A Death in the Family (My Struggle #1)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

The elderly man who dies during a cinema performance might just as well remain in his seat until the film is over, and during the next too for that matter.

the notion that transporting bodies upwards in buildings seems contrary to the laws of nature, as though height and death are mutually incompatible. As though we possessed some kind of chthonic instinct, something deep within us that urges us to move death down to the earth whence we came.

Understanding the world requires you to keep a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce.

Throughout our childhood and teenage years we strive to attain the correct distance from objects and phenomena.

Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning.

The most important change in my behaviour, however, was linguistic; I had discovered the edge that words gave you to bully others. I taunted and harassed, manipulated and ridiculed, and never, not once, did it strike them that the basis of this power I had was so insecure that one single well-directed blow could have knocked it flying.

For a moment I was filled with the sensation of white snow against black water. The way the whiteness erases all the detail around a lake or a river in the forest so that the difference between land and water is absolute, and the water lies there as a deeply alien entity, a black hole in the world.

‘Many happy returns, mother,’ he said. ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have done!’ grandma said. ‘Goodness me. You shouldn’t buy presents for me, dear!’ ‘Yes, I should,’ dad said. ‘Come on. Open it then!’ I didn’t know where to look. There was something intimate about all this which I had not witnessed before and had no idea existed.

The next few days I occasionally thought about the little episode in the hall, and my feeling was the same every time: I had seen something I shouldn’t have seen.

So, on the Wednesday I went to the supermarket, put twelve lagers in my trolley, with bread and tomatoes as alibis, queued up, put them on the conveyor belt, handed the checkout girl the money; she took it without so much as a glance at me, and I hurried excitedly home with a clinking carrier bag in each hand.

Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. But how to get there?

So strictly regulated and demarcated was life here that it could be understood both geometrically and biologically.

always had a bad conscience whenever vehicles had to stop because of me, a kind of imbalance arose, I felt as though I owed them something. The bigger the vehicle, the worse the guilt.

It was as though in dreams I had not grown up, I was still a child surrounded by the same people and places I had been surrounded by in childhood.

And even though the events that occurred there were new every night, the feeling they left me with was always the same. The constant feeling of humiliation. Often it could take several hours after waking before that feeling had left my body. Moreover, when conscious, I hardly remembered anything from my childhood, and the little I did remember no longer stirred anything in me, which of course created a kind of symmetry between past and present, in a strange system whereby night and dreams were connected with memory, day and consciousness with oblivion.

This wasn’t about knowledge, but about the aura knowledge exuded, the places it came from, which were almost all outside the world we lived in now, yet were still within the ambivalent space where all historical objects and ideas reside.

Understanding must not be confused with knowledge for I knew next to nothing

When I, as a nineteen-year-old, was confronted with the contention that the world is linguistically structured, I rejected it with what I called sound common sense, for it was obviously meaningless, the pen I held, was that supposed to be language? The window gleaming in the sun? The yard beneath me with students crossing it dressed in their autumn clothes? The lecturer’s ears, his hands?

Art has come to be an unmade bed, a couple of photocopiers in a room, a motorbike in an attic. And art has come to be a spectator of itself, the way it reacts, what newspapers write about it; the artist is a performer. That is how it is. Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not any more.

Our world is enclosed around itself, enclosed around us, and there is no way out of it. Those in this situation who call for more intellectual depth, more spirituality, have understood nothing, for the problem is that the intellect has taken over everything.

Everything has become intellect, even our bodies, they aren’t bodies any more, but ideas of bodies, something that is situated in our own heaven of images and conceptions within us and above us, where an increasingly large part of our lives is lived. The limits of that which cannot speak to us – the unfathomable – no longer exist. ...

just listen to how people who have been involuntary witnesses to fatal accidents or murders tend to express themselves. They always say the same, it was absolutely unreal, even though what they mean is the opposite. It was so real. But we no longer live in that reality. For us everything has been turned on its head, for us the real is unreal, the unreal real. And death, death is the last great beyond.

Meta-thoughts, that I was sitting on the plane on my way to bury my father while thinking that I was sitting on the plane on my way to bury my father, increased.

I think that I think that I think.