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One day they would look back and ask the same questions as me, why had things been the way they were then, why are they like this now, what exactly is the meaning of my
The world is old, yet simple, I thought to myself, and everything in it stands open.
It was as if I had been shut away inside myself, alone with my frustration, a dark and monstrous demon, which at some point had grown enormous, as if there was no way out. Ever-decreasing circles. Greater and greater darkness. Not the existential kind of darkness that was all about life and death, overarching happiness or overarching grief, but the smaller kind, the shadow on the soul, the ordinary man’s private little hell, so inconsequential as to barely deserve mention, while at the same time engulfing
The Clouds over Metapontion
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.
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.
Relevance was a matter of communication, establishing community out of what was one’s own, and the novel was one of the forms of relevance.
novel that was meant to say something true about reality could not be made too simple, it had to contain an element of exclusiveness in its communication, something not common to or shared by all, in other words something of its own, and there, at some point between the madman’s own particular and therefore uncommunicated ramblings, meaningless to everyone but the madman himself, who found them fascinatingly relevant, and the genre novel’s fixed formulations and clichés, which had become clichés by being familiar to everyone, was the domain of literature.
The issue was whether or not excellence was bound up with the personal.
Beauty is a problem in that it imparts a kind of hope. As a stylistic device in literature, a particular filter through which the world is viewed, beauty lends hope to the hopeless, worth to the worthless, meaning to the meaningless. This is inevitably so. Loneliness beautifully described raises the soul to great heights. But then the writing is no longer true because there is no beauty in loneliness, not even in yearning is there beauty.
that absence would seem instead to call for more important topics, and once they begin to determine the conversation there’s no turning back, because then it’s two diplomats exchanging information about their respective realms in a conversation that needs to be started up from scratch,
Nowadays, though, people work themselves into the ground of their own accord. Why? Because the idea has arisen that they realize themselves through their jobs. So work has become the opposite of alienating. Now it’s self-realization. Everyone works like mad now, because it’s good for them. The same with consumption. We find our identities in the purchase of goods that are mass-produced. You’d think it was a joke. But the worst thing is you’re not allowed to say that, it means you’re paranoid.
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? Why write?
And is it not this hum of the own, this distant reverberation of the self, that pervades all music, all art, all literature, and moreover all that is alive and able to sense? It has nothing to do with the I, even less with the we, only with our very being in the world.
I became closer to her than I had ever been to any other person in my life, and in that closeness there was no use for words, no use for analysis, no use for thoughts, because when all is said and done, which is another way of saying in life, when it presents itself in all its intensity, when you’re there, at the center of it all, with your entire being, the only thing that matters is feeling. Geir gave me the chance to look at life and understand it, Linda gave me the chance to live it. In the first instance I became visible to myself, in the second I vanished. That’s the difference between
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the more the significance of my life’s struggle diminishes, for what difference does it then make if I spend more or less time with my children, if I change their diapers or don’t change their diapers, if I do the dishes or don’t do the dishes, if I spend time on my work or don’t spend time on my work? Oh, how then, for crying out loud, can we make the lives we live an expression of life, rather than the expression of an ideology? All the thou-shalt-nots by which our small middle-class lives were constrained, all the things we weren’t supposed to say or do, or else were obliged to say or do,
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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.
couldn’t rely on myself and my own recollections, they were infected by the writing. I knew that from earlier, that writing about a recollection changed it, all of a sudden you no longer knew what belonged
the recollection and what belonged to the writing. I didn’t know what was true.
Life was there to be felt, that was what we strove for, but why? For our headstones to say, “Here lies a person who liked to sleep”?
They were doing it so as to learn how not to think. This is the most important thing of all in art and literature, and hardly anyone can do it, or even realizes it is the case, because it is no longer taught or conveyed. Now everyone thinks art is to do with reason and criticism, that it’s all about ideas, and the art schools teach theory. Which is decay, not progress.
But we don’t create anything in that space other than more softness and warmth. I see it as a weakness. That’s why I have no respect for men who just wander into all that. Everyone hails them for doing it, but all they’re actually doing is shirking a responsibility.
Inside me was this enormous distance from other people, at the same time as I was hugely impressionable and open to influence, and could allow myself to be tied to someone and remain incapable of freeing myself. A friendship never ties, because if it does it ceases
to be a friendship.
Only those who had every reason to be conceited, those of real caliber, showed no trace of conceit, only they were humble. Conceit and self-righteousness were part of a defense mechanism without which a person would be crushed under the weight of their own weaknesses, shortcomings, and flaws, and that fact underlay almost every discussion I witnessed,
Weakness was important, and greatness was important. But not what lay in between.
