My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

There’s a poem by Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” which ends with the lines: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

grief is physical, an abuse of the living.

and most of all angry at death for having such good taste. Always taking the best first.

Not many people are blessed like that, with as many giggles and chuckles as he was in his final weeks, with the chance to feel that he stole more moments from death than death had from him.

Having a heart is heavy, far too heavy for some of us.

He stopped going out, his skin was too thin for fame, his lungs too small for the top of the world.

The artist’s bookcases were full of poets, like the bookcases of anyone trying to find out how everyone else copes.

He thinks of what Joar used to say: You know you’re old when you have to use soap on your head and shampoo on your ass.

They stare at each other, the thirty-nine-year-old and the eighteen-year-old, with funerals in their eyes.

When you get old, gravity pulls the corners of your mouth down, the road to a smile grows longer.

She smiles at that, strangely enough. She’s young, it’s still so easy for her, it doesn’t cost her body anything.

When you think about summers growing up, it feels like the sun was always shining, there’s never any wind or rain in nostalgia.

But there’s a difference between being loved and receiving love,”

Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.

“The geniuses. I only fall in love with the geniuses.” Louisa’s face lights up. “Fish was like that too!” Ted nods slowly and says: “That was why she loved you.”

and somehow it worked, because she was a genius idiot. That was why she got on so well with Joar, because he was an idiotic genius.

Louisa’s pencil scrapes sadly against the paper, like the sharpened blades of a pair of skates on fresh ice. Not drawing, but dancing.

“Little brat,” Ted grunts. “Miserable old man,” she grins.

“I think you’re like the drawing, you’re not ready yet. But one day I think you’re going to do something important. One day you’ll paint someone else’s postcard.”

“I could never have lived there without him. I would just have lain awake all night waiting for him to come home. I would have had to throw away all the eggs, because he was the only one who ate them, but I would have forgotten not to buy them. I would have forgotten that he didn’t exist, all the time. I would have gotten angry because the light in the bathroom was turned off, because I used to get so annoyed with him for always leaving it on. I would have saved all his shoes, all his shirts, and I would have been angry with the spring and hated flowers when they appeared because they drowned out the last smells of him. I would have always laid the table for two on the balcony. I would have had to eat all the popcorn myself. I would never have been able to pick a film.”

“I could never have lived there on my own. I would have frozen to death in that apartment without his eyes on me.”

But art doesn’t need critics, art has enough enemies already. Art needs friends.”

“One of my mom’s favorite painters was a man called Ragnar Sandberg,” he told the boy gently without taking his eyes off the wall. “Sandberg once said that art should be without purpose, and irresistible. You have to paint like the birds sing.”

His mom and dad never saw him hunched over his sketch pad with his pen darting across the paper. What a treasure to miss out on. They never understood how special it is to be abnormal.

If you told him to draw a house, he would draw how the house felt.

It doesn’t take any strength at all to crush someone’s self-confidence if you know where to stomp.

The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.

“You’re an artist if you create something! You’re an artist if you don’t see the world the way it is, if you hate white walls! No one else decides what art is, no one can stop you loving whatever you like, the cynics and critics can have control of all the other crap on the planet… but they can’t decide how hard your heart beats! Become whatever you want, but don’t become one of them. Art is a fragile enough light as it is. It can be blown out by a single sigh. Art needs friends, with our bodies against the wind and our hands cupped around the flame, until it’s strong enough to burn brightly with its own power. Until it’s an inferno. Unstoppable.”

when he didn’t know where he belonged she would tell the truth: art was his homeland. Hers too. That was how they survived reality.

she would quote Marcel Duchamp: “Art is completed by the viewer.”

Art is nothing for people with armor, you need a thin skin, but someone like that isn’t only sensitive to beauty, but to everything.

You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.

Then he quoted Ragnar Sandberg, whose words his mom had quoted to him throughout his childhood: “He paints like the birds sing.”

“I believed in God when I saw him paint,” Ted says

“He carried on painting those skulls, because then it felt like Christian was still alive in his fingertips. Perhaps it’s like that for you too. Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”

Here’s one: In ancient Greece there were two artists, Zeuxis and Parrhasius. They challenged each other to a contest to see who was best. Zeuxis painted a picture of some grapes, and it was so true to life that birds flew down from the sky to try to eat them. So he turned to Parrhasius, confident of victory, and said: ‘Now do you admit I’m the greatest artist?’ But Parrhasius just smiled and said: ‘Pull aside this curtain, my painting is behind it!’ So Zeuxis went over and took hold of the curtain, but he couldn’t, because the curtain was the painting. So Zeuxis had to admit he’d been beaten, because he had only fooled the birds, but Parrhasius had fooled Zeuxis.”

“Isn’t it like, totally unbelievable that we even exist? So it won’t be a tragedy when we don’t exist anymore! It’s just cool, really cool, that we happened at all.”

Ali was paddling alongside him with all the sympathy she could muster as she looked at him, then called out very, very seriously: “Sure. Have you got a coin?” That laugh? A tsunami.

In the bottom corner she has drawn some skulls and written: For Ted. I hope the birds sing for you.

The most dangerous creature on the planet is, and has always been, a young man. And the worst thing about a young man? That until very recently he was just a boy. No one gets any warning when he stops being one.

“It suits you, that laugh. I’m glad they didn’t manage to take it from you.” “Who?” “All the people who have tried.”

Throughout our entire existence we have been on the run, first from wild animals, then from each other.

“God belongs to you as much as to me. You can ask whatever you want.” Joar pursed his lips thoughtfully for a long, long time. Then he looked up at the roof, cleared his throat seriously, and said: “Okay. Can you stop giving people cancer, you fucking bastard?”

“One day you’ll be someone whose work sells for millions.” The boy squirmed uncomfortably and said down toward the floor: “You can keep it, if you like.” It was the first time someone other than his friends had said his art was worth anything. The first time an adult, apart from a janitor called Christian, had said what he drew was anything other than shameful and embarrassing. The minister held the drawing gratefully as the boy walked out of the church and disappeared into the rain with his friends. “What did the minister say?” Joar asked outside, and the artist told him the truth. So a moment later, the church door flew open again and Joar rushed back in and snatched the drawing out of the minister’s hands. The boy’s eyes looked apologetic, but all that came out of his mouth was: “Not if it’s worth MILLIONS!” Then he rushed out again, and the minister laughed and laughed and laughed. Perhaps God did too.

“How can there be enough room inside a person for something this beautiful?” the artist had whispered once when they were listening to Maria Callas.

“But there isn’t enough room. Art is what can’t fit inside a person. The things that bubble over,” Ted had said.

People say that anxiety is fear for no reason, but Ted’s brain is very helpful when it comes to providing suggestions.

The middle of summer vacation is a quite specific sort of sadness.

“Petrichor. That’s what it’s called. The smell of rain.

“Maybe we could hire Ali out as a singer? People could send her to someone they hate!” Joar had suggested.