At Crusty House, in a four-hundred-metre race, it was…

““At Crusty House, in a four-hundred-metre race, it was always possible to determine who could run better than everyone else. And pretty often in football, you could say that one pass was better than another. But it was actually less common that you might imagine. And mainly in straightforward situations offering very few openings. In Biehl's classes it was obvious when an answer was correct. With Karin Äre things were a little less clear-cut but, on the whole, there was never any serious doubt as to who sang true enough to be in the choir. One has to be left with the impression that this things about assessing the merit of a person's singing on answers or football was something straightforward, something strictly regulated. But in all of these instances an answer did, already, exist. That you had to score, or remember a particular date or sing true or run a distance under a certain time. There was a clearly defined quadrangle of knowledge -- like a chessboard, like a football pitch. So it was pretty easy to see what was correct and what was wrong, when one thing was better or worse than another. But if it became just a little bit more complicated, as at the opening of an attack, or in midfield, then you could no longer be sure what the answer would be. As with August's drawing. You would think, in that case, that it would have to be almost impossible -- after all, it was his. How could an answer already exist as to how it should be?””

— Peter Høeg