Snorri: We are like two parasites consuming each other; will there be nothing left of us when we are done? Will we be just another story. My tales have been of actual men, not myths and fantasies about Gods, about God. Have I used this time well? It has given me so much, have all I done is take?
Jon: There were just the two of us in the house, for all those years. Of course we had Lady, until her time was up. Had Snoopy before that and Butch before that. Suppose we had a dog most of the time. Not much of a cat person. Don’t get me wrong, nothing against them, but they smell like cats. Not a friendly smell like horses or even cows, certainly not like a dog. A dog smells like a friend. We had company sometimes of course. Harriet always made a big fuss, with the food and the cleaning and always having something to entertain. Frankly I was always just happiest when they left.
Snorri: There were always people around. Many people of all kinds; family, friends, visitors, strangers and of course the servants and labor men that worked the fields and tended the beasts. The priests too, of course. They were always around, somewhere, lurking and creeping. There were dogs of course, many of them, working with the shepherds. I had some in the house from time to time, though none as close friends, they came and went. In those last years I felt as though it was only Hallveig and me. All the rest were just shadow people, moving about in the background, performing their tasks, living their lives.
Jon: I studied you. Wrote volumes about you. I probably know you better than you know yourself.
Snorri: I thought I knew myself well. But what did I really know. Like all of us my life was consumed with my life. Just like you. I probably know you better than you know yourself. Not that I studied you, I didn’t even know you until now.
Jon: Perhaps you did. Perhaps I was always there. Perhaps it was my conscience that spoke to you sometimes when you were troubled or confused. Perhaps it was me telling you how things would work out.
Snorri: Perhaps. And perhaps it was me speaking to your inner self in your desperate times.
Jon: It was at the very least the essence of you that I embodied through all the study I did of you. After all you were my 19th great grandfather, so there has been a thread of you passed down to me through all the generations between us.
Snorri: I do not know things of this sort, though I understand the bond between ancestors and descendants. This is told in my Heimskringla. Like you, I am a scholar of history, in search of the lives that came before me, perhaps many whose blood I shared. As I am of Egil, a life I wrote of, as you wrote of mine. My beast of an ancestor, the poet warrior, brilliant but savage, from a time when temper rose quick and life and death was ruled at the point of the sword.
Jon: The violence in my time is far greater but much more subtle and concealed. We kill in far greater numbers, but it is a secret.
Snorri: Why are you here? Why am I here? Where is ‘here’? Am I not dead? Should I not be on my journey to heaven or hell or maybe Valhalla, instead of here with you, conversing in the dark and light.
Jon: This must be the Singularity. It is the place I have dreamed of reaching, since my later years. The place like your heaven or Valhalla where our spirit can survive forever. Where it has always existed and now draws us back to it.
Snorri: What do you mean by saying it is my heaven or hell or my Valhalla?
Jon: You have God in your heart and mind. Your church dictates your entire life. Or perhaps you have clung to the remnants of the Pagan. Whatever the case, I have no fear of burning in hell nor expectation of eternity in paradise. But I do have a deep inner sense that we all return to the Singularity where that thing that was us returns to, the common energy of the universe.
Snorri: This thing you call Singularity, it sounds like God to me.
Jon: It is much more than that.
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Wade Harold Johnson - Canadian Novelist/Poet 