Some Rain Must Fall (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

There’s no difference between pulp fiction and highbrow fiction, one is as good as the other, the only difference is the aura they have, and that’s determined by the people who read the stuff, not by the book itself. There’s no such thing as “the book itself”.’

You carried your inner thoughts and passions within you, and perhaps shared with a partner – what did I know about such matters – at any rate it wasn’t something you brought up one night you were on the town, it would have killed everything, caused others to shy away. Because it was all about having a good time, laughing, telling stories or arguing till the sparks flew, but about matters that were outside your inner life, about what was between people, about what they shared. Bands, films, books, other students, lecturers, girls, various experiences remodelled as entertaining anecdotes or jokes.

There was also something panicked about my desire to acquire knowledge, in sudden terrible insights I saw that actually I didn’t know anything and it was urgent, I didn’t have a second to lose. It was almost impossible to adapt this urgency to the slowness that reading required.

What was consciousness other than the cone of light from a torch in the middle of a dark forest?

It was no surprise that time went more slowly there, it was a place where nothing was supposed to happen, where no progress was possible, you noticed that as soon as you entered, this was storage, a warehouse for unwanted people,