My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

No matter where we happened to be on September 11, 2001, we heard about or saw the same thing, the two planes crashing into the twin towers. This event was in all our minds, there was no outside – apart from the place one happened to be, physically, wherever in the world. This bipartite operation, so characteristic of our age, where something is on the one hand almost completely focalized, and on the other almost completely spread out in all directions, was of course unknown in Lorrain’s day, the technologically unsophisticated seventeenth century, when an event was for those who happened to be there when it took place. When Lorrain interprets a scene from the Aeneid, he brings it across to us in a way not unlike that of a news photographer in our day and age, as a kind of witness – the fact of the former being a fictive witness, and the latter being an actual witness, makes no difference to the form – but he shows us something more besides, which has to do with the time and space in which the event took place. The great, eventless landscape that surrounds what is going on makes it so obvious to us that it is going on only in the scene’s here and now, and that this is the most important, essential aspect of any event. Oh, how simple and plain an insight, yet it is one thing to know the nature of something, quite another to feel and experience it. How hidden the actual nature of events has become to us is something we understand only when we see something unexpected happen ...