BEF 2011/13 – Hotel by a Railroad [Norway]

The act of making a choice is an expression of freedom.  When there is only one path to take, and that path steep and stony, we feel keenly our privation, the injustice of it, often hopeless, and we shuffle along it fettered, as it were, by a fate incorrigible.  Most often, however, the truth is that we have only ourselves to blame for such a harshly determined existence.  And so while we yet have the choice to make, while we remain undecided, we stand in the knowledge of our freedom, feeling that we have some control over our lives.  In this state of perpetual indecision  is how the narrator of Frode Grytten’s short story Hotel by a Railroad wants to live.