My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

All I’s of literature make use of the same words, the only difference, that which separates one literary I from another, is the way in which those words are ordered, and the fact that it is possible, in that nonuniform distribution, so very marginal when seen from afar, for an I as vital and significant as Emily Dickinson’s to emerge, is remarkable indeed. And it becomes no less remarkable when we consider that practically no one read her poems while she was alive. The overwhelming loneliness and longing she apparently felt is long since dead and buried as we read them now, all that remains is their articulation, which we awaken the very moment we allow our gaze to fall upon the words she wrote such a long time ago, and succumb to them. From that moment she sings within us. But what did she get from it, one might wonder, given that she never could have predicted that her poems would find readers throughout the world, be considered among the very best of the period to which she belonged, and be read long after people would normally have forgotten all about her and her life, though presumably they were written without thought of any reader at all? Why articulate what it feels like to be alive, rather than simply feel and think?