My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

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...