Spring (Seasons Quartet, #3)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

Now there was still something frugal about it all, the landscape lacked the deep fullness that came with summer, the green of the trees was still merely a tinge, for that is April: buds, shoots, uncertainty, hesitation. April lies between the great sleep and the great leap. April is the longing for something else, where the object of longing is still unknown.

For that’s how it is, we cover up our mistakes and failings, we invent stories that put ourselves in a more favourable light. Self-deception is perhaps the most human thing of all.

This was because a child’s differing needs had to be fulfilled in different ways, as if the parents’ thoughts and actions were a river that adjusted itself to the child’s course, filling it in places where before there was nothing, flowing past where it was full.

Such are the musings of a middle-aged man driving through a sunlit landscape in spring with a small baby in the back seat, I thought. Amid all the clatter of life, where every little thing was significant and a great anxiety about what would happen to us, especially to you children, kept rearing up in me.

My identity, the person I am to myself, is woven into the world of things in such a way that it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins, while my body is, in a sense, itself an object,

the absence of other people felt like a hard-to-define yet powerful deficiency, almost physical, akin to other states of deficiency such as that of salt or sunlight,

Having three children so close together had been like tying ourselves to the mast during a tempest.

Imagine this landscape lying motionless, day after day. Not a breath of wind, just the still air beneath the dark blue sky, the saturated fields, the old trees in the farmyards, the narrow roads criss-crossing the landscape. And the chalk-white clouds sailing slowly by. The atmosphere it created, at least within me, was one of solitude and belonging at one and the same time. And of endlessness and closeness – everything was small, everything was local, houses stood singly, villages too, at the same time as the vastness of the sky seemed to drag everything towards infinity, not infinite space, but rather an infinity that had to do with time.

His landscape writing is always superb.

We come from far away, from terrifying beauty, for a newborn child who opens its eyes for the first time is like a star, is like a sun, but we live our lives amid pettiness and stupidity, in the world of burned hot dogs and wobbly camping tables. The great and terrifying beauty does not abandon us, it is there all the time, in everything that is always the same, in the sun and the stars, in the bonfire and the darkness, in the blue carpet of flowers beneath the tree. It is of no use to us, it is too big for us, but we can look at it, and we can bow before it. I stood there for a long time, looking at all the people standing about in the dusk, talking and laughing, the children scampering between them, the orange flames of the bonfire stretching into the darkness. When I bent down over you, tears were running down my cheeks. You smiled as you saw my face approaching, because you didn’t know what tears were either.

Sometimes it hurts to live, but there is always something to live for.