The End (My Struggle #6)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

All generations live their lives as if they are the first, gathering experiences, progressing onward through the years, and as insights accumulate, meaning diminishes, or if it doesn’t diminish, it at least becomes less self-evident. That’s the way it is. The question is whether it has always been that way. In the Old Testament, where everything is expressed through action and the narratives are closely bound up with physical reality, and in the ancient Greek epics, where lives unfold in similarly concrete fashion, doubt never comes from within, as a condition of the individual’s existence, but always from without, by some external occurrence, for instance a sudden death, and is thus bound up with the conditions of external, earthly life. The New Testament, however, is different. How might we otherwise explain the darkness in Jesus’ soul that eventually drove him to Jerusalem, there to close door upon door until only the last and simplest remained? His final days can be interpreted as a way of eliminating all choices, so that responsibility for what was to happen, his slow death on the cross, would not be his, since he would be directed there, so to speak, by the will of others. The same thing occurs in Hamlet, his soul too is darkened, he too approaches his demise with open eyes, in such a way that it appears governed by fate and thereby inevitable. In the case of King Oedipus it is fate, he is genuinely oblivious, but for both Hamlet and Jesus it is a choice they make an...

No era can surely have undergone such radical transformation as our own, the second half of the twentieth century has so little in common with the first, it seems as if they occurred in different worlds entirely.

This fear of people being angry with me was the child’s fear, it didn’t belong in the adult world, where it was unprecedented, yet something inside me had never made that transition, never become adult and hardened in that way, so the child’s emotions lived on in the adult. The adult, which is to say I, was completely at the mercy of the child’s emotions, sometimes it hurt so much I could hardly bear it, knowing as I did that I was an adult and acutely aware that the feeling and everything to do with it was deeply shameful. What was the reason for it? If my sense of self had been strong and whole, if I’d been more assured, I would have been able to say to myself that I did this and I’m accountable for it, and if anyone has another opinion that’s their business, not mine. If they want the argument, I’m ready for an argument. But my sense of self wasn’t at all strong or whole, I wasn’t at all assured, and my self-confidence was completely built around what other people might think of me. My own thoughts and opinions didn’t matter in that respect. I was still living in the world Dad had set up for me, where everything I did basically came down to not doing anything wrong. What was wrong was not defined by any set of rules, but was instead a matter of what he at any given time decided was wrong. These circumstances I transferred to my adult life, in which they no longer existed apart from inside me. But Dad was dead, he’d been dead for eleven years. I knew all this, but knowin...

I’d been hoping that being with the kids would help and give me a new perspective, but it was just the opposite, I found myself feeling sorry for them having me for a father, for the person they saw and related to wasn’t the same as who I was inside, and this would gradually dawn on them when they were old enough to be able to judge the people around them in terms of personal qualities and character traits, rather than just how they appeared to them in ordinary interaction. I wasn’t good enough for them, but that wasn’t the sad part of it, the sad part was that they didn’t know.

Merciless is the beating heart.

My question is why we conceal the things we do. Where is the shame in human decline? The complete human catastrophe? To live the complete human catastrophe is terrible indeed, but to write about it? Why shame and concealment when what we are dealing with here is basically the most human thing of all? What’s so dangerous about it that we cannot speak of it out loud?

The children stood and took stock of each other for a few seconds, the same way dogs do – what kind of children are you, they seemed to be thinking – before accepting the new situation

The right to work, what kind of a right is that? How’s that supposed to be liberating? It’s just the opposite, a prison. The consequence of that is that our kids are farmed out to an institution from the age of two, and what happens then? Mum and dad are almost driven insane, aren’t they? They’re riddled with guilt, so they spend all the time they can on their kids when they’re not at work, trying to be as close to them as possible. Compensation, compensation, compensation.’

Who knows what’s going to happen in a place, who he’s going to meet and what it’s going to mean for him? We can’t control life, only our thoughts about life. So everything that has to do with our kids is actually all about us. It’s the tyranny of good intent. All we can do is try for the best, it’s impossible to imagine any other way, but the consequences are beyond our control.’

