The first paragraph of Knut Hamsun's Pan

These last few days I have thought and thought of the Nordland summer's endless day. I sit here and think of it, and of a hut I lived in, and of the forest behind the hut; and I have taken to writing about it, just for my own amusement and to while away the time. Time drags; it does not pass as quickly as I should like, although I have no cares and lead the gayest of lives. I am perfectly content with everything, and thirty is no great age. A few days ago I received a couple of bird's feathers from far away, from one who need not have sent them; just two green feathers folded in a sheet of paper with a coronet on it and fastened with a seal. It amused me to see two so fiendishly green feathers. Otherwise there is nothing to trouble me except a touch of arthritis now and then in my left foot, the result of an old shot wound that healed up long ago.