My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

endless, forever sprouting anew from dead stubs. Knowledge comes from the dead, everything we know we have learned from them. Life is the life of the one and the life of us all. Death is the death of the one and the death of us all. The sun is forever being seen for the first time, always a new pair of eyes squinting up at it, and forever being seen for the last time, other eyes closing, losing sight of it once and for all. These connections are what our myths and rituals manage and administer, and the same applies to them, they are already there for us. They are a language, a different language, and what they communicate can be communicated in no other way. In this respect the Enlightenment, resting on the idea that myth, ritual, and religion were a form of superstition, represented decay. We call the mythological view of the world unenlightened, and obviously, four hundred years after the beginning of the Enlightenment, we now know more about the material world and how it works than those who lived before that time. And not just more, but unimaginably more. But what is knowing? Throughout the Völuspá, the völva’s questions are repeated in what seems like a refrain of reluctance: Do you know enough yet, or what? Knowledge is concealed, connected to Hel, the dead and the past, out of sight, and access to it comes at a price. “Do you know enough yet, or what?” says the völva, and in that lies an evaluation of those listening in, their thirst for knowledge, at which she snee...