My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

If I had lived here all on my own, I thought, in a little cabin in the mountains, for example, without a house nearby, but set in exactly the same landscape, then I would have felt the weight of the mountains and the depth of the sea, then I would have heard the winds sweeping across the peaks, the waves beating against the shore, and although I would hardly have been afraid, I would definitely have been vigilant. I would have taken my leave of the landscape every night and woken up to it every morning. Now that wasn’t the case, I could feel it with every fiber of my being, here it was faces that counted.

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.