The Funeral by Halldor Laxness

We shall only touch lightly here upon the lengthy arguments that were used on pastor Jon Primus right up to the last moment, so reluctant was the pastor to conduct this ceremony, or rather, so difficult was it to nag him into it. He said he had a sore foot and had caught a chill- something in that. Hadn’t had time to sleep for three days and nights because of onerous official duties - arguable. No paper to be found in the house on which to write funeral sermons, and no time for writing, and besides he had forgotten how to write- pretexts.

The undersigned pointed out that nothing was required of a pastor except that he intimate in church at the dead man’s bier his date of birth and date of death and thereafter say some little prayer or other, even if it were only the Lord’s prayer; and finally sprinkle the State’s three spadefuls of earth with the statutory innocent phrases, Earth to Earth, etc., as is the custom.

Pastor Jon Primus: That’s not so innocent as it looks. It derives from the scholastics. They were always doing their utmost to falsify Aristotle, though he was quite bad enough already. They tried to feed the fables with yet more fables, such as that the primary elements of matter first disintegrate and then reassemble again in order resurrect. They lied so fast in the Middle Ages they hadn’t even time to hiccup.

Embi ( The Bishops Emissary): In the Middle Ages it was also the custom to write down a formula on a piece of paper and lay it against a sore, and then it healed. For internal ailments a mixture was prepared and given to a dog belonging to the man who was sick, and then he would recover. When I was a little boy I cured a wart I had by sticking a tongue-bone into a wall.

Pastor Jon Primus: Cold  water for me.
Embi: But sometimes also nice and hot, with plenty of coffee in it.

Now pastor Jon Primus laughed. Philosophy and theology have no effect on him, much less plain common sense. Impossible to convince this man by arguments. But humor he always listens to, even though it be ill humor. A typical Icelander, perhaps. Sometimes your emissary would have given a lot, however, to be able to see the world from the standpoint of pastor Jon Primus.

Embi, when pastor Jon has stopped laughing: There will be no one else there except foreign and home officials, and their business is to make a report. If they don’t see a pastor, there will be no report – no funeral, no nothing, and everything ending up in fuss and bother, diplomatic action, and international complications all over the world. You and I would both be put in jail, perhaps.

                  .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

Dignified gentlemen stood stiffly around the coffin in the middle of the church and had begun to wait. The choristers on the other hand had been allotted seats on account of their age, and told not to stand up until they were given the signal to start singing. Pastor Jon entered the church at 1113 hours. He did not close the door behind him, and the church stood open. Birds flew past the door. A yellow-striped cat sat on a grave and longed for breakfast, but the breakfast sang its trilling song up on the church gable. There was a fog along the mountain ridges, but the weather passed for dry down here.

The pastor’s cassock must originally have been made for a much smaller clergyman than pastor Jon Primus – lost property – or else excessively shrunk: it was far too tight for him. This cassock was multi-colored, as if it had lain out in the open for a few years, for the most part under snow; and full of holes as if insects had been at work there, perhaps also mice. The pastor walked nonchalantly straight to the coffin, completely unaffected by the presence of solemn mourners, and halted at the left side of the head of the coffin. That is not where a pastor ought to stand, but perhaps pastor Jon thought he was going to shoe a horse. He stood for a while and looked straight out the open door, a little pensive, and raised his hand to his wolf-grey mane and scratched his head, and tried to remember something; then he wiped his face hard as if he were squeezing a rubber mask. Finally he produced his manual from his cassock pocket, but then he had forgotten his spectacles.

He lifted the book to his nose and squinted at it, but had difficulty in finding anything suitable to read. He became a little anxious as he hunted through the book. Until now  I had thought that pastor Jon was the last man to get flustered. But it hardly escaped those present that this parish pastor didn’t feel at home in the cassock. I myself felt I was now seeing pastor Jon  Primus for the first time not at play. The British Consul leaned across to the undersigned and asked in a whisper on behalf of her Majesty if it were quite definite that this man believed in God

Embi: Yes.

