Some Rain Must Fall (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

When, shortly afterwards, I stopped at the top of the hill and saw the town beneath me, my feeling of happiness was so ecstatic that I didn’t know how I would be able to make it home, sit there and write, eat or sleep. But the world is constructed in such a way that it meets you halfway in moments precisely like these, your inner joy seeks an outer counterpart and finds it, it always does, even in the bleakest regions of the world, for nothing is as relative as beauty. Had the world been different, in my opinion, without mountains and oceans, plains and seas, deserts and forests, and consisted of something quite different, inconceivable to us, as we don’t know anything other than this, we would also have found it beautiful. A world with gloes and raies, evanbillits and conulames, for example, or ibitera, proluffs and lopsits, whatever they might be, we would have sung their praises because that is the way we are, we extol the world and love it although this is not necessary, the world is the world, it is all we have.

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.

Academic writing was actually about hiding what you didn’t know.

Everything was like the world as it was, but all the meaning had been stripped from it, and what was left was a parody, a travesty, grotesque and painful.

I wanted to be a good person, full of empathy for those worse off than me, but if they came too close, what I felt for them was contempt or anger, as if their deficiencies touched something deeper inside me.

It was nine o’clock, mum asked if I would mind scattering spruce sprigs over the road by the gate. This was an old custom. I went down in the rain, laid sprigs over the gravel, looked up at the house, the windows aglow in the grey morning. I cried. Not because of death and its coldness but for life and its warmth. I cried because of the goodness that existed. I cried because of the light in the mist, I cried because of the living people in the dead man’s house and I thought, I can’t waste my life.

What I discovered during these months was the great power of routine and repetition. I did exactly the same every day so that I didn’t have to waste any energy and could put it all into my writing. Which also derived energy from the same source, three pages in one day became three hundred pages in a hundred days, and in a year more than a thousand.