My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

If we are far away, looking at it from high above, we see simply a mass of bodies – limbs, heads, eyes, hair, mouths, ears – man as the creature he is, the human being in terms only of its biology and materiality, and this was what made it possible to incinerate those people, and what their incineration moreover revealed, as if it were some new perspective on the human, our worthlessness, our interchangeability, life rising up in a well. Human life as a cluster of mussels clinging to rocks in the sea, human beings as beetles and vermin, man as a shoal of writhing fish brought gasping to the surface in nets. If, however, we stand up close to each individual, so close as to hear each name as it is whispered, to look into each pair of eyes, where the soul of every human is revealed, unique and inalienable, and listen attentively to the story of a day in the life of each and every one of them, a day in the company of loved ones, families, and friends, an ordinary day in an ordinary place, with all its joy and delicacy, envy and curiosity, routines and spontaneity, imagination and boredom, hate and love, then the opposite becomes apparent, the one, not as I, but as the I’s necessity. Which is you.