Chapter 7. Predawn Gloom.

March 7, 1912

Edwin Hoff sighed heavily. Blow after blow, heartbeat after heartbeat, thought after thought, and feeling after feeling—it was in this way, as if in a kind of magical and sacred monotony, which was nothing more than a diverse totality, that this thirty-year-old representative of the Norwegian nation slowly but consistently embodied his destiny into reality.

By profession, but not necessarily by destiny, Edwin Hoff was a miner—in these minutes, he was changing the essence of earthly matter hidden from ordinary eyes, but perhaps his destiny was to change another essence: water or air? Perhaps his destiny was to excavate and deepen the metaphysical matter of science or to extract the greatest minerals from the depths of art?! Does it matter what his lot was if he was destined—but was it by himself?!—to do his work inside the mine. What are these thoughts, which are no better than the work of the Danaids?!

His hard, honest work, the work of Edwin Hoff, despite its righteousness and adherence to biblical testaments, did not bring him joy at all, but to one degree or another, it brought certain income to his family, which he, it must be admitted, devoted a lot of time and attention to in his life, and most of all when there was no longer any strength and energy left in his unusually muscular hands to make another blow to the aforementioned element with the tip of his relatively heavy pickaxe, which was exhausted to a shine.

How many people before him were in this mine and, like him, in order to achieve the result of their work, sought to extract from the depths of the earth what was of a certain value for our human civilization? There were many of them. But were these materials, which are so highly praised and exalted, valuable for those inhabitants of the sublunary world who continuously, from one generation to another, for some reason, by their lot, coexisted with these extremely valuable clots of a perishable form of imperishable being? For a worm, an amoeba, or a slipper animalcule, what represented the greatest prey for our civilization was only an insignificant, unimportant, ordinary element of the all-surrounding decor.

Edwin Hoff was not the first and not the last person who had to do what he was doing now: to realize and embody his own destiny, and accordingly, as one of the infinite number of flowers, the destiny of an entire plantation of human form—to do this until the Greatest Gardener of the fractal Universe, which is nothing more than an ethereal and ephemeral egregore, wished otherwise. Spending a significant number of days a year underground, Edwin Hoff eventually learned to understand the nature of this matter, learned to distinguish its mood, and to see an infinite world in its division and multiplication in the lifeless accumulation of atoms: in addition, he was lucky enough to see for himself that the earth is the most grateful matter, because if you take care of it, if you raise your own time or labor on its altar in its name, it will certainly reward you in full for the corresponding efforts.

So Edwin Hoff thought. A great many people caressed the limits of the globe with their presence, but an even greater number of people sullied its nature with their extremely vicious thoughts, and accordingly with their extremely dirty deeds: the earth, despite this, always remained pure and independent—at the same time belonging to everyone, it at the same hour belonged to no one. Each of the representatives of the human race used its blessings to one extent or another, but none of them could claim absolute possession of its nature and essence.

Like a stubborn and wayward bride, she was never able to find a worthy lover for herself—it was for this reason that many, having seen that the sweet fruit was not under reliable protection, once decided to deprive her innocent face of the most precious and valuable thing she possessed: to deprive her of her freedom—without waiting for it to ripen, they plucked the still green fruit from the young branches by force… having tasted this fruit, they felt the intolerably disgusting taste of this fruit, and therefore immediately spat it out of the depths of their vicious mouth. Thus, by not allowing the fruit to ripen, they deprived themselves in the future not only of the sweetness of that fruit but also of the possession of this fruit at all, because with the destruction of its disgustingness or sweetness, it was also destroyed itself…

Edwin Hoff was one of those who transformed our earth day and night—the majority of the time physically, and the minority of it metaphysically. He daily, measuredly, according to a schedule, cultivated his own garden, while not doing either good or bad deeds, and therefore was most pleasing to the existing Almighty: being a caterpillar, he did not want to become a butterfly, nor did he strive to become a worm—someone would call this kind of life darkness and, most likely, this someone would be right to some extent…

A blow… Another blow… That's it, blow after blow, and Edwin Hoff has already lost a minute in his life… another blow… still more and more… invariably, with the measuredness of a clock, performing these actions, Edwin Hoff did not assume that regardless of his action or inaction, just by inhaling the available air, he was thereby bringing his demise closer… Every blow seemed to testify that he had lost a minute in his life—these were a kind of clocks of life… As if he were some kind of original reaper, he diligently mowed the minutes of his life, as if they were ripe ears of grain of one fullness or another—a surprising paradox: his own life was the sickle in his work—it was his birth that led to the fact that he would have to die at one moment or another…