A Proustian writer would probably have ignored the physical-concrete aspect of the situation and emphasised its reminiscence in memory, which by virtue of being a representation is connected with all other representations, which is to say that it shares the characteristics of the work of art, the reproduction of something no longer here but which nevertheless remains within us, in the almost dreamlike haze that is such an important element of our reality,

Geir gave me the chance to look at life and understand it, Linda gave me the chance to live it. In the first instance I became visible to myself, in the second I vanished. That’s the difference between friendship and love.

A choir of nine-or ten-year-old pupils sang pop songs by the likes of Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey; two lads of the same age played piano; some others, slightly older, perhaps twelve or thirteen, performed a rap. After each performance the church erupted into exuberant applause. It was like an audition for American Idol. The priest spoke about how important it was to be joyful, he told them fame and fortune didn’t matter and that everyone was equal. There was no mention at all of God, Jesus or the Bible. After the sermon, which lasted all of five minutes, the pupils who had stood out most during the year were called forward. They received diplomas.

When it came to religion, one had to tread carefully, church had long since been separated from state, and now things had got to the stage where priests no longer mentioned God or Jesus or the Bible when addressing schoolchildren, since this could cause offence to the many who came from Muslim homes. It was this same ideology, hostile to all difference, that could not accept categories of male and female, he and she. Since han and hun are denotative of gender, it was suggested a new pronoun, hen, be used to cover both. The ideal human being was a gender-neutral hen whose foremost task in life was to avoid oppressing any religion or culture by preferring their own. Such total self-obliteration, aggressive in its insistence on levelling out, though in its own view tolerant, was a phenomenon of the cultural middle class, that segment of the population which controlled the media, the schools and other major institutions of society, and it existed, as far as I could tell, only in northern Europe.

As Nietzsche says, empathy merely increases the amount of suffering in the world. Instead of just one, there’s two.’

A writer such as Marcel Proust would be unthinkable without Impressionism, his entire work built around the relationship between recollection and oblivion, light and shade, visible and invisible, and the compelling feeling the world, especially the sunken world, yet also the prevailing world of the present, awakens in him, is shaped, if not brought into being, by the eye of the Impressionist.

Inside me was this enormous distance from other people, at the same time as I was hugely impressionable and open to influence, and could allow myself to be tied to someone and remain incapable of freeing myself. A friendship never ties, because if it does it ceases to be a friendship. But a relationship ties, because its foundations are deeper, rooted in the emotions, in the very fulcrum of life, and a relationship is in every respect a common bond; if we are not bound to each other, then what we have is not a relationship but a friendship.

The idiot is he who gapes and laughs with those who laugh at him, his face a question mark. The idiot is the cynic’s antipode. Between them lies the choice. The cynic asks, But who will forgive? The idiot replies, I will.

The connections that hold us back, which cause us to thrash in our chains, as it were, have to do with expectations and obligation, with what the world asks of us, and sooner or later we come to a point where we realise the imbalance of our honouring the world’s demands while the world fails to honour ours. At that point we become free, we can do as we please, but what has made us free, the meaninglessness of the world, also deprives that freedom of its meaning.

Ulysses has become the myth of the difficult book, eight hundred pages about a single day, Freud is associated with the subconscious, with stretching out on a couch and talking about your childhood, and with jokes about cigars and trains going through tunnels, Husserl is Heidegger’s forerunner, Heidegger himself a Nazi. The fact that Joyce writes about this, the way culture’s every expression is broken down to live among us only barely understood, as misconstruals, assumptions, half-truths, myths and surmisals, bits of this and fragments of that, as if to show that culture is this, the human and living is that, God but a shout in the street, is perhaps ironic in view of he himself becoming the very epitome of literary elitism and obliviousness to the world, though quite understandable given the fact that in order to get there, in order to penetrate into this, he had to shun that same quotidian culture’s ways of communicating.

Reading a novel after having listened to Bach’s cello suites is like leaving a sunset to descend into a cellar.

To grow older is not to understand more but to realise that there is more to understand.

