My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

out. Dad was no longer around, and my fear of his rage had been transferred onto others: I was twenty years old and scared stiff of other people being angry with me. It never went away. When I left everything behind and moved to Stockholm at thirty-three, the fear was still inside me. Linda, whom I met soon after, was temperamental and often unreasonable in her outbursts, and yet I allowed myself to be intimidated completely, even the slightest raising of her voice was enough to fill me with anxiety, and the only thing I could think about would be to make it go away. Even as a forty-year-old, sitting on the balcony on a morning in August 2009, I was scared of someone being angry with me. Whenever I gave anyone reason to be, I became so terrified and despairing and so full of anguish, I never knew how I would ever get over it. 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.

Or rather, they exist still, but are hidden from us and may no longer be invoked, existing no more as a value, a goal, or a utopia, which is to say as something superordinate, but only as something subordinate, in the life of the individual and in the form of a paradox: each individual I is unique and inalienable, though in exactly the same way as every other. We elevate some individuals among us but are unable to acknowledge the fact, and we are permeated by others, unknowing that this is so, or unwilling to recognize it. Yet it is in terms of influence that this becomes tangible and visible to us in its entirety, in the striking difference between acceptable influence,

Language belongs to the we, it is ours, but what we express through it is our individuality. That individuality, expressed again and again in language, through the centuries, is the cacophony of the we. In language and culture we overcome death, and this is perhaps their most fundamental function.

Why do I organize 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.