A Man in Love

by Karl Ove Knausgård

the rails of routine we followed, which made everything so predictable that we had to invest in entertainment to feel any hint of intensity?

the light that illuminated the world and made everything comprehensible also drained it of meaning? Was it perhaps the forests that had vanished, the animal species that had become extinct, the ways of life that would never return?

the whole point for me of living in a big city was that I could be completely alone in it while still surrounded by people on all sides.

yup

literature is not just words, literature is what words evoke in the reader. It is this transcendence that validates literature, not the formal transcendence in itself, as many believe. Paul Celan’s mysterious, cipher-like language has nothing to do with inaccessibility or closedness, quite the contrary, it is about opening up what language normally does not have access to but that we still, somewhere deep inside us, know or recognize, or if we don’t, allows us to discover. Paul Celan’s words cannot be contradicted with words. What they possess cannot be transformed either, the word only exists there, and in each and every single person who absorbs it.

I did understand intuitively that he was right, that there was such a thing as a supreme philosophy and a supreme poetry, and that even if you didn’t understand it, were unable to partake in it, you only had yourself to blame.

You opened a book, read, and if the poems opened themselves up to you, you had the right, if not, you didn’t.

it bothered me a lot that I was one of those for whom the poems did not open. For the consequences of this were serious, much more so than merely being excluded from a literary genre. It also passed judgment on me. The poems looked into another reality, or saw reality in a different way, one that was truer than the way I knew, and the fact that it was not possible to acquire the ability to see and that it was something you either had or you didn’t condemned me to a life on a lower plane, indeed, it made me one of the lowly. The pain of that insight was immense.

“To will is to have to will,” he said. “As the mystic Maximus says in Emperor and Galilean. Or to be precise: ‘What is the value of living? Everything is sport and mockery. To will is to have to will.’

I feel what I feel. It’s not possible to identify every tiny fluctuation of the soul, if that’s what you believe.”

elevate what was actually the bare essence, and he didn’t deal with characters or themes or what lay on the surface, he dealt with the metaphors and the unseen function they performed, bringing everything together, uniting them in an almost organic fashion.

Stendhal wrote that music was the highest form of art and that all the other forms really wanted to be music. This was of course a Platonic idea, all the other art forms depict something else, music is the only one that is something in itself, it was absolutely incomparable.

Monet had an exceptional eye for light on snow, which Thaulow, perhaps technically the most gifted Norwegian painter ever, also had. It was a feast for the eyes, the closeness of the moment was so great that the value of what gave rise to it increased exponentially, an old tumbledown cabin by a river or a pier at a holiday resort suddenly became priceless, the paintings were charged with the feeling that they were here at the same time as us, in this intense here and now, and that we would soon be gone from them, but with regard to the snow, it was as if the other side of this cultivation of the moment became visible, the animation of this and its light so obviously ignored something, namely the lifelessness, the emptiness, the non-charged and the neutral, which were the first features to strike you when you entered a forest in winter, and in the picture, which was connected with perpetuity and death, the moment was unable to hold its ground. Caspar David Friedrich knew this, but this wasn’t what he painted, only his idea of it. This was the problem with all representation, of course, for no eye is uncontaminated, no gaze is blank, nothing is seen the way it is. And in this encounter the question of art’s meaning as a whole was forced to the surface. Yes, okay, so I saw the forest here, so I walked through it and thought about it. But all the meaning I extracted from it came from me, I charged it with something of mine. If it were to have any meaning beyond that, it couldn...

lovely…

Caravaggio, you know, The Cardsharps, where he’s tricked by all the others.

We live in a culture where the person with the most experience wins. It’s sick. Everyone knows which way modernism is going, you create a form by breaking up a form, in an endless regression, just let it continue, and for as long as it does, experience will have the upper hand. The unique feature of our times, the pure or independent act, is, as you know, to renounce, not to accept. Accepting is too easy. There’s nothing to be achieved by it.

a tragedy is when a great person goes through bad times. In contrast to a comedy, which is when a bad person goes through good times.” “Why tragedy?” “Because it is so joyless. Because your life is so joyless. You have such unbelievable reserves and so much talent, but it stops there. It becomes art, but never more than that. You’re like Midas. Everything he touches turns to gold, but he gains no pleasure from it. Wherever he goes everything around him sparkles and glitters. Others search and search, and when they find a nugget, they sell it to acquire life, splendor, music, dance, enjoyment, luxury, or at least a bit of pussy, right, throw themselves at a woman just to forget they exist for an hour or two. What you lust for is innocence and this is an impossible equation.

Everyone’s life is as great as they make it. I’m the hero in my own life, aren’t I. Well-known people, famous people, people everyone knows, they aren’t well-known or famous in themselves, in their own right, someone has made them well-known, someone has written about them, filmed them, talked about them, analyzed them, admired them. That’s how they become great for others. But it’s just scene-setting. Should my scene-setting be any the less true? No, quite the opposite, because the people I know are in the same room as me, I can touch them, look them in the eye when we talk, we meet in the here and now, and of course we don’t do that with any of all those names swirling around us all the time. I’m the Underground Man and you’re Icarus.”

Who the hell would want a great inner life if they don’t have any outer life? People only think of what introversion can give them in terms of external life and success. What is the modern view of a prayer? There is only one kind of prayer for modern people and that is as an expression of desire. You don’t pray unless there is something you want.”

The last good Norwegian novel was Fire and Flame by Kjartan Fløgstad, and that was published in 1980, twenty-five years ago. The last good one before that was The Birds by Vesaas, which appeared in 1957, so a further twenty-three years previously.

research

Not only were the opportunities fewer, the emotions I experienced were weaker. Life was less intense. And I knew I was halfway, perhaps more than halfway. When John was as old as I was now I would be eighty. And with one foot in the grave, if not both feet. In ten years I would be fifty. In twenty, sixty. Was it strange that a shadow hung over happiness?

knowing this makes life more precious...