My struggle book 2

Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009)

places I have dreamt about are their stomping grounds
aplomb
Seeing her grow up also changes my view of my own upbringing, not so much because of the quality but the quantity, the sheer amount of time you spend with your children, which is immense. So many hours, so many days, such an infinite number of situations that crop up and are lived through. From my own childhood I remember only a handful of incidents, all of which I regarded as momentous but which I now understand were a few events among many, which completely expunges their meaning, for how can I know that those particular episodes that lodged themselves in my mind were decisive, and not all the others of which I remember nothing? When I discuss such topics with Geir, with whom I talk on the telephone for an hour every day, he is wont to quote Sven Stolpe, who has written somewhere about Bergman that he would have been Bergman irrespective of where he had grown up, implying, in other words, that you are who you are whatever your surroundings. What shapes you is the way you are towards your family rather than the family itself. When I was growing up I was taught to look for the explanation of all human qualities, actions and phenomena in the environment in which they originated. Biological or genetic determiners, the givens, that is, barely existed as an option, and when they did they were viewed with suspicion. Such an attitude can at first sight appear humanistic, inasmuch as it is intimately bound up with the notion that all people are equal, but upon closer examination it could just as well be an expression of a mechanistic attitude to man, who, born empty, allows his life to be shaped by his surroundings. For a long time I took a purely theoretical standpoint on the issue, which is actually so fundamental that it can be used as a springboard for any debate – if environment is the operative factor, for example, if man at the outset is both equal and malleable and the good man can be shaped by engineering his surroundings, hence my parents’ generation’s belief in the state, the education system and politics, hence their desire to reject everything that had been and hence their new truth, which is not found within man’s inner being, in his detached uniqueness, but on the contrary in areas external to his intrinsic self, in the universal and collective, perhaps expressed in its clearest form by Dag Solstad, who has always been the chronicler of his age, in a text from 1969 containing his famous statement ‘We won’t give the coffee pot wings’: out with spirituality, out with feeling, in with a new materialism, but it never struck them that the same attitude could lie behind the demolition of old parts of town to make way for roads and car parks, which naturally the intellectual left opposed, and perhaps it has not been possible to be aware of this until now, when the link between the idea of equality and capitalism, the welfare state and liberalism, Marxist materialism and the consumer society is obvious because the biggest equality creator of all is money, it levels all differences, and if your character and your fate are entities that can be shaped, money is the most natural shaper, and this gives rise to the fascinating phenomenon whereby crowds of people assert their individuality and originality by shopping in an identical way, while those who once ushered all this in with their affirmation of equality, their emphasis on material values and belief in change, are now inveighing against their own handiwork, which they believe the enemy created, but like all simple reasoning this is not wholly true either: life is not a mathematical quantity, it has no theory, only practice, and though it is tempting to understand a generation’s radical rethink of society as being based on its view of the relationship between heredity and environment, this temptation is literary and consists more in the pleasure of speculating, that is of weaving one’s thoughts through the most disparate areas of human activity, than in the pleasure of proclaiming the truth. The sky is low in Solstad’s books, they show an incredible awareness of the currents in modern times, from the feeling of alienation in the 60s, the celebration of political initiatives at the beginning of the 70s, and then, just as the winds of change were starting to blow, to the distance-taking at the end. These weathervane- like conditions need be neither a strength nor a weakness for a writer, but simply a part of his material, a part of his orientation, and in Solstad’s case the most significant feature has always been located elsewhere, namely in his language, which sparkles with its new old-fashioned elegance, and radiates a unique lustre, inimitable and full of elan. This language cannot be learned, this language cannot be bought for money and therein lies its value. It is not the case that we are born equal and that the conditions of life make our lives unequal, it is the opposite, we are born unequal, and the conditions of life make our lives more equal. When I think of my three children it is not only their distinctive faces that appear before me, but also the quite distinct feeling they radiate. This feeling, which is constant, is what they ‘are’ for me. And what they ‘are’ has been present in them ever since the first day I saw them. At that time they could barely do anything, and the little bit they could do, like sucking on a breast, raising their arms as reflex actions, looking at their surroundings, imitating, they could all do that, thus what they ‘are’ has nothing to do with qualities, has nothing to do with what they can or can’t do but is more a kind of light that shines within them. Their character traits, which slowly began to reveal themselves after only a few weeks, have never changed either, and so different are they inside each of them that it is difficult to imagine the conditions we provide for them, through our behaviour and ways of being, have any decisive significance.
