Miss Smilla’s feeling for snow

Finally finished reading Miss Smilla’s feeling for snow.

A small boy falls to his death from a city rooftop. Accident, say the police. Murder, says his resourceful friend Smilla, who, half- Greenlander, can read the marks left in the snow. The story is about her quest for truth.

A child needs both parents. That is one of the practical reasons why marriage is sacred. That does not mean that I do not regard love between man and woman as holy. It is, however, only one stage along the way. A stage, that I have permitted myself to skip, so to speak.

One of the reasons I’m fond of ice is that it covers the water and makes it solid, safe, negotiable, classifiable. I know that, outside, the waves and the wind have picked up, and far forward the bow of the kronos is pitching through the waves, splintering them, and sending roaring cascades of water along the gunwale until, outside my porthole, they disperse into a whistling mist shining white in the night. On the open sea there are no landmarks, there is only an amorphous, chaotic shifting of directionless masses of water that loom up and break and roll, and their surface is, in turn, broken by subsystems, that interfere and form whirlpools and appear and disappear and finally vanish without a trace. Slowly this confusion will work its way into the labyrinth of my ear and dissolve my sense of orientation ; it will fight its way into my cells and displace their salt concentrations and the conductive power of my nervous system as well, leaving me deaf, blind, and helpless. I’m not afraid of the sea merely because it wants to strangle me. I’s afraid of it because it will take away from me my orientation, the inner gyroscope of my life, my awareness of what is up and down, my connection to absolute space.

A breakdown doesn’t necessarily have to be a collapse; it can also take the form of a quiet slide into resignation. Don’t let loneliness get into you. Let it be a brief period of solitude and introspection, to return to the social group as a stronger person.

It’s only what you do not understand that you can come to a conclusion about. There will be no conclusion.

Thank you Dunja for suggesting this book. It was a memorable journey into a new land, and how the world has shrunk, and science and people, are destroyed for personal gains.