[David Mason]

Friends, I'm pasting in a letter from a new friend who lives in Norway. I thought the remarks about grief and poetry would be of interest here. I've posted it with the friend's permission but have taken the precaution of removing his name and address.


26 July 2011



This is a letter I am sending to many friends – some of you often get letters from us, others hardly ever do. But you’re all receiving the same thing. There are times when one wants to talk to those one knows – in fact, when one should talk to them. Recent events have underlined this. Talking. Holding. How good it is to hold someone, even if it’s just a handshake, and how comforting it is to talk! This is true for us on the periphery of something desperate that happens, and even more true for those in the vortex.

As you know we are struggling here to come to terms with the recent atrocities in Norway. I need not repeat what happened and the dreadful consequences – the media have given it saturation treatment. We must work through what happened, and inevitably dwell on the fact that the perpetrator is a homegrown fair-haired Caucasian Norwegian, when all expectations in the immediate shock after the bomb explosion were something very different. (Fortunately no leaders here speculated in who lay behind the terror until some facts emerged.) This man is obviously completely nuts with his stupid ideas about multiculturalism, his dotty belief in the magic of numbers and his utterly fiendish ideas about the use of violence combined with his devilish willingness to put these ideas into practice. Apparently he still believes what he did was justified. A sort of wickedness we hoped was extinct. The events on the island were horrifying. This man spent over an hour walking round shooting young people, and any adults in his way (and some of them tried to stop him, but none of them was armed), almost as if it were sport.

Young people who should have years of life ahead of them with thousands and thousands of experiences…

No one we knew personally was killed or injured. Our friend Pete was working quite near the bomb blast (it was apparently a massive bomb) by an open window but luckily for him no glass got broken - a lot of horrible injuries were caused by flying glass. Our children? They all live in Oslo. Christina was out of town but was concerned about her flat's windows but they were OK. Thomas and family were out of town. Anne was in Oslo but some way from the centre. (The friend she visited last week in Paris was on a language course but normally on a Friday would have been working as a receptionist in the foyer of the government building that was the main target of the bomb - this shows how near one can be to a tragedy.)

We were in Oslo on Saturday and there was a very subdued mood - in fact there has been the last few days. We walked to the police-tape that limited access to the central area, and saw the edges of the damage to buildings. This gave us an inkling of the destruction. I’m afraid they haven’t excluded the possibility that there might still be the remains of people in some of the shattered rooms near the blast. In the memorial service in Oslo Cathedral on Sunday the king wept. So did hundreds of others.

In times like this we have to turn to one another. You have probably seen on television how Norwegians have done this, political, generational, social and ethnic differences have melted away in a common sense of outrage and grief. It is a cliché to say that this is a small country, but at a time like this it is true, actually. Everyone knows someone who in some way is affected directly.

At a time like this people look to their national figureheads (here, the royal family and the government), their deepest faith (often religious faith, but it could also be a faith in the healing powers of nature), and to words and to music. Poetry is quoted. Music is sung and played and listened to. We seek things that endure and that are rooted in some sort of deep consciousness. (While I write this I am listening to Mahler’s 9th symphony from the Proms last night, the last movement now, “dissolving away into silence” says the announcer now, after the music fades away…) The superficial crust of our lives – the games and consumerism and trivial entertainments etc. etc. – collapses. Oh, it’ll all come back, but I wonder if the mayor of Oslo was right last night when he said that there may well be a permanent change in the way people treat each other – less bullying in the school playground, for example. I think he may be.

A quiet walk, a quiet read, can help. I re-read Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour” from his and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. This poem has an elegiac and mesmerizing calm and sanity that is irresistible, to me at least. I find the Romantic poets have this quality. Keats, for example. So do many modern poets, those who resist the temptation to twist and turn into impenetrable obscurity. (I have recently discovered an American poet who very strongly helps me “see into the life of things” to use Wordsworth’s phrase from the poem I mentioned.) Songs often do the same. It is no coincidence that last night’s gathering in Oslo, where well over 100,000 people took to the streets to assemble outside the City Hall, ended with songs. As one of the speakers said, it was paradoxical that an outrage of this scale can produce so much good.

But at what a cost.

Love to you all. Some of you have written to us – many thanks. Much appreciated.