autumnal
reprimanded
He always looked so wily, always looked as though he had got something on the people he spoke to, it was hard to know where you stood with him; that half-smile of his could equally well have been sarcastic or congenial or tentative. If he’d had a pronounced or strong character, that might well have bothered me, but he was dithery in a weak-minded, irresolute kind of way, so whatever he might be thinking didn’t worry me in the slightest.
dithery
ardently
What a stupid, bloody idiotic country this was. All the young women drank water in such vast quantities it was coming out of their ears, they thought it was ‘beneficial’ and ‘healthy’, but all it did was send the graph of incontinent young people soaring. Children ate wholemeal pasta and wholemeal bread and all sorts of weird coarse-grained rice which their stomachs could not digest properly, but that didn’t matter because it was ‘beneficial’, it was ‘healthy’, it was ‘wholesome’. Oh, they were confusing food with the mind, they thought they could eat their way to being better human beings without understanding that food is one thing and the notions food evokes another. And if you said that, if you said anything of that kind, you were either reactionary or just a Norwegian, in other words ten years behind.
"Yep, jogging along."
All my adult life I have kept a distance from other people, it has been my way of coping because I come so incredibly close to others in my thoughts and feelings they only have to look away dismissively for a storm to break inside me. That closeness naturally informs my relationship with children too, that is what allows me to sit down and play with them, but as they lack any veneer of courtesy and decency that adults have, this also means they can freely penetrate the outer bulwarks of my personality and then wreak as much havoc as they wish. My only defence, when it all started, was either sheer physical strength, which I was not able to use, or else simply to pretend I wasn’t bothered, possibly the best approach, but something I wasn’t so adept at, since the children, at least the most forward of them, immediately discovered how uncomfortable I was in their presence. Oh, how undignified this was!
‘Isn’t it tough to have two children so close in age?’ she asked. ‘Yes and no,’ I answered. ‘It is a bit wearing. But it’s still better with two than one. The single-child scenario seems a bit sad, if you ask me . . . I’ve always thought I wanted to have three children. Then there are lots of permutations when they play. And the children are in the majority vis-à-vis the parents . . .’
‘Do you know what Benjamin said?’ I said from the doorway. ‘No,’ she said, looking up at me with sudden interest. ‘He said you were the nicest girl in the nursery.’ I had never seen her filled with such light. She was glowing with happiness. I knew that neither Linda nor I would be able to say anything to make her react like that, and I understood with the immediate clarity of an insight that she was not ours. Her life was utterly her own.
There’s coffee as well if you’d like some,’ Erik said, looking at me with a kind of pregnant smile, as if there lay more in the question and what he said than met the eye. For all I knew, it was a technique he had learned so as to appear important, more or less like the tricks the average writer resorts to when trying to lend his stories the semblance of immense profundity.
I returned the glass to the table and stubbed out my cigarette. There was nothing left of my feelings for those I had just spent several hours with. The whole crowd of them could have burned in hell for all I cared. This was a rule in my life. When I was with other people I was bound to them, the nearness I felt was immense, the empathy great. Indeed, so great that their well-being was always more important than my own. I subordinated myself, almost to the verge of self-effacement; some uncontrollable internal mechanism caused me to put their thoughts and opinions before my own. But the moment I was alone others meant nothing to me. It wasn’t that I disliked them, or nurtured feelings of loathing for them; on the contrary, I liked most of them, and the ones I didn’t actually like I could always see some worth in, some attribute I could identify with, or at least find interesting, something which could occupy my mind for the moment. But liking them was not the same as caring about them. It was the social situation that bound me, the people within it did not. Between these two perspectives there was no halfway house. There was just the small self- effacing one and the large distance-creating one. And in between them was where my daily life lay. Perhaps that was why I had such a hard time living it. Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or made me happy. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to wash floors or change nappies but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it, and always had done. