My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

“He’s the neighbor I was telling you about. I’ve only spoken to him three or four times. He wears his heart on his sleeve. Never seen anything like it.” “You can say that again,” she said. “I’ll be off then. Can you call me?” What a shock. For a brief moment, no more than a second or two, I was unable to breathe. “Yes,” I said. “I can.” When, shortly afterward, 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.

When Grandma and I looked at each other it was from either side of a chasm. For her, family was the central point in her life, in other words, her family, the one that came from the farm where she grew up, and then her children. I had the impression that Grandpa’s family, which had moved inland from the islands a generation earlier, was not important. Her family was the center of her existence, and the soil. Kjartan would sometimes say that the soil was her religion, that they were soil worshippers in Jølster, where she came from, a kind of ancient heathendom they had clad in the language and rites of Christianity. Look at Astrup’s pictures, he would say, all the fires they lit on Midsummer Eve, that’s Jølster folk for you, they dance around the flames as though they were their gods. Kjartan would laugh when he said such things, and it was not without disdain, yet there was always some ambivalence because Kjartan had a lot of her in him: the serious attitude to life and the deep sense of duty were in Kjartan, too, and if she worshipped and cultivated the soil, Kjartan worshipped and cultivated nature, the presence of the universe in the form of birds and animals, mountains and skies.

The song of the Sirens. Those who heard it were also lost, felt themselves being drawn to them, did everything in their power to get close, and perished. The Sirens were both Eros and Thanatos, desire and death, the most desirable and the most dangerous. Orpheus, who sang so beautifully that everyone who heard him became spellbound and was lost, he descended into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice and this was within his power so long as he didn’t turn and look at her, but he did, and so she was lost forever. A French philosopher by the name of Blanchot had written about this, and I read his essay about Orpheus, in which he wrote that art was the force that caused the night to open, but that it is Eurydice he wants and she was the utmost that art could attain. Eurydice was the second night, Blanchot wrote. These ideas were too grandiose for me, but I was drawn to them and tried to get my head around them, to capture them, to assimilate them, unsuccessfully, I saw them from the outside, knowing that their full meaning escaped me. Give the sacred back to the sacred? The night of the night? I recognized the main figure, that which appears and disappears at the same moment or the simultaneous presence of the one and the other, which cancels out the one, this was a figure I had seen in many poems from that period, and I also felt a particular attraction to the ideas about the night, the second night, and death, but as soon as I attempted to think independently about it, in oth...

When I sat in the reading room, which was old and had a kind of somber atmosphere, and read Blanchot in the afternoon, a completely new feeling arose in me, something I had never felt before, a sort of extreme excitement, as though I found myself in the proximity of something unique, mixed with an equally extreme impatience, I had to go there, and these two feelings were so incompatible that I wanted to jump up and run and shout and sit perfectly still and read on all at the same time. What was strange was that the restlessness began to course through me at the moment when I read something good that I had understood and absorbed, it was as though it was simply impossible to bear. Often I stood up and took a break then, and while I walked along the corridors and up the stairs to the first floor of the canteen, the excitement and the impatience mingled with the dropped jaw of my consciousness, which was to do with my pursuing these paths alone, and so on, my soul in an inexplicable turmoil, I bought myself a coffee and sat down at a table and tried to appear as calm as possible.

Not much more than that happened, yet I experienced it as rich and meaningful in the sense that I never questioned it, there were no alternatives, in more or less the same way that people never questioned a horse and cart in the centuries before the car was invented. And somehow it was rich, too, and full of significance, because every one of the tiny arenas of interest contained an unending wealth of nuances and distinctions, a band was not just a band, for example, it carried with it a multitude of other details, and there were thousands of them. A Literature student was not only a Literature student, although it probably looked like that from a distance, once you got closer to one, as I did with Espen, each and every one of them was his own complete world, there were hundreds of them, and of students, thousands. Then there were all the books that existed and all the knowledge they contained, as well as their interconnections. There were millions of them. Bergen was a tract of land and it wasn’t just rain that fell into it, there was also everything that was thought and done throughout the world that found its way here, to the foundations of this town in whose streets we walked.

Academic writing was actually about hiding what you didn’t know. There was a language, a technique, and I had mastered it. In everything there were gaps, which language could cover over, so long as you had acquired the know-how. I had, for instance, never read Adorno, knew practically nothing about the Frankfurt School, just the snippets I had picked up here and there, but in an assignment I could maneuver the little knowledge I actually had in such a way as to make it appear greater and more comprehensive. Another technique that was held in high regard was the ability to transfer knowledge from one field to another, preferably in a surprising way, this, too, was simple, all you had to do was build a bridge between them and then your work seemed to have a new original element, even though actually there was nothing new or original in it. It didn’t have to be brilliant, not even particularly good, because all it was intended to do was provide evidence that you thought for yourself, had your own opinions, besides of course showing that you had knowledge of the topic.

