History of Nature

History of Nature is the worldly book Rinaldo gives Robert Nilsson when he finishes school, and it becomes more than a keepsake: it sustains Robert’s reading, gives Arvid access to a world he cannot read about for himself, and supplies some of their first concrete knowledge of distant lands. Set beside the Bible as a book of earthly things, it makes the unknown world legible while also exposing how little the two young farmhands have seen beyond their parish.

A Gift and a Purpose

Rinaldo gives Robert the book on the day Robert completes his schooling. He explains that children often stop reading once school ends and may soon lose the ability if they do not keep practicing. The gift is therefore an encouragement to continue learning, not simply a school prize. Rinaldo’s confidence in the value of reading shapes the book’s role in Robert’s life: it is meant to accompany him beyond the brief schooling available in the parish.

For more than a year, however, Robert does not open it. He attends confirmation classes at the dean’s and helps Karl Oskar fell oaks and pines. The timber is destined for shipbuilding, and as Robert works on wood that will travel by sea, he imagines going with the timbermen to Karlshamn to see the sea for himself. The book is present during this interval as an unused possibility; the first movement toward a wider world comes both from its subject matter and from the ships Robert pictures while working.

The Worldly Book

When Robert receives his Bible at his first Communion, History of Nature becomes one of two books he owns. Rinaldo has described them as complementary: one teaches about the body and earthly things, the other about the soul and spiritual matters. The distinction gives the natural-history book a clear intellectual place. It does not displace religious instruction; it opens a different field of knowledge, setting the visible, material world beside the Bible’s account of what lies beyond it.

That division also has a practical consequence. Robert is still living in this world and must earn his living, but the knowledge in the book gives him a mental reach beyond the farm and the work immediately before him. Its pages can bring faraway plants, animals, climates, and natural phenomena into the stable room, even when neither reader has traveled beyond the small waters of the parish. The book’s worldly scope thus stands in tension with the narrow conditions of the boys’ daily lives.

Reading Aloud with Arvid

During Sunday afternoons in summer, when the horses in Nybacken’s stable room need no attention, Robert brings out History of Nature and reads aloud to Arvid. Arvid has attended school for only two weeks and never learned to read. He pretends to follow the printed words, turning pages with studied seriousness, while Robert understands the pretense and allows it to continue. Their shared reading depends on this quiet arrangement: Robert supplies the words, and Arvid can receive the knowledge without having to admit directly that he cannot read.

The book’s subject matter makes that arrangement expansive. Robert reads about air and water, animals and plants, crocodiles and rattlesnakes, silkworms and butterflies, sea lions and flying fish, spice trees and coffee bushes, deserts and polar seas, leaf lice and planets, geysers and volcanoes. These are not sights the two boys have encountered themselves. Through the aloud reading, Arvid learns about a globe filled with things beyond his experience, while the book gives Robert a way to share what he knows with his closest companion. Arvid’s pretended reading is therefore not mere comic evasion: it frames a genuine exchange in which the book’s knowledge crosses the boundary of literacy.

The reading also touches a more immediate want. Arvid’s favorite food is rice porridge, which he can eat only once a year at Christmas. When Robert reads about rice as a grain grown in warm countries and shipped to their own, Arvid asks him to read the passage again. The description connects a rare holiday dish with distant agriculture and trade; the porridge he longs for depends on a crop grown far beyond the parish. Afterward Robert reads about sugar cane, a tall grass cultivated in warm regions including America. Arvid, thinking of rice and sweetness together, begins to wonder about the ocean separating his country from America. The book does not create his curiosity from nothing, but it gives that curiosity a specific geography and substance.

From the Page to the Road

For Robert, the book is also an early companion to thoughts of departure. He has imagined traveling to Karlshamn to see the sea, and, later, the natural-history passages about distant countries help open America to discussion between him and Arvid. The printed world remains secondhand: neither has seen a great body of water, much less the faraway places described. Yet the difference between the parish’s small tarns and the ocean becomes a question the book has helped make imaginable.

As the Nilsson family prepares to emigrate, the old oak clothes chest is converted into an America chest, and Robert’s knowledge of distant waters gives his packing a particular emphasis. He includes trolling gear for pike, hooks, angling twine, and wire for fish snares, thinking of the streams and waters said to abound in America. This expectation belongs to the same horizon the book has helped establish, though the narrative does not say that these particular plans come directly from its pages. History of Nature is one part of the emigrants’ limited knowledge of the world they are approaching, alongside the reports and assumptions on which they must rely.

The book’s importance lies in that balance between instruction and uncertainty. It can name foods, climates, animals, and landscapes; it cannot substitute for seeing them, or tell the emigrants exactly what awaits them. Through Robert and Arvid’s reading, knowledge first arrives as a shared, local act in a stable room. Through the emigration, the distant world becomes a place toward which the family actually travels. The book marks the threshold between imagining that world and setting out to meet it.