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts. What was the problem? Was it the shrill sickly tone I heard everywhere, which I couldn’t stand, the one that arose from all the pseudo people and pseudo places, pseudo events and pseudo conflicts our lives passed through, that which we saw but did not participate in, and the distance that modern life in this way had opened up to our own, actually inalienable, here and now? If so, if it was more reality, more involvement I longed for, surely I should be embracing that which I was surrounded by? And not, as was the case, longing to get away from it? Or perhaps it was the prefabricated nature of the days in this world I was reacting to, the rails of routine we followed, which made everything so predictable that we had to invest in entertainment to feel any hint of intensity? Every time I went out of the door I knew what was going to happen, what I was going to do. This was how it was on the micro level, I go to the supermarket and do the shopping, I go and sit down at a café with a newspaper, I fetch my children from the nursery, and this is how it was on the macro level, from the initial entry into society, the nursery, to the final exit, the old folks’ home. Or was the revulsion I felt based on the sameness that was spreading through the world and making everything smaller? If you travelled through Norway now you saw the same everywhere. The same roads, the same houses, the same petrol stations, the same shops. As late as in the 60s you could see how local culture changed as you drove through Gudbrandsdalen, for example, the strange black timber buildings, so pure and sombre, which were now encapsulated as small museums in a culture which was no different from the one you had left or the one you were going to. And Europe, which was merging more and more into one large, homogeneous country. The same, the same, everything was the same. Or was it perhaps that the light which illuminated the world and made everything comprehensible also drained it of meaning? Was it perhaps the forests that had vanished, the animal species that had become extinct, the ways of life that would never return? Yes, all of this I thought about, all of this filled me with sorrow and a sense of helplessness, and if there was a world I turned to in my mind, it was that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its enormous forests, its sailing ships and horse-drawn carts, its windmills and castles, its monasteries and small towns, its painters and thinkers, explorers and inventors, priests and alchemists. What would it have been like to live in a world where everything was made from the power of your hands, the wind or the water? What would it have been like to live in a world where the American Indians still lived their lives in peace? Where that life was an actual possibility? Where Africa was unconquered? Where darkness came with the sunset and light with the sunrise? Where there were too few humans and their tools were too rudimentary to have any effect on animal stocks, let alone wipe them out? Where you could not travel from one place to another without exerting yourself, and a comfortable life was something only the rich could afford, where the sea was full of whales, the forests full of bears and wolves, and there were still countries that were so alien no adventure story could do them justice, such as China, to which a voyage not only took several months and was the prerogative of only a tiny minority of sailors and traders, but was also fraught with danger. Admittedly, that world was rough and wretched, filthy and ravaged with sickness, drunken and ignorant, full of pain, low life expectancy and rampant superstition, but it produced the greatest writer, Shakespeare, the greatest painter, Rembrandt, the greatest scientist, Newton, all still unsurpassed in their fields, and how can it be that this period achieved this wealth? Was it because death was closer and life was starker as a result?
The novel writing had taken its toll on our relationship. I slept in the office for six weeks, barely seeing Linda and our five-month-old daughter, and when at last it was over she was relieved and happy, and I owed it to her to be there, not just in the same room, physically, but also with all my attention and participation. I couldn’t do it. For several months I felt a sorrow at not being where I had been, in the cold clear environment, and my yearning to return was stronger than my pleasure at the life we lived. The fact that the novel was doing well didn’t matter. After every good review I put a cross in the book and waited for the next, after every conversation with the agent at the publisher’s, when a foreign company had shown some interest or made an offer, I put a cross in my book and waited for the next, and I wasn’t very interested when it was eventually nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, for if there was one thing I had learned over the last six months it was that all writing was about writing. Therein lay all its value.
One day I had seen a woman in the shop, suddenly she was standing next to me, by the meat counter of all places, and there was something about her, the sheer physicality of her appearance, which from one moment to the next filled me with almost explosive lust. She was holding her basket in front of her with both hands, her hair was auburn, her pale complexion freckled. I caught a whiff of her body, a faint smell of sweat and soap, and stood staring straight ahead with a thumping heart and constricted throat for maybe fifteen seconds, for that was the time it took her to come alongside me, take a pack of salami from the counter and go on her way. I saw her again when I was about to pay, she was at the other cash desk, and the desire, which had not gone away, welled up in me again. She put her items in her bag, turned and went out of the door. I never saw her again.
