Drift, Sigrid says out loud. She’s found the collection of Olav H. Hauge’s poems on the bookshelf and opened the book at the poem she’s marked by folding a corner of the page.
My life is drifting on the Arctic Ocean
My ship frozen in desolation.
Oh, that’s just how she feels! She’s twenty-three years old, and she’s already a boat that’s frozen in the ice. If this were a film, and she were some miserable, closed person, she thinks, something would happen at this point to pull her out of her reclusiveness. If she had braces and wore glasses, this would be the point where someone came along and taught her to wear contact lenses and makeup, and someone else would do her hair. If, at this point, she were a character who’d lived at home with her mother in a sixties-style flat all her life, something would happen to knock her existence out of orbit, her mother might die and she would have to take her odd, unfashionable self out into the world and go through all the changes that make a character interesting to follow on the silver screen. But that’s not reality! Sigrid wants to shout. People just stay sitting in their rooms. They sit there, and nothing happens. They don’t change, they just stay the same. Even if they’re only twenty-three years old! They look things up in books, they have photographs of Belgian literary theorists on their wall, and they sigh heavily when they read something that makes them see the closed life they lead for what it is: closed. Perhaps they buy another type of yogurt one day, but come to the conclusion that Fruits of the Forest is the best flavor after all, and so go back to buying Fruits of the Forest yogurt. If she were going to make a movie, Sigrid thinks, it would be exclusively about a girl who sat in her room, and about what happened to her there, what she thought about, and how she went over to the skylight and looked out at the twin spires of St. Mary’s Church and longed for something greater than life itself, which—alas—hadn’t arrived quite yet, and so far showed no sign at all of ever arriving.
* * *
Through me, she writes. Where did that come from? Through me, an oversized man’s shirt, they pass into eternal pain, these bare-legged women! Dante, of course, from the inscription on the gates of hell. Through me [they] pass into eternal pain. She finds Dante’s Divine Comedy and finds the place where she thinks the quote comes from.
* * *
And it is indeed from Canto 3, on page 95 of Sigmund Skard’s translation from 1965, published in paperback in 1994.