The End (My Struggle #6)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

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.