‘For Christ’s sake, man. What we’re talking about is the expression you used. Hen-pecked. Do you remember?’ ‘Yes, I’m afraid I do.’ ‘And?’ he said. ‘What do you deduce from that?’ ‘That there are differences,’ I said. ‘I’m not hen-pecked. I’m a hen- pecker. And you’re a woodpecker.
I walked past her and picked up the second volume of The Brothers Karamazov, which was lying on the sofa. ‘I’m off then,’ I said. ‘Bye.’ ‘Enjoy,’ she said. Now I had an hour to myself. It was the sole condition I had made before taking over responsibility for Vanja during the daytime, that I would have an hour on my own in the afternoon, and even though Linda considered it unfair since she’d never had an hour to herself like that, she agreed. The reason she’d never had an hour, I assumed, was that she hadn’t thought of it. And the reason she hadn’t thought of it was, I also assumed, that she would rather be with us than alone. But that wasn’t how I felt. So for an hour every afternoon I sat in a nearby café reading and smoking. I never went to the same café more than four or five times at a stretch because then they started to treat me like a stammis, that is, they greeted me when I arrived and wanted to impress me with their knowledge of my predilections, often with a friendly comment about some topic on everyone’s lips. But the whole point for me of living in a big city was that I could be completely alone in it while still surrounded by people on all sides. All with faces I had never seen before! The unceasing stream of new faces. For me the very attraction of a big city was immersing myself in that. The Metro swarming with different types and characters. The squares. The pedestrian zones. The cafés. The big malls. Distance, distance, I could never have enough distance. So when a barista began to say hello and smile on catching sight of me and not only brought me a cup of coffee before I asked but also offered me a free croissant, it was time to leave. And it wasn’t very hard to find alternatives, we were living in the city centre, and there were hundreds of cafés within a ten-minute radius.
You can say a lot about my self-image, but it was definitely not shaped in the cool chambers of reason. My intellect may be able to understand it, but it did not have the power to control it. One’s self-image not only encompasses the person you are but also the person you want to be, could be or once had been. For the self-image there was no difference between the actual and the hypothetical. It incorporated all ages, all feelings, all drives. When I pushed the buggy all over town and spent my days taking care of my child it was not the case that I was adding something to my life, that it became richer as a result; on the contrary, something was removed from it, part of myself, the bit relating to masculinity. It was not my intellect which made this clear to me, because my intellect knew I was doing this for a good reason, namely that Linda and I would be on an equal footing with regard to our child, but rather my emotions, which filled me with desperation whenever I squeezed myself into a mould that was so small and so constricted that I could no longer move. The question was which parameter should be operative. If equality and fairness were to be the parameters, well, there was nothing to be said about men sinking everywhere into the the thralls of softness and intimacy. Nor about the rounds of applause this was met with, for if equality and fairness were the dominant parameters, change was an undoubted improvement and a measure of progress. But these were not the only parameters. Happiness was one; an intense sense of being alive was another. And it may be that women who followed their careers until they were almost in their forties and then at the last moment had a child, which after a few months the father took care of until a place was found in a nursery so that they could both continue their careers, may have been happier than women in previous generations. It was possible that men who stayed at home and looked after their infants for six months may have increased their sense of being alive as a result. And women may actually have desired these men with thin arms, large waistlines, shaven heads and black designer glasses who were just as happy discussing the pros and cons of Babybjørn carriers and baby slings as whether it was better to cook one’s own baby food or buy ready-made ecological purées. They may have desired them with all their hearts and souls. But even if they didn’t, it didn’t really matter because equality and fairness were the parameters, they trumped everything else a life and a relationship consisted of. It was a choice, and the choice had been made. For me as well. If I had wanted it otherwise I would have had to back out and tell Linda before she became pregnant: listen, I want children, but I don’t want to stay at home looking after them, is that fine with you? Which means, of course, that you’re the one who will have to do it. Then she could have said, no, it’s not fine with me, or, yes, that’s fine and our future could have been planned on that basis. But I didn’t, I didn’t have sufficient foresight, and consequently I had to go by the rules of the game. In the class and culture we belonged to, that meant adopting the same role, previously called the woman’s role. I was bound to it like Odysseus to the mast: if I wanted to free myself I could do that, but not without losing everything. As a result I walked around Stockholm’s streets, modern and feminised, with a furious nineteenth-century man inside me. The way I was seen changed, as if at the stroke of a magic wand the instant I laid my hands on the buggy. I had always eyed the women I walked past, the way men always have, actually a mysterious act because it couldn’t lead to anything except a returned gaze, and if I did see a really beautiful woman I might even turn round to watch her, discreetly of course, but nevertheless: why, oh why? What function did all these eyes, all these mouths, all these breasts and waists, legs and bottoms serve? Why was it so important to look at them? When a few seconds, or occasionally minutes, later I had forgotten everything about them? Sometimes I had eye contact, and a rush could go through me if the gaze was held a tiny second longer, because it came from a person in a crowd, I knew nothing about her, where she was from, how she lived, nothing, yet we looked at each other, that was what it was about, and then it was over, she was gone and it was erased from memory for ever. When I came along with a buggy no women looked at me, it was as if I didn’t exist. One might think it was because I gave such a clear signal that I was taken, but this was just as evident when I was walking hand in hand with Linda, and that had never prevented anyone from looking my way. My God, wasn’t I only getting my just deserts, wasn’t I being put in my place for walking around ogling women when there was one at home who had given birth to my child? No, this was not good. It certainly was not.
