My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

FIRE Fire belongs to the group of phenomena that has never undergone any evolution. Change is therefore alien to its form, it will not be moved in any direction by the many fluctuations of its settings, it rests in its own completeness. Fire is perfect. But fire’s unique feature, that which sets it apart from many of the other unchanging phenomena that exist, is that it has managed to detach itself from the tyranny of time and place. While water is doomed to be situated in a particular place forever, in some form or other, as air and mountains also are, fire has this remarkable ability to cease existing, quite simply – not only to disappear from view, to go into hiding, but indeed to allow itself to be extinguished – only to reappear exactly as before, in a new place, in a new time. For us, this makes fire difficult to understand, used as we are to regarding the world as a coherent system of continuous events, which at countless different speeds – from the tree’s endlessly slow growth to the rapid fall of raindrops – progress temporally. Fire stands outside this system and that must have been why in the Old Testament the Divine revealed itself to man in the form of a flame: the form of revelation and fire are the same. The Divine has this ability to reveal itself suddenly, in its complete form, only then to disappear. The Divine also has this mysterious alien and merciless nature, which causes us to both fear and admire it. Anyone who has witnessed a house burning will kno...