Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Høeg

There is nothing as disarming as a sympathetic response.

I like him. I have a weakness for losers. Invalids, foreigners, the fat boy of the class, the ones nobody ever wants to dance with. My heart beats for them. Maybe because I’ve always known that in some way I will forever be one of them.

There’s a widespread notion that children are open, that the truth about their inner selves just seeps out of them. That’s all wrong. No one is more covert than a child, and no one has a greater need to be that way. It’s a response to a world that’s always using a can opener to open them up to see what’s inside, wondering whether it ought to be replaced with a more useful sort of preserves.

“If you’re hunting shy animals, like reindeer, you let them catch sight of you a few times on purpose. You stand up and wave the butt of your rifle. In all living creatures, fear and curiosity are closely related in the brain. The deer comes closer. It knows that it’s dangerous. But it has to come and see what’s moving like that.”

There’s relatively little that words can do for grief. Words can do relatively little about anything. But what else do we have?

If you have to wait for a long time, you have to seize hold of the waiting or it will become destructive. If you let things slide, your consciousness will waver, awakening fear and restlessness; depression strikes, and you’re pulled down.