I would have given a fortune to know what the people sitting there were thinking. What the world looked like to them. Imagine if it was radically different from what I saw. If it was full of pleasure at the dark leather of the sofa, the black surface of the coffee and its bitter taste, not to mention the yellow eye of custard in the centre of the puff pastry’s winding and cracked terrain. What if the whole of this world sang inside them? What if they were full to bursting with the many delights the day had bestowed on them? Their carrier bags, for example, the ingenious and extravagant handles of string some of them were fitted with instead of the small cardboard handles stuck on the bags in the supermarkets. And the logos which someone with all their specialist knowledge and expertise had spent days and weeks designing, the meetings with feedback from other departments, more work refining the design, perhaps they had shown samples to friends and family, lain awake at night, for there was always someone who would not have liked it, despite all the meticulous care and ingenuity that had gone into it, until the day it became a reality, and now lay, for example, in the lap of that woman in her fifties with the stiff hair dyed a golden tint. Maybe she didn’t seem that elated. More like mildly contemplative. Filled with a great inner peace after a long and happy life? In which the perfect contrast between the coffee cup’s cold, hard, white stoneware and the coffee’s hot, fluid, black liquid was only a temporary stopping point on a journey through the world’s noumena and phenomena? For had she not seen foxgloves growing in rocky scree once? Had she not seen a dog pissing against a lamp post in the park on one of those misty November nights that fill the town with such mystique and beauty? Ah, ah, for isn’t the air full of tiny rain particles then that not only lie like a film over skin and wool, metal and wood, but also reflect the light around such that everything glistens and glimmers in the greyness? Had she not seen a man first smash the basement window on the other side of the backyard, and then lift the hasp and crawl in to steal whatever might be inside? The ways of man are indeed weird and wonderful! Did she not have in her possession a little metal stand with salt and pepper cellars, both made of fluted glass, the top made of the same metal as the stand and perforated with lots of small holes so that the salt and pepper, respectively, could sprinkle out? And what had she seen them sprinkle on? Roast pork, a leg of mutton, wonderful yellow omelettes with chopped green chives in, pea soups and joints of beef. Filled to the brim with all these impressions, each and every one, with all their tastes, smells, colours and shapes, in themselves an experience of a lifetime, was it perhaps not surprising that she sought peace and quiet where she sat, and did not appear to want to absorb any more of the world?
The sight of the Dostoevsky book on the table was not exactly tempting. The threshold for reading became higher the less I read; it was a typical vicious circle. In addition, I didn’t like being in the world Dostoevsky described. However rapt I could be and however much admiration I had for what he did, I couldn’t rid myself of the distaste I felt when reading his books. No, not distaste. Discomfort was the word. I was uncomfortable in Dostoevsky’s world. But I opened the book anyway and settled down on the chair to read, after glancing round the room to make sure no one saw me doing it.
