My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

And as always when I saw or experienced something wonderful, I thought of Ingvild. She was a living person who existed in the world with her own way of perceiving it, her own memories and experiences, she had her mother and father, her sister and her friends, the countryside she had grown up and walked in, all this resided within her, this immense complexity that is another person and of which we see so little when we are with them, yet it is enough to like them, to love them, for it takes nothing for this to happen, two serious eyes that suddenly beam with happiness, two playful teasing eyes that suddenly become unsure or introspective, that falter, a person faltering, is there anything more beautiful than that? With all their inner richness, yet faltering all the same? You see it, you fall in love with it, and it is not much, perhaps you will say it is not much, but the heart is always right. It never errs. The heart never errs. The heart never ever errs.

The first poem was short. NOWADAYS Whatever you say, let the roots follow, let them dangle With all the dirt just to make it absolutely clear where they came from Make it absolutely clear where who came from? I read it again, and then I realized it was referring to the roots of words. That is, you should display the roots of words and the dirt around them to make it clear to those listening where the words came from. So, talk coarsely, or at least don’t be frightened to.

It would be wonderful to spend a few days there, where no one cared about what I was or what I wasn’t, I had always been enough for them.

he was open, very much so, and basically brilliant, but when he touched on areas I knew something about, such as literature, he was also naïve, and I found that moving, somehow, as I did all chinks of weakness in the armor of others.

You carried your inner thoughts and passions within you, and perhaps shared them with a partner, what did I know about such matters, at any rate it wasn’t something you brought up when 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 remodeled as entertaining anecdotes or jokes.

But that didn’t justify my stay here. I had to write. But what? Five days in succession could pass without me saying a word to anyone. Everything was unfamiliar, the houses, the people, the shops, the countryside, no one needed me, no one cared about me, and that was perfect, that was exactly how I wanted it, just walking around and looking, and looking at everything in existence without it looking back. But to what end? And with what justification? What was the point of looking if you couldn’t write about what you saw? What was the point of experiencing anything at all if you couldn’t write about what you’d experienced?