The Summer Book

by Tove Jansson

Grandmother walked up over the bare granite and thought about birds in general. It seemed to her no other creature had the same dramatic capacity to underline and perfect events—the shifts in the seasons and the weather, the changes that run through people themselves.

If you turned it off—which was easy to do—and listened only to the insects, you could hear thousands of millions of them, and they filled the whole world with rising and falling waves of ecstasy and summer.

You can see for yourself that life is hard enough without being punished for it afterwards. We get comfort when we die, that’s the whole idea.”