him a strange feeling of freedom, and so it seemed only natural to link the idea of a person floating, a person flying, to the idea of a memorable sight. But memorable for whom? For him, who stood eye to eye with the memorable sight? Sure, but then who was it he saw flying through the air? Another person? But who? The Other? No, not the Other, himself. It was Singer flying. But then who was the “he” standing eye to eye with this memorable sight, which was Singer flying freely high up in the air? The Other? No, that wouldn’t work. Singer couldn’t write “One fine day he stood eye to eye with a memorable sight,” and by that mean that it was the Other, this person seeing the one who was writing — Singer — who happened to be flying. That didn’t sit well with him, it was arrogant, and he refused to accept such arrogance. And so the feeling of freedom evoked by the freely floating Singer, high up in the air, preferably over the rooftops of the city, had to be dropped. That was not the way he needed to proceed, if it was true that he had a calling to obey. The fact that Singer flew was not a memorable sight for “him”; it was only a feeling of freedom for Singer himself, while at the same time cutting off Singer from a personal and profound contact with this “he” that he was describing, the one who saw the memorable sight, and in his most basic stance, meaning “eye to eye.”

  But this young man who was so fixated on a memorable sight and consequently brooded his way to the fact that the sight of himself flying was not memorable, but merely an intoxicating feeling of freedom that made him uneasy the moment he linked it to a memorable sight, this young man was first and foremost a student, even in danger of being considered an eternal student, at the time that the thought of the free-floating Singer above the city’s rooftops popped into his consciousness to amuse him. He defined himself as a student, he was enrolled as a student, and he always wrote “student” in the space allotted for profession on official documents or applications. Proofreader for Dagbladet, sales clerk in the state liquor store, and desk clerk at the Gyldenløve Hotel — these were all jobs he took to finance his studies and not his dreams of becoming a writer. It’s true that writing was potentially his secret calling, but even to himself he had to admit that it was a hobby, or even a daydream. Anything else would have been irresponsible, because he didn’t devote all that much time to it. It was mostly daydreaming. Suddenly a literary image might occur to him that possibly corresponded to his promising original sentence, “One fine day he stood eye to eye with a memorable sight.” Then he would close his eyes and dream about the image, or the scene. For example, the sight of a flying fish. Not a specimen belonging to the genus of flying fish, but a fish that flew, a flying cod or halibut. Like a streak through the air, in the form of a solid fish. A flying cod or halibut, its tail flapping, its mouth shut.

  Singer, closing his eyes, pictures this. Then an owl standing on the ground suddenly takes off, ascends, erect and impassive as it rises, until it reaches the same level as the flying cod or halibut, and there it stops. The owl and the flying fish. Singer closes his eyes and smiles blissfully; this is a daydream. He is lying on the couch in his condemned room in Homansbyen, with sounds from the cars on Josefinsgate, cars braking at the stoplight on Bogstadveien, resounding like a violent roar close to his ears as he lies here, soon to be thirty, immersed in his blissful daydream. This is Singer immersed in his secret calling, which is first and foremost a daydream.

  It didn’t become a hobby until he got up from the couch and picked up the pen and tried to scribble these images on the page, using his ballpoint pen. When he tried to describe how the owl lifted off — how it took off from its owl toes and rose upward, slowly, with its heavy body and its weighty head, until it reached the impassive, horizontally flying cod (or halibut) — he struggled with the words, struggled to describe that elegant movement upward, which halted at the height of the solid fish, in horizontal position, resting in a flying position up in the air, its tail flapping; he struggled to describe both of these movements, the upward motion of the owl and the horizontal motion of the fish, up until the moment when the movement stopped, happily released. He never succeeded, but occasionally he was on the right track; he thought he’d almost pulled it off, at least so much so that he could begin: “One fine day he stood eye to eye with a memorable sight.” One fine day? Eye to eye? Stood? Yes, stood. Yes, one fine day, it was a fine day. But eye to eye. Eye to eye with the eyes of the owl? Eye to eye with the fish eye of the cod? No, that didn’t work. Singer glanced at the clock. It was time to leave for his night shift at the Gyldenløve Hotel.

