My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

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, ...