A Time for Everything

The only things that have always been remembered are the story of the first people who were driven out of paradise and into the valley, the story of the two brothers Cain and Abel, and the story of the great flood. But all the details about these people and the world they lived in were gradually erased. And as each new age is convinced that it constitutes what is normal, that it represents the true condition of things, the people of a new age soon began to imagine the people of the previous one as an exact replica of themselves, in exactly the same setting. Thus Cain and Abel became nomadlike figures who lived and operated in a flat, burning hot, sand-filled world, of olive and fig trees, oases, camels, asses, robes, tents, and little whitewashed stone houses. Gone were all the pine trees, all the fjords and mountains, all the snow and rain, all the lynxes and bears, wolves and elk. In addition, all the infinitely delicate nuances in the relationship between the brothers were lost over time, such that only the bare details remained: Abel was good, Cain bad, Abel was a shepherd, Cain a tiller of the soil.

It is clear the whole time that the human condition is not something [God] has experienced. If he knows anything about it, it isn't from within. Only someone who lacks insight into the human condition could despair over its evilness, as the Lord does time and time again throughout the Old Testament. Perhaps he knew mankind, but he couldn't have understood them – or he wouldn't have been so surprised that they ate from the tree of knowledge, despite his emphatic prohibition, or that they could kill their own brothers, or that they built a tower almost up to heaven.

On the Nature of Angels consists of three parts. The first contains a catalog of all 189 angelic manifestations in the Bible, and the second discusses what conclusions can be drawn about the angels from these. The third, which initially looks at angels' non-Biblical appearances, ends in a discussion about the question that is the work's main theme: Can the nature of the divine undergo change?

Bellori contemplated everything he saw. Whether it was fish, waterfalls, trees, mountains, birds, insects, or flowers, he saw only the unique. If one reads his notes consecutively, from beginning to end, a feeling is gradually fostered of the infinity of the world. Not "trees" nor even "a tree" but this particular tree right here, now, as it is. Not "fish" nor even "a fish" but this unique fish right here, now, as it darts suddenly across the sandy bottom through the clear, sun-spangled water. Its tail's rapid movement from side to side, the stream of water through its gills, the flat shadow gliding over the bottom beneath it ...

It is hard to imagine, as Bellori said, that God and his divine creatures would exist without any sort of link with the human, raised completely over matter, as Thomas Aquinas and like minds maintained. As far as they were concerned, God in all his forms was absolute – absolute purity, absolute enlightenment, absolute perfection – but just what that absolute really was, or how it really developed, apart from being like light, is unknown. But because God in this way is defined as everything man is not, and never can be, it's easy to accept it and believe that things really are that way, and that this abstract God is the true God, when really it's the opposite: the abstract God is the more human, precisely because it equates with mankind's concept of what the most beautiful, the most elevated, and the most perfect is.

“Knausgaard’s strange way of writing forces attention. Only now and again are the actual things he writes about interesting, like the descriptions of the nephilim – his strength is rather in what might follow. In other words his writing is dull but one feels that it is leading to something important...one is led on. Unfortunat

“Knausgaard’s strange way of writing forces attention. Only now and again are the actual things he writes about interesting, like the descriptions of the nephilim – his strength is rather in what might follow. In other words his writing is dull but one feels that it is leading to something important...one is led on. Unfortunately sometimes one gets the feeling that there will not be any resolution And therefore that one is wasting his time reading it. But the feeling of promise persists!..

All this stuff seems to me to be more autobiographical than biblical, in spite of the names. Reminiscent, for instance, of many a meal round the kitchen table of the Knausgaard’s in Sweden (sic) during the author’s childhood, perhaps. Gone is the fictitious Italian writer Bellori, gone the cherubim guarding the way to the tree of life. We wish a return to the biography of the angels!..

If the novel or Bellori’s description of angels is supposed to tell you something why, oh why does it waste dull seemingly inconsequential pages of apparent autobiographical stuff on family life? Why after building up interest on Noah’s meeting with God and the building of the Ark then lapsing into a flashback for many pages into Noah’s family life and the oh (!) so boring description of Anna’s love life, to an equally dull parting whilst forgetting entirely anything to do with angels? – or for that matter the impending flood?
The force of the attraction of the reading is impossible to deny...”
					GR Clarke 2009