  We see here that an upward-rising owl and a horizontally floating fish have taken over the spot where Singer previously, in an unwarranted moment, had positioned himself, with an intoxicating feeling of freedom. In general, it was striking how often animal figures appeared in Singer’s daydreams when he lay stretched out on the couch in his condemned room in Homansbyen, and in other rooms that he rented, and when he closed his eyes. And they were often deformed shapes, such as when he saw a man holding a severed sheep’s head in one hand, and in the background a stiff sheep’s body, with no head but still covered in wool. This is all the more striking because Singer was never particularly interested in animals, except for the fact that he worked two evenings a week as a totalizer at the Bjerke Racetrack. But these must have been archaic images that appeared inside the head of the eternal student, images conjured partly from his own nocturnal dreams, partly from his meticulous reading of world literature, and from encounters with world-famous art; barking dogs from his own dreams, or cat teeth and severed cat heads, stuffed in a sack, and a man fleeing with this sack flung over his back, which must have appeared as strata in his consciousness, based on the reading, or staring, he’d done. By the way, the severed cat heads were sewn into the sack, and the fleeing man was a naked figure trying to disappear with the sack over his back, when Singer sat down at the table and attempted to write down these imaginings, or daydreams. But the scene tried too hard to be a memorable sight, it was more of a horrible sight, and he thought maybe he ought to change the whole idea to “One fine day he stood eye to eye with a horrible sight.” But he rejected this notion at once. Only if the horrible sight turned out to be synonymous with the memorable sight would he be able to use it as the goal he was seeking, as his true calling, as he set off, without purpose, as a young man, and merrily squandered what others regarded as his richest years. He was able, in quite a composed manner, to deal with these horrible animal images by meticulously trying to interpret them in the context of his as yet blank conception of a memorable sight. In that connection he was surprised that so many of these images took place on a beach, at the shoreline. Possibly in order to combine fish and animals, especially beasts of prey. But there were also fish and sheep. In one version of the severed sheep’s head, a man was holding a sheep’s head in one hand and a fish’s head in the other. Blood dripped from both the sheep’s head and the fish’s head, sheep blood, fish blood. This took place on a beach, and naturally Singer was there too, even though sheep and beaches aren’t the first things that come to mind as belonging together. But one day he found the answer to this, and joy coursed through his body. It was because of the sky. At the beach the sky is vast and wide. And since the image of the flying Singer had been repudiated and discarded, he was left with a big, empty, wide sky. And he couldn’t get enough of it.

  He might find himself out in nature, for example on a beach, or on a city street, or occasionally on the balcony of an apartment building on a city street, with the sky overhead, in all its nuances; or he might find himself on the couch in his room in a condemned building in Homansbyen, closing his eyes and picturing the sky; then picturing this expansive sight, he found himself on a beach, and quite frequently the sky would take on a uniform color in his inner eye, a series of gray nuances, and the act of staring into this sky-wide sea of gray nuances made a captivating impression on him, and he could lie like that and look at it for long periods of time, often instead of getting up and going over to the university to study. He would often allow other tones of color into the grayness, for example something yellowish that was practically spun from grayishness, a long, wooly yellowishness on his internal sky; or he might see black suddenly appear in the sky, this too excreted from the gray, a steadily darkening gray, an infinity of gray nuances approaching the black, until the black appeared, as black, absolute black, in the sky, portending a thunderstorm inside him. Lightning. Rain. And now rain was pounding against the warm asphalt in the city street while he was inside, in a building, lying on a couch in a drafty room, where all the sounds, including the sound of rain drumming against the warm asphalt, penetrated with such intensity.

  Singer would soon turn thirty-one, and he was a student. At this time he focused on the sky, the empty sky, which was such an enchanting sight that he lay on the couch, looking at it with closed eyes instead of going to the university to study for his next exam in comparative literature. And that was how Singer’s writing career ended, with this image of the sky on his retina, in that room. A room in Homansbyen. He lay there daydreaming instead of going to the university to study. He was a worthless bum at the age of thirty-one. Things couldn’t continue this way. It’s true that he was a punctual and conscientious sales clerk in the state liquor store, but as a student he was a worthless bum, and his role was as a student, both in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. So he gave it up. He decided to say goodbye to the intoxicating days of his youth and become a librarian instead.

