Ingmar Bergman Unfinished Script “Wheat and Oranges” —Excerpt”
“Olaf, I have gotten a job with the Government.”
“It is a bowl of soup, Sven. It is a bowl of pitiful radish soup.”
“I do not understand what you are saying, Olaf, even if I try to understand in a Godless way.”
“Your days will be spent as if a radish, floating in tasteless lukewarm broth. The broth of Government is all Hope filed away into endless cabinets. Rows of cabinets, for which you and the other radishes will retrieve one folder after another, endlessly, before putting each of them carefully back, one at a time. You will be reduced to a scribble in the margins of a yellowing paper no one will ever read.”
“But it will lead to a comfortable life, Olaf. I will be able to afford shoes.”
“Better to be barefoot in the snow, Sven, than to wear shoes while shoveling other people’s offal with bare hands.”
“Surely there is good I can do in my new position, Olaf. The Government must be good for something.”
“The Government will always refuse more than it allows, Sven. It is a headless chicken that rules the roost.”
“But the government gives wheat to the poor.”
“A man given free wheat will never tend oranges, Sven. That is the price of Government: plentiful wheat and empty orchards.”
“You speak as if Government is meaningless, Olaf.”
“Everything is meaningless, Sven. But in the midst of this meaningless universe I find hope in one orange, not in man.”
“You have given me much to think about, Olaf. Perhaps I shall wander out into the snowy forest and lose my way, beneath an uncaring sky.”
“One day, Sven, the Government will not let you do even that…”
I am Laslo.
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