Now pastor Jon finds near the back of the book the formulas that are prescribed for the burial of so-called ‘adult persons’ who do not get a special funeral sermon: this normally refers to paupers and thieves or else drownings and bodies that have been washed ashore from shipwrecks. There you find, inter alia, the words: Lord, thou makest man return to dust. But pastor Jon shakes his head and skips over that as well. When he has dipped into various places and tasted the occasional word here and there, he finally reaches a passage and stops; he had no doubt forgotten it; he now starts examining this passage, and weighs and assesses each word to himself, though everyone could easily hear him, and then he reads out loud; ‘Because no one of us lives for himself and no one dies for himself. For if we live, then we live for the Lord; and if we die, then we die for the Lord. Therefore whether we live or die we belong to the Lord.’

Pastor Jon Primus to himself: That’s rather good.

With that he thrust the manual into his cassock pocket, turned towards the coffin and said:

That was the formula, Mundi. I was trying to get you to understand it, but it didn’t work out; actually it did not matter. We  cannot get round this formula anyway. It’s easy to prove the formula is wrong, but it is at least so right that the world came into existence. But it is a waste of words to try to impute to the creator democratic ideas or social virtues; or to think that one can move Him with weeping and wailing, and persuade Him with logic and legal quibbles. Nothing is so pointless as words. The late pastor Jens of  Setberg knew all this and more besides. But he also knew that the formula is kept in a locker. The rest comes by itself, the Creation, which includes you and me, we are in the formula, this very formula I have just been reading; and there is no way out of it. Because no one lives for himself and so on; and whether we live or die, we and so on.

You are annoyed that demons should govern the world and that consequently there is only one virtue that is taken seriously by the newspapers: killings.

You said they had discovered a machine to destroy everything that draws breathe on earth; they are now trying to agree on a method of accomplishing this task quickly and cleanly; preferably while having a cocktail. They are trying to break out of the formula, poor wretches. Who can blame them for that? Who has never wanted to do that?

Many consider the human being to be the most useless animal on earth or even the lowest stage of evolution in all the universe put together, and that  it is more than high time to wipe this creature out, like the mammoth in the tundra. We once knew war maiden, you and I. There was only one word ever found for her: Ua. So wonderful was this creation that it’s no exaggeration to say that she was completely unbearable; indeed I think that we two helped one another to destroy her, and yet perhaps she is still alive. There was never anything like her.

Like all great rationalists you believed in things that were twice as incredible as theology. I bid you welcome to this poor parish at Glacier to be united with the power-generator of the Creation and the intelligences that dwell on the planets of the galaxies. It was a good idea to summon to your assistance people who have the law of determinants in their power and thereby communion with life-giving beings in infinite space. I can well understand that such people do not enter such a poor church as mine. I bow my head before your honorable mourners, my dear Mundi, who have come here from distant places to take part in a requiem service.

In conclusion I, as the local pastor, thank you for having participated in carrying the Creation on your shoulders alongside me. This parish at Glacier is actually a good living, but it is a little difficult sometimes, especially for horses. I am always trying to wring out some hay-sweepings here and there to feed them in hard weather. And yet horses out in the open are always full of pranks and start kicking their heels and boxing and uttering mating cries, however badly they are being treated: and one never knows whether they are in earnest or not; yes, one can learn from these creatures in a horse-torturing society such as this. Of the snow bunting I have nothing to add to what I said the other day to a young man who was looking for the truth: if there is an Almighty in the heavens, it is to be found in the snow bunting. Whatever happens, the snow bunting survives; no sooner have the blizzards abated than it has started courting. And the lilies of the field, they toil not; neither do they spin. I might also mention the brightly colored small birds of the South Sea islands. One thing is certain; we need have nothing to fear, honorable mourners, because whether we live or die, it so happens that we have the same God as the Mohammedans in the desert – and of him pastor Jens of Setberg said: Allah  is great.

 (Tape-recorded.)