  In what has been presented here as Singer’s failed dreams of becoming a writer, there may seem to be quite a few inconsistencies. Sometimes Singer’s preoccupation with becoming an author is described as his secret calling, something along the lines of his true calling, while in other places it seems more like some sort of hazy idea, a castle in the air that occasionally made him sit down and scribble a few lines on paper, although he never really took it very seriously. Most likely it’s right to point out this discrepancy, but then allow it to remain a discrepancy. During certain periods Singer undoubtedly took his calling very seriously, suffering great despair when he didn’t succeed; while at other times he viewed writing as a hobby that didn’t preoccupy him much, except for providing him with the joys of a daydream. On the whole it might also be said that some development did occur, during his twenties when he took his writing most seriously, but when his twenties were ending, he viewed it as more of a hobby. His writing dreams from the earliest, most intense period were also of a personal nature, a sort of yearning that he tried to link to his basic worldview (which he never gave up, daydream or not). This might involve portrayals of love, which expressed his hunger for love: bride and groom portraits, with himself brazenly playing the role of the groom. These were images that might well be enchanting but in no way could be linked to a “memorable sight” — that was his own opinion, offered without objection. But was he right? Couldn’t a bride-and-groom portrayal, with the twenty-four-year-old Singer as the groom, have been a memorable sight, if not for Singer himself, then at least for the “he” who saw it, and who was writing these lines? It seemed to him, the person writing this, that there might be some exultation to be found, whether or not this was actually a memorable sight, and not merely an enchanting or a noteworthy one.

  So Singer tried, with great seriousness, to link the revocation of his fundamental aloneness (which rests over every young man like a curse) with his own incomplete ambitions to “one fine day stand eye to eye with a memorable sight.” Written in this way, by Singer (age twenty-two): “One fine day he stood eye to eye with a memorable sight. Why does the child sleep alone, in his own room, closed in? So as to become hardened in his yearning for the Other?” Or when he realized, at the age of twenty-three, in a sudden outburst: “How we count the seconds and minutes when we are in the splendor of youth! And how slowly time passes then. How we glance at the clock with a start, out of boredom!” Enticing assertions like the following occurred to him: “He didn’t notice that time was passing.” Was this an entry to the memorable sight? “One fine day he was overwhelmed by a memorable sight. He didn’t notice that time was passing.” But Singer’s writing career ended when he fantasized about the nuance-filled, yet empty, sky. On a couch, as a thirty-one-year-old worthless bum, although with a blissful smile on his face. In that sense you might easily perceive some sort of development occurring within him, in that Singer’s writing career, or secret calling, ended of its own accord. Yet you would then have to add — and it’s in this addition that the image of Singer as a young man emerges most clearly — that he also, as a twenty-one-year-old, had periods when he took a lighter view of this hobby of his, and didn’t consider it to be a significant part of his life, but rather a way of passing time, on par with all the other pastimes in his life that he enjoyed, especially because they prompted all sorts of delightful daydream images to appear before him in a glow of indolence; on the other hand, even when well past thirty, he had periods when he wept with despair at not being able to make a go of it, and he loudly lamented to himself that he’d taken too lightly that which, in such despairing moments, he didn’t hesitate naively to label — even though it might seem pompous — his potential calling. So it was with no small amount of relief that he eventually gave up his purposeless life as a young man and, somewhat belatedly, sought the goal-oriented training to become a librarian. And with that his youthful dream of being an author ended.

  After three years he had completed his training as a librarian. He applied for a number of positions, at random, and took the first and best offer he received. It was a job with the Not­odden library. And so, on the last day of July in 1983, he was at the Vestbane station in Oslo, about to take a train on the Sørlandet Line to Hjuksebø, and then change trains to Not­odden. He was thirty-four years old and about to begin a new life. With neither sorrow nor disappointment at the fact that he was who he was, but also with no particular joy. He set off on a new life. Actually, he felt relieved as he got on the train, relieved that, in spite of everything, things had gone well so far. Now he was on his way to Not­odden, and there he would go into hiding; even though he’d never been there before, he was looking forward to living an anonymous and routine-driven life in Not­odden.