Some Rain Must Fall (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

So you’ve got two sets of norms, but both derive from the outside. What’s important is that you set your own limits. That has to come from the inside, from you yourself. Your father didn’t do that, and that’s maybe why he was so confused.’

‘it’s the reception that defines a work or an artist, and that’s what artists play on of course. Irrespective of whether they enjoy high or low status, everything is a pose.’

Right there, at that precise moment, I felt as if I would be able to meet whatever challenges came my way, as if there were no limits to what I could do. This wasn’t about writing, this was something else, a boundlessness, as if I could get up and go now, this very minute, and then just walk and walk to the end of the earth. This feeling lasted for thirty seconds perhaps. Then it was gone, and even though I tried to summon it back it refused to return, a bit like a dream that goes, slips from your grasp as you struggle to recall it after waking.

There were two things that particularly bothered me in those days. One was that I came too fast, often before anything had happened at all, and the other was that I never laughed. That is, it did happen once in a while, maybe once every six months, when I would be overcome by the hilarity of something and just laugh and laugh, but that was always unpleasant because then I completely lost control, I was unable to regain my composure, and I didn’t like showing that side of myself to others. So basically I was able to laugh, I had the capacity, but in my everyday life, in social situations, when I was with people around a table chatting, I never laughed. I had lost that ability. To make up for this, I smiled a lot, I might also emit some laughter-like sounds, so I don’t think anyone noticed or found it conspicuous. But I knew: I never laughed.

We stayed there for almost an hour, it was torture, neither of us managed to get a grip on the situation, it was as if it existed independently of us, something much bigger and heavier than we could handle. When I said anything it was tentative, and every time it was the tentativeness, not what was said, that prevailed. She kept looking out of the window, not wanting to be where she was, either. But, I sometimes thought, perhaps she too is struck by sudden intense waves of happiness at just sitting there with me, as I was at sitting with her. I couldn’t begin to guess, I didn’t know her, didn’t have a clue what she was like normally. But when I suggested leaving it was relief she felt, I could see that.

I often stood looking out of the windows, like a cow out of a stall, because I was empty inside then, I registered movements and followed what was happening, that was all.

Even then I had felt I was being false, someone who carried thoughts no one else had and which no one must ever know. What emerged from this was myself. This was what was me. In other words, that which in me that knew something the others didn’t, that which in me I could never share with anyone else. And the loneliness, which I still felt, was something I had clung to ever since, as it was all I had. As long as I had that no one could harm me, for what they harmed then was something else. No one could take loneliness away from me. The world was a space I moved in, where anything could happen, but in the space I had inside me, which was me, everything was always the same. All my strength lay there.

Well, in my thoughts they could reach me, anyone at all could stir them up, but what were thoughts worth? What was consciousness other than the surface of the soul’s ocean? Other than small gaily coloured boats, floating plastic bottles and driftwood, waves and currents, whatever the day might bring, over a depth of several thousand metres.

He was clear in his language, in an unambiguous plain masculine way; I was unclear, vague, cowardly in mine. Not when it was just us two, but as soon as others joined us. Then it was a question of listening to where they were going and playing up to their collective will.

Inwards, that was the new outwards.

I was happy therefore my desire was so great that everything else was swept away. Then I couldn’t understand why I had been abstaining, there was nothing I wanted more, and afterwards we were close again, as we had been when we first got together, then it had been only us two and not a word had to be said for it to be like this. Everything lay in the attraction and the pleasure, it looked after itself. But without it the distance had to be broken down or counteracted with words or actions, and if I didn’t want to or didn’t have enough strength to sustain my desire we were just two young people living together, sharing nothing more than age and culture.

That evening we went to the cinema and saw True Romance. Afterwards we were going to her place to make waffles, I had the waffle iron in a bag between my feet in the cinema, when we came out it struck me that I was the antithesis of what we had just seen. They had their bags full of weapons, I had a waffle iron. I couldn’t stop laughing.

This coldness in my heart was terrible, sometimes I thought I wasn’t human, I was a Dracula who lived off other people’s emotions but had none myself. My love affairs, what else were they but a mirror? What else were they but my own feelings?