A Man in Love

by Karl Ove Knausgård

problem with uninteresting or unoriginal people – they may have other, more important attributes, such as warmth, consideration, friendliness, a sense of humor, or talents such as being able to make a conversation flow to generate an atmosphere of ease around them, or the ability to make a family function – but I feel almost physically ill in the presence of boring people who consider themselves especially interesting and who blow their own trumpets.

The same, the same, everything was the same. Or was it perhaps that the light that illuminated the world and made everything comprehensible also drained it of meaning?

the world as it appeared in philosophy, literature, social science, politics, whereas the world in which I lived, slept, ate, spoke, made love, and ran, the one that had a smell, a taste, a sound, where it rained and the wind blew, the world that you could feel on your skin, was excluded, was not deemed a topic for thought.

I wiped the sweat from my brow with the towel, looked down at the rolls of fat sagging from my stomach. Pale and fat and stupid. But in Stockholm!

Everything was as it had been, yet it wasn’t, for imperceptibly, so imperceptibly that it seemed as if it wasn’t happening, something in our lives lost its luster. The fire that drove us toward each other and into the world no longer burned as bright. Moods could spring up, one Saturday I awoke thinking how nice it would be to have some time for myself, visit some secondhand bookshops, go to a café and read the papers … We got up, went to the nearest café, ordered breakfast, that is, porridge, yogurt, toast, eggs, juice, and coffee, I read the papers, Linda stared down at the table or into the room, said at length, do you have to read, couldn’t we talk? Yes, of course, I said, closing the newspaper, and we chatted, it was fine, the tiny black spot in my heart was barely noticeable, a little hankering to be alone and read in peace without anyone demanding anything of me was forgotten in a flash. But then came the time when it wasn’t, when on the contrary it led to ensuing moods and actions. If you really love me, you have to come to me without demands, I thought, but didn’t say, I wanted her to notice on her own.

The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.

“I didn’t quite catch his name, and for a long time I thought it was Knudsen,” she said. “And at first I liked the other one better, you know. But then I fell for your father … it’s such a good memory. The sun, the grass in the park, the trees, the shade, all the people there … We were so young, you know … Yes, it was an adventure. The beginning of an adventure. That was how it felt.”