The Details

by Ia Genberg

I preferred books with a pull so strong I couldn’t get out. It was the same way with most things in life and as a result my responsibilities were few, perhaps too few.

Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.

That’s all there is to the self, or the so-called “self”: traces of the people we rub up against.

For a short while I kept The Man Without Qualities in the low, blue-lacquered bookcase by my bed, four volumes I’d gotten after someone recommended the novel, but which I’d instantly come to realize I was nowhere near ready for. The first volume was dog-eared at page twenty and lay untouched where I’d put it, until one evening when one of Jonas’s work friends opened it. His name was Palle; he’d been traveling the world and was only briefly at home to make some money. He’d taken a welding class through the employment agency and got a job at the plant where Jonas worked, and here he was sitting on my mattress with a cup of tea, sinking into the first pages of this book. He’d skipped the introduction and the translator’s note and went straight to the novel itself, which I took as a good sign. The book was his, I knew it immediately, no discussion needed. It had just taken a detour through me.

It’s turned into one of those books you own without ever reading, a phenomenon you’ll come across in most people’s homes: an assurance for tomorrow, a future where you’ll have time to read.

knew with certainty that no friendship survived her, and nevertheless I was surprised. Like death, I guess. Everyone knows it’s coming but few look at their living hands and think that those hands will one day go limp and reach room temperature.

and I had the good luck of getting exactly what I’d asked for, the bad luck of getting everything I thought I wanted, the good luck and the bad luck of having my prayers about passionate love heard.

sound and matter are basically the same, that music has an architecture and vice versa, and that our senses, as long as we let them intermingle as they wish, are able to tell us much more than we can imagine.

and these details now appear so pedestrian and naive to me, I seem so innocent and distracted, as though there were no seminal events left for me, no cataclysmic decisions to make, as if I was already done with everything in my life that might burn.

Everyone I know remembers the time right before the turn of the millennium with a certain embarrassment since the excitement seemed so disproportionate after the fact, so headless; silly, in a way. It was a collective impulse, like a global popular movement, but nobody could give it a more profound explanation than “the passing of time.” The numbers felt magical, and they were magical, but only in the way that numbers are.

As soon as trust attaches, as soon as it takes root, it fuses with the rest of what’s there, takes on other names. Johanna, Hägersten, Dad, Atlas, Farsta. Getting attached, to me they were like tattoos, everything and every detail present and intact, everyone I’d loved and liked was still with me.

I’ve had more than my share of magic in life, most often in the encounter with others. There is something there, and only there. I can’t be more specific than that, can only say that if we’re searching we should look in each other,

We live so many lives within our lives—smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up—and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.

Anxiety’s central task, as instructed by fear, is to run ahead and touch everything, circle potentialities with the intention of preventing them from happening, on and on and on in a process that never stops, that becomes one with life.

She was never granted peace, there was always some aspect of the world that had to be controlled lest things went out of hand. And I suppose that’s what’s at the heart of it for every person suffering from anxiety; the fact that life, by its very nature, is impossible to manage.

Every morning was a new beginning for my dad who never let a mood stay overnight.

I suppose most people who seek in earnest do end up finding something sooner or later, if the seeking is true, if it’s founded in a sincere desire to know oneself, to look seriously behind that familiar face in the mirror.

Going deeper requires a loss of control, requires the abandonment of that constant surveillance of time and space in exchange for a headlong fall inside oneself, or into somebody else, or down one of life’s many cracks and fissures.

When I was younger I often thought I should travel more and farther, spend more time in foreign countries, that I should be in a constant state of velocity so that I could get out there and truly live, but with time I have come to understand that everything I was looking for was right here, inside of me, inside the things that surround me, in the money jobs that became my actual jobs, in the constancy of the everyday, in the eyes of the people I meet when I allow my gaze to linger.