I took out my writing materials to try to write something, but write I could not. The sound of music was borne up on the wind to me from the Students’ Allée. But when God had touched me with His finger, He let me be, and touched me no more, and let no evil befall me but let me depart in peace, and let me depart with the gaping hole. And there was a gaping hole after the finger, which was God’s finger, and a wound in my brain in the track of His finger. And then the Lord withdrew His finger, and there were fibres and delicate root-like filaments adhering to the finger, and they were the nerve-threads of the filaments. Wherefore should I sorrow for what I eat, for what I drink, or for what I may array this miserable food for worms called my earthy body? Hath not my Heavenly Father provided for me, even as for the sparrow on the housetop, and hath He not in His graciousness pointed towards His lowly servitor? The Lord stuck His finger in the net of my nerves gently-yea, verily, in desultory fashion-and brought slight disorder among the threads.

The rhythmical sound of Biblical language sang in my ears, and I talked quite softly to myself, and held my head sneeringly askew. A swarm of tiny noxious animals had bored a way into my inner man and hollowed me out.įragments of the teachings of my childhood ran through my memory.

I had become, as it were, too languid to control or lead myself whither I would go. A dog that dashed by me, a yellow rose in a man’s buttonhole, had the power to set my thoughts vibrating and occupy me for a length of time. I could not sit down on a bench by myself or set my foot any place without being assailed by insignificant accidents, miserable details, that forced their way into my imagination and scattered my powers to all the four winds. Why had the last months pressed so strangely hard on me? I failed to recognize my own happy temperament, and I met with the most singular annoyances from all quarters. How gaily and lightly these people I met carried their radiant heads, and swung themselves through life as through a ball-room! And I, walking in the very midst of these people, young and newly-fledged as I was, had already forgotten the very look of happiness. I wandered up Castle Hill and fell into a reverie. I stuck my elbows closely to my sides, tried to make myself look small, and slipped unperceived past some acquaintances who had taken up their stand at the corner of University Street to gaze at the passers-by. Bowing and laughing folk walked up and down Carl Johann Street. The whole town began to get on its legs as it approached the fashionable hour for promenading. The sun stood in the south it was about twelve.

Hunger by knut hamsun