See how paltry I am in my mind, dear Helga, likening you, young and naked, to a tractor. I know I’m just befouling your beauty by comparing you to a worldly thing. Yet you were a splendid tractor.

I could accept living in town if so many people didn’t become so boring living there. Even the ducks on the Pond, who get as much to eat as they want, lose their radiance, their personalities. When the Co-op sent me to Reykjavík, and I wandered down to the Pond, I saw that the birds behaved differently there. They weren’t curious or playful, like birds in the wild. The ducks at the Pond had become just like the people: dull parasites who quarrel over what’s thrown to them.

The path that I’d followed up until then branched. I took both paths. Yet neither of them rightly, in the sense that I followed one of them—but had all my heart on the other. With you.