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Rating: He did everything to seem stupid: perhaps he thought that this way no one would bother him anymore with fetching the stick, giving a paw, catching tennis balls in the air, and other nonsense. He was born old, and he mostly liked lying in the sun, sleeping, venting for 3-4 days a year, and little else. However, he miscalculated; my brother and I wore him out, and when he left, he gave us a look as if to say, “fuck you bastards, now I'm going to sleep for real”. Ultimately, he was good and docile, yet that son of a bitch even bit me. Me, not taller than a handful of years, watching the blood spurt happily while forcefully stroking his furry butt with my left foot.
For an animal, food is the ultimate purpose of its existence. That then our domestic dogs get it heated, wrapped in branded cans, and even placed in a clean bowl is secondary. A dog doesn't bother with philosophical musings. Not mine, at least. And if a child tenderly strokes him; well, he might be the most gentle, docile, cute quadruped...
The ultimate goal of a people is somewhat more noble and higher and is called freedom. Its importance becomes fully evident only when it is lacking, and the more abrupt and sharp the deprivation is, the stronger the ensuing reaction will be. War.
Initially, it seemed like quite a beautiful picture. A country where, once the guns were silenced, living and starting a family with a big farm to tend wouldn't be so bad. That’s what a couple of officers think in the middle of the Second World War after taking possession of the village with only a few minor skirmishes that cost 6 lives for those who tried, dared, a futile resistance. Formidable machine guns, those that are now cooling down.
In an undefined polar Norway, there are now two authorities. The Nazi colonel and the mayor. The first asks the second for cooperation to maintain order. The officer has already experienced this situation twenty years prior, and the memory he has makes him uneasy: even then there was snow, and the retreat had been frantic. Colored red. The silent anger of tough, bitter people waiting for a misstep, an opportunity, seems closer and more pressing on him. This state of affairs consumes him. The manual doesn’t provide useful instructions in this regard. The first signs of revolt must be repressed in blood; so it is written. And every delay in coal collection operations, every sign of dissent or sabotage now makes the rifles sound daily. They echo to the fjords, shatter bones, scratch and dirty walls, but the result is only to throw seasoned wood on a flame now lively and sufficiently blue. It seems impossible that they do not understand something so simple. A child blowing on a newborn fire that greedily feeds on air.
In those intense dialogues between colonel and mayor, in these few and compact pages of rare strength, the entire essence of war is captured for a hard book. If it were wood, it would be centuries-old olive. And all those knots that make it practically immune to time are nothing but Steinbeck's dry and terse style. A linear and rhetoric-free writing, just ideal while I watch, from one page to the next, the first snow of this long winter falling.
The Moon Is Down.
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