Afterward I lay on my bed reading a novel by V. S. Naipaul I had found on sale a few days earlier, it had been in a box outside the bookshop and was called The Enigma of Arrival. I liked it even though there was no plot, just a description of a man who has moved to a house in a remote village in England, everything is alien to him, but slowly he conquers the countryside, or the countryside conquers him. It struck me that you could find rest in the prose, the way you can rest under a tree or in a chair in the garden, and that had a value in itself. Why actually should you write about actions?

I sat at the back of the bus and put on my Walkman, played Sonic Youth, a band I had tried to like for ages, without any success, until that autumn when Goo came out. One night I had been listening to it, downstairs with Espen, we had been smoking hash, and I was lost in the music, literally, I saw it as rooms and corridors, floors and walls, ditches and slopes, small forests between apartment blocks and railway lines, and didn’t emerge from it until the song stopped, it was like drawing breath because the next minute a new song started and I was caught again. The exception was the second song, “Tunic,” it just kept moving forward, I sat with my eyes closed and drifted with it. Strange, I thought now as it started in my headset, because the lyrics, or at least the chorus, explicitly stated the opposite. You aren’t never going anywhere You aren’t never going anywhere I ain’t never going anywhere I ain’t never going anywhere

The mist drifted in great sheets above the dense dark green, bordering on black, spruce trees on the hillside across the mere. It was nine o’clock, Mom 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 gray morning. I cried. Not because of death and its coldness but 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.

The snake, sleepy and lethargic, slowly raised its head and then, so quickly I recoiled, launched itself at the mouse. It was given four mice. For the next four days it lay still in the aquarium with four large bulges in its otherwise slim body. Once the world consisted of creatures like this one, deeply primitive, they slithered across the ground or thundered along on their huge taloned feet. What was life like when that was all there was? When we knew that once there had been nothing else, and actually it was still like that? Just a body and food and light and death? One thing I had learned when I was working at the first institution: life wasn’t modern. All the variants, all the deformities, all the freaks of nature, all the mental disabilities, all the insanity, all the injuries, all the illnesses, they still existed, they were as present now as they had been in the Middle Ages, but we had hidden them, we had put them in enormous buildings in the forest, created special camps for them, consistently kept them out of sight so as to give the impression the world was hale and hearty, that that was how the world and life were, but they weren’t, life was also grotesque and distorted, sick and crooked, undignified and humiliated. The human race was full of fools, idiots, and freaks, either they were born like this or they became like this, but they were no longer on the streets, they no longer ran around frightening the wits out of people, they were in civilization’s shadow, ...

when I left to catch the bus to town it felt as if everything was within my reach, I was on to something important, all I had to do was stretch out for it. This was a vague feeling, nothing on which you could build, but all the same I knew I had something there. In the mist, in the darkness of the forest, in the dew drops on the spruce needles. In the whales that swam in the sea, in the heart beating in my breast. Mist, heart, blood, trees. Why were they so appealing? What was it that enticed me with such power? That filled me with such enormous desire? Mist, heart, blood, trees. Oh, if only I could write about them, no, not write about them but make my writing be them, then I would be happy. Then I would have peace of mind.

I took the lid off the saucepan. Circles of grease had floated to the top, a couple of sausages had already split. I pulled it off the heat and took a pair of wooden tongs from the drawer. The clock on the wall above the window showed it was nearly twelve. Even if the land was leased out and everything that could be called farmwork had ceased many years ago, they still maintained the old mealtimes: breakfast at six, lunch at twelve, tea at five, and supper at nine. Habits that were tied to farmwork. This was how it had been around here for many centuries. And it had been like this for a reason. The fury I occasionally felt as they sat down to eat lunch at twelve sharp was completely unjustified, it was unreasonable to get worked up about this. Yet, somehow, yes, it was reasonable: what sort of life was it getting up at the crack of dawn to sit around all morning, as she did, in a chair, or as in his case, to lie on the sofa, with the radio on so loud that the voices were distorted, what sort of a life was it, living day after day, as though they were waiting for something and while they waited went into the kitchen to eat, then returned to wait and so on and so on? It was deeply entrenched inside them, almost an instinct, any tiny deviation could cause tremors that spread and became, or so it seemed, unbearable, perhaps even life-threatening.