Opningstale 2025

Is it naive to search for truth in the world today? Is it naive because we have different frames of reference?

Is it naive because it has become easy to manipulate the truth, to edit, to hide, to deny the truth – not least – because it has become fashionable to lie? Because lying has become a performative sport on the world scene, with cheering crowds, not for the truth, but for the best told lie?

Is searching naive because truth is impossible to reach?

Standing here, I have the privilege of answering this question, and my answer is no. It is not naive. It is more important than ever. It is more important than ever.

This truth is not relative: The number of hostages. The number of prisoners. The number of dead.

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But there is also another truth.

That, which erupts violently like a volcano, with afterquakes that keep shaking you long after you thought it was over. Or, heavy like uranium, old as the rain. The truth you will never utter aloud.

A truth that is intimately connected to what it means for you to be you or what it means for me to be me in the world.

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No two minds are alike. We don’t see things as they are – we see them as we are. We predict what to expect and we construct the reality accordingly – we construct our truth, so to say.

You are the master of your own listening, of your own reasoning. You are the master of your truth.

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Are you thinking I am contradicting myself? That I am the face of Janus?

I do not believe so. I would like to suggest that accepting these variants of truth is a key to a greater understanding of ourselves and the world around us. To what we see, what we hear, what we perceive.

To what it means to be living and sensing human beings.

To realise that truth is not relative, but still individual.

Truth. The most ancient of all literary themes.

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I invite you – these festival days, to listen with what I call critical empathy.

Let the days ahead be a time of discovery.

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LitFestBergen is a festival for literature that writes itself into the core of what it means to be human.

LitFestBergen is a festival that seeks truth in poetry rather than in the artillery of propaganda.

We will never be a festival that seeks consensus. We look at people and the world with an empathetic gaze. We listen without interruption. We seek the beauty of humanity and of the world.

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Searching for truth requires courage.

Accepting truth requires patience.

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Thank you.