My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

The human domain has both outer and inner boundaries, in the space between them lies our culture, which is what makes us visible to ourselves.

How might we otherwise explain the darkness in Jesus’s 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 and a direction in which they choose to go. Oedipus is blind, Hamlet and Jesus see with open eyes into the darkness.

I was completely the opposite, storing up and accumulating grievances and frustrations, which then lay like a sediment inside me, fossils of emotions, darkening my mind increasingly until eventually I became as hard as stone, unreceptive to reconciliation and tenderness.

Obviously, I’ve seen you feel ashamed of me in certain situations, and still do see that. It’s hard, because it touches on aspects of myself that I’m painfully aware of – the way I can sometimes not be there inside myself; the way I can criticize things that I haven’t thought of myself; preferring the role of someone who reads Adorno rather than actually reading Adorno. Mediocrity combined with poor self-awareness and big ambitions doesn’t come out very well.

I’ve seen you feel ashamed of me in certain situations, and still do see that. It’s hard, because it touches on aspects of myself that I’m painfully aware of – the way I can sometimes not be there inside myself; the way I can criticize things that I haven’t thought of myself; preferring the role of someone who reads Adorno rather than actually reading Adorno. Mediocrity combined with poor self-awareness and big ambitions doesn’t come out very well.

The world dissolved when filled with sunlight, that was the feeling I had, the relationships between all things vanished, everything seemed suddenly to exist on the same level. It was the job of culture to define those relationships, establish hierarchies of connections and draw together what lay dispersed into particular, meaningful patterns. That was why we had novels, films, TV series, poems, and plays, but also newspapers, television news, and gossip magazines. That a culture originating in a sun-scorched landscape, underneath a burning sky, along the fertile banks of a river, would draw the world together in a different way and create other meaningful patterns was obvious.

everything had its own significance, that was what culture was. The fabric of a pair of trousers was significant, the width of a trouser leg was significant, the pattern in the curtain hung in front of a window was significant, the sudden lowering of a gaze was significant. The particular way a word was pronounced was significant. What a person knew about one thing or another was also significant. Culture charged the world with meaning by establishing differences within it, and those differences, in which everything of value existed, varied from culture to culture. That the units were becoming increasingly bigger, and cultures increasingly similar, was a discouraging thought, at least for someone like me who was fascinated by differences and attracted by impenetrability.

It wasn’t hard to write well, but it was hard to make writing that was alive, writing that could pry open the world and draw it together in one and the same movement.

the novel and the poem are always entities in their own right, singular and existing as they are, and the fact that what the novel or the poem says cannot be said in any other way makes them essentially mysterious.

The number of people we come close to during our lives is small, and we fail to realize how infinitely important each and every one of them is to us until we grow older and can see things from afar. When I was sixteen, I thought life was without end, the number of people in it inexhaustible. This was by no means strange, since right from starting school at the age of seven I’d been surrounded by hundreds of children and adults; people were a renewable resource, found in abundance, but what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day I would look back on my life, and this would be what I looked back on. What then had been insignificant, as weightless as air, a series of events dissolving in exactly the same way as the darkness dissolved in the mornings, would twenty years on seem laden with destiny and fate. The people who had been there then would become even more important, infinitely significant in as much as they had not only been shaping my perception of who I was, had not only been the people through which my own face emerged and became visible, but embodied the very understanding of how this particular life turned out the way it did.

It is because it is always dark inside the brain, and still.

Darwin wrote a book, and whereas biological nature before Darwin existed spatially, after Darwin it existed temporally. The world was the same, reality changed. To describe the world is to establish reality.

Ladybugs were among the most appealing of insects. So delicate and flowerlike in their beauty, they were the very antithesis of the monstrous. Mosquitoes could occur in huge swarms and be everywhere, there was nothing unnatural about that, but with ladybugs there was something ominous about it, as if something had gone wrong, as if something that ought to have been closed had been opened, and as I looked out over the sound, where the gigantic structure of the Öresund Bridge rose up disconcertingly near us to the south and the contours of the Barsebäck nuclear power plant were visible to the north, the blue sky above the glittering blue sea teeming with tiny black dots I knew to be ladybugs, I thought to myself: this is how the world ends.

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

The forces that exist within the realm of the social reveal themselves only when they are exceeded, and they are powerful indeed, almost, no, absolutely impossible to break away from. I imagined I was going to write exactly what I thought and believed and felt, in other words to be honest, this is how it is, the truth of the I, but it turned out to be so incompatible with the truth of the we, or this is how it is meant to be, that it foundered after only a few short sentences. I came to understand what morality is, and where it is found. 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.

This was made possible by a shift in the language, displayed in its purest form in Mein Kampf, which contains no “you,” only an “I,” and a “we,” which is what makes it possible to turn “they” into “it.” In “you” was decency. In “it” was evil. But it was “we” who carried it out.