My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

I too felt a strong sense of duty, that was what the outer world basically was for me, obligation, whereas my inner world to a much greater extent was freedom. Only during the past few years had I begun to understand that retreating into the self was perilous, something that removed me from life.

I know what it means to see something without fastening one’s gaze. Everything is there, the houses, the trees, the cars, the people, the sky, the earth, and yet something is missing because their being there means nothing. It could just as well be something else that was there or nothing at all. This is what the meaningless world looks like. And we can inhabit the meaningless world quite adequately, it being a simple matter of endurance, and indeed we do so if we must.

God asking Moses to take off his sandals diminishes the revelation yet further: sandals or no sandals is a particularly human deliberation, one would think.

How hidden the actual nature of events has become to us is something we understand only when we see something unexpected happen in front of our own eyes. Only then, at such a moment, do we realize how unimaginably few unexpected events unfold in our world, how incredibly systematized and regulated our every movement, even in our largest cities, and, moreover, and this is perhaps the most shocking aspect, the way such an event vanishes again the same moment it occurs.

I felt shaken. It wasn’t because I felt for him, or because there had been blood, it was something else, something to do with the very nature of the occurrence. Fifty meters away no one knew what had happened, and to the few people who were there it was all over and done with as quickly as it took place. Had there been some mention in the paper, I would probably have calmed back down, order would have been restored.

The fact that we operate with one compartment for the authentic, another for the inauthentic, to which advertising and the power of advertising belong, is perhaps what saves us from some of the forces that were set free in Europe three generations ago.

Because if evil comes it will not come as “they,” in the guise of the unfamiliar that we might turn away without effort, it will come as “we.” It will come as what is right.

Only remoteness can make such an act possible, since in remoteness consequence ceases to exist, and the question we must ask ourselves is not what kind of political opinions this person held, nor if he was mad, but more simply how such remoteness could ever arise in our culture. Did