In the world outside language, one could only ever be alone.
is treacherous in that it implies time, a before and a now, whereas in reality only the now exists, in reality there is but one time for everything:
The world was the same, reality changed. To describe the world is to establish reality.
The idiot is he who gapes and laughs with those who laugh at him, his face a question mark. The idiot is the cynic’s antipode. Between them lies the choice. The cynic asks, But who will forgive? The idiot replies, I will.
if the world is meaningless, what good does it do to fasten our gaze on it? What kind of foolish middle-class delusion is that?
but for those who are not whole, good isn’t even within their horizon; indeed, perhaps no horizon exists for such people, no up, no down, no good, no bad, only anger or pain or loathing, because something inside them is broken, truly fucked up, and they are so deeply entangled in all sorts of unmanageable emotions, struggling for life with their backs to the wall, unless they’ve resigned themselves and given up completely. So many struggle for life, so many give up, and the rest, who know nothing of such pain or anger, watch TV in the cozy warmth of their own goodness.
To begin with we are near the world, I believe, but if our trust is broken we seek refuge deep within ourselves, cut off from what goes on outside, and the remoteness
Wasn’t that what was happening? Never had the darkness of August felt more replete than now. Replete with what? The beauty of time passing.
A memory is a ledge on the mountainside of the mind; there we are, drinking and chatting, and on the ledge below us my dad sits in his chair, dead, his face smeared with blood.
That was the feeling I had: the world was vanishing because it was always somewhere else, and my life was vanishing because it, too, was always somewhere else. If I was to write a novel it would have to be about the real world the way it was, seen from the point of view of someone who was trapped inside it with his body, though not with his mind, which was trapped in something else, the powerful urge to rise out of such fusty triviality into the clear, piercing air of something immeasurably greater.
I knew, too, that what the novel can do, and which perhaps is its most important property, is to penetrate our veils of habit and familiarity simply by describing things in a slightly different way,
Reading The Sound and the Fury is like going into the house of a family you don’t know, where everyone’s talking about their relations and paying you not even the slightest attention; all you get is a number of names connected to various events and occurrences everyone knows about except you, which is why they are never related in their entirety but merely alluded
The poem is akin to the song and exists somewhere between music and the word, which is to say that it is capable of reaching beyond the word and thus to break out of the social, which is another term for the world as we know it.
This means poetry is related also to religion, which has always been rooted in the human domain, staring out at the nonhuman, in whose icy winds we are unknown and strangers to all, not just to each other, but also to ourselves.
Forgiveness is the uniformity of the divine implanted in the human. It is as if the gaze is turned from the stars to the eyes.
People have been reading the Bible as holy Scripture for a couple of thousand years, and every word it contains has been considered meaningful, a dizzyingly tight mesh of different meanings and shades of meaning have thereby arisen, which no single human can ever possibly command. What happened when I started working on those texts was that I learned to
To grow older is not to understand more but to realize that there is more to understand.
The sentence “God is living” can only mean “He is not dead,” which is to say that he is the opposite of the negative, the negation of negations. But what is he then? Can we say that God is anything at all? It is to this progression that the Kabbalist notion of God resting in the depths of his nothingness belongs. God is nothing.
Language is the human. In language I exist, but only if there is also a you to which the I of the speech act can relate, because if not, how then should the I separate itself and find form? The you-less I is no one and everyone.
If I do, I must do so with caution, since this is what it means to read, to give up the self and yield to the alien voice, obeying it, in this instance a voice created by a Paul Celan, a human being long since dead but who in these words and their fine shades of meaning emerges into view, an I directed toward a you, which I, more than fifty years after it was written, endeavor to identify with.
but also to what was lost with their death, which is to say “we.” It was in Celan’s native tongue, German, that the Jews were first separated from the “we” of the language to become “they,” and subsequently, in the extermination camps, “it.” The Jews were deprived of their name; in the name lay not only their identity, but also their humanity; they became “it,” bodies with limbs that could be counted, but not named. They became no one. Then they became nothing. All that was left when they were gone was ash.
When a person dies in a society his or her memory lives on among the others and their physical belongings are divided up among the next of kin. A we has lost a you, which in death has become it.
What they were when they died, their own “is,” ceased to exist, but also their “was,” and that nothing, which is absolute, in which no one and nothing is left, creates a distinction between is and was which death in itself does not establish, for the we never dies, it lives on, all our institutions, all that we build and all that we do is directed toward the continuation of the we, more resilient than any of its individual parts, which all will die, remaining for a short time in the memory of the closest we, which in turn dies too, until the we, fundamentally the same, eventually comprises
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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.
