Norwegian by Night (Sigrid Ødegård #1)

by Derek B. Miller

“It’s all artifice,” he’d said with uncharacteristic seriousness. “You mean it’s all meaningless?” “No,” he said, “I don’t mean that at all.” He paused for a long time before he spoke again. Her father was not an affected man and did not indulge in dramatic pauses. Rather, he was motivated to be precise. And sometimes, he said, that requires time to collect one’s thoughts. If people are impatient, and walk off in the meantime, then clearly they are not interested in the answer. “What I mean,” he’d continued, “is that the buildings, the desks, the great structures are all products of ideas. So it isn’t the buildings that matter. It is the ideas. But because the buildings are shiny and expensive, and the ideas are more elusive, we tend to become dazzled by the buildings—that is, the artifice. In fact, they distract us from the ideas that fill them. People stand on the steps of great buildings and feel awe before they enter. Why? The ideas don’t know where they are being expressed. When I read history, I don’t read about the great buildings; I read about the ideas of empires. They all asked similar questions, but came to different answers. It is a fact that when we compare worlds, those worlds are different. “The interesting bit is this. For those worlds to hold together, the ideas must be shared. So I like to look to the ideas that are being shared. Who is involved? What are they thinking? What do these ideas make possible? What, for them, is obvious, and what is impossible ...