Hitler leaves for Vienna to seek admission to the Academy of Fine Arts; confident of his own talents he considers it a formality that he will be given a place. But he is turned down. In view of all the pressures at home, all those who held that his artist dreams were folly and who wished only that he would pull himself together and get himself a proper job, the rejection must have been crushing indeed, and in fact he told no one.

That came costly to humankind.

Humanity advances in much the same way as a forest, for whose trees the number of other trees changes nothing.

The untrue world is a place to which we escape in dreams, the true world is where we live. The sense of the untrue world becoming increasingly dominant in our lives, to the extent almost of becoming the world we live in, is what brings about the forceful craving for reality that has begun to emerge in the culture around us.

Morality is the we within the I, which is to say a concept of the social world, and it stands above the truth. The ‘ought’ of morality is the voice of decency that saves us. But it is also the voice of I-constraint, the antithesis of truth and freedom, the voice that stands in our way.

The time from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the Second World War was a period when the fundamental building blocks of our human existence and organisational structures were in flux, not to say disintegrating, and the unprecedented radicality of those fifty years, which gave rise to the last two great utopian movements, Nazism and Communism, can only be understood on the basis that the societal order suddenly, because of a massive build-up of pressure arising in industrialism’s in time extremely compressed and in volume extremely expansive changes, no longer could be taken for granted, it began to crack and appeared increasingly arbitrary, governed by rules imposed from without, in a civilisational system at odds with its people, from which they, or many of them, felt utterly alienated.

Here, in the transition between the one and the all, resides the problem of our time. On the one hand, we live in a society in which a whole set of evaluations in one way or another deemed threatening to the status quo and associated with violence, revolution and utopia are treated as taboo in the sense that they may only occur in contexts of ritual, moored only figuratively in reality; on the other hand, we live in a society that is changing in ways we cannot consider to be anything but revolutionary, along lines of flight that are directly connected with those taboos, which then are of such form and nature as to preclude that connection. We can talk about the one thing, but only as something outside ourselves, inside a closed system; the other, happening in our midst, is hard for us to see, since the correspondence between those events and our understanding of ourselves is so great, and the door of the external perspective closed.

This is what happened in Norway this summer, when a man only a few years younger than me went out to an island and began indiscriminately shooting and killing young people. He acted like a figure in a computer game, but the act of heroism he thought he was performing, and the carnage he brought about, did not belong to the world of images, was not abstract and without consequence, did not occur in some other place, detached from the time and place of his physical body; it was real, tangible, absolute. Every shot he fired lodged in human flesh, every eye that closed was a real eye belonging to a human being with a real life. Only remoteness can make such an act possible, since in remoteness consequence ceases to exist, and the question we must ask ourselves is not what kind of political opinions this person held, nor if he was mad, but more simply how such remoteness could ever arise in our culture. Did he feel a yearning for reality, for an end to relativity, for the consequences of the absolute? We must assume he did. Do I feel such a yearning? Yes, I do. My basic feeling is that of the world disappearing, that our lives are being filled with images of the world, and that these images are inserting themselves between us and the world, which for that reason is becoming lighter and lighter and less and less binding.

We can strip down reality, layer by layer, and never reach its core, for what the last layer covers over is the most unreal of all, the greatest fiction of them all, the true nature of things.

Be that as it may, this doesn’t stop me thinking that I empathise too little with the lives of other people. Most conspicuously and persistently with regard to Linda. One of the many things she criticises me for is that I don’t see her. This is not quite true, I do see her, the problem is that I see her more or less in the way you see a room you know well; everything is there, the lamp and the carpet and the bookcase, the sofa and the window and the floor, but somehow transparently, no mark is left on your mind.

Why do I organise my life like this? What do I want with this neutrality? Obviously it is to eliminate as much resistance as possible, to make the days slip past as easily and unobtrusively as possible. But why? Isn’t that synonymous with wanting to live as little as possible? With telling life to leave me in peace so that I can … yes, well, what? Read? Oh, but come on, what do I read about, if not life? Write? Same thing. I read and write about life. The only thing I don’t want life for is to live it.