Before Dostoevsky, the ideal, even the Christian ideal, was always pure and strong, it was part of heaven, unattainable for almost everyone. The flesh was weak, the mind frail, but the ideal was unbending. The ideal was about aspiring, enduring, fighting the fight. In Dostoevsky’s books everything is human, or rather, the human world is everything, including the ideals, which are turned on their heads: now they can be achieved if you give up, lose your grip, fill yourself with non-will rather than will. Humility and self-effacement, those are the ideals in Dostoevsky’s foremost novels, and inasmuch as they are never realised within the framework of the storyline, therein lies his greatness, because this is precisely a result of his own humility and self-effacement as a writer. Unlike most other great writers, Dostoevsky himself is not discernible in his novels. There are no brilliant turns of phrase that can point to him, there is no definitive moral that can be elicited; he uses all his ingenuity and diligence to individualise people, and since there is so much in man that will not allow itself to be humbled or effaced, the struggle and active striving are always stronger than the passives of mercy and forgiveness, which is how they end up. From here one might go on and examine, for example, the concept of nihilism in his work, which never seems real, always seems like a mere idée fixe, a piece of his era’s intellectual history heaven, for the very reason that humanness bursts forth everywhere, in all its forms, from the most grotesque and brutish to the aristocratically refined and the besmirched, impoverished and worldly splendour-repudiating Jesus ideal, and it quite simply packs everything, including a discussion about nihilism, to the brim with meaning. With a writer like Tolstoy, who also worked and wrote during the period of great upheavals that was the latter half of the nineteenth century and which furthermore was riddled with all manner of religious and moral qualms, everything looks different. There are long descriptions of landscapes and space, customs and costumes, a rifle barrel smoking after a shot has been fired, the report reverberating with a faint echo, a wounded animal rearing up before falling down dead, and the blood steaming as it flows to the ground. Hunting is discussed in lengthy analyses which do not pretend to be anything other than that, an informed account of an objective phenomenon, inserted in an otherwise eventful narrative. This preponderance of deeds and events for their own sake does not exist in Dostoevsky, there is always something lying hidden behind them, a drama of the soul, and this means there is always an aspect of humanness he doesn’t include, the one that binds us to the world outside us. There are many kinds of wind that blow through man, and there are other entities inside him apart from depth of soul. The authors of the books in the Old Testament knew that better than anyone. The richest conceivable portrayal of the possible manifestations of humanness is to be found there, where all possible forms of life are represented, apart from one, for us the only relevant one, namely our inner life. The division of humanness into the subconscious and the conscious, the rational and the irrational, whereby one always explains or clarifies the other, and the perception of God as something you can sink your soul in, such that the struggle ends and peace prevails, are new concepts, inextricably linked to us and our time, which not without reason has also let things slip out of our hands by allowing them to merge with our knowledge of them or with our image of them, while at the same time turning the relationship between man and the world on its head: where before man wandered through the world, now it is the world that wanders through man. And when meaning shifts, meaninglessness follows. It is no longer the abandonment of God which opens us to the night, as it did in the nineteenth century, when the humanness that was left took over everything, as we can see in Dostoevsky and Munch and Freud, when man, perhaps out of need, perhaps out of desire, became his own heaven. However, a single step backwards from that heaven was all that was necessary for all meaning to be lost. Then it was evident that there was a heaven over and above humanness, and that it was not only empty, black and cold, but also endless. How much was humanness worth in the context of the universe? What was man on this earth other than an insect among other insects, a life form among other life forms, which might just as well take the form of algae in a lake or fungi on the forest floor, roe in a fish’s stomach, rats in a nest or a cluster of mussels on a reef? Why should we do one thing rather than another when there was no goal anyway, nor any direction in life, apart from to huddle together, live and then die? Who enquired about the value of this life when it was gone for ever, turned into a fistful of damp earth and a few yellowing brittle bones? The skull, wasn’t it grinning with derision down there in the grave? What difference did a few extra dead bodies make from that perspective? Oh yes, there were other perspectives on this same world; couldn’t it be seen as a miracle of cool rivers and vast forests, whorled snail shells and deep potholes, veins and grey matter, deserted planets and expanding galaxies? Yes, it could, because meaning is not something we are given but which we give. Death makes life meaningless because everything we have ever striven for ceases when life does, and it makes life meaningful too, because its presence makes the little we have of it indispensable, every moment precious. But in my lifetime death was removed from our lives, it no longer existed, except as a constant item in all the newspapers, on the TV news and in films, where it didn’t mark the end of a process, discontinuity, but, on account of daily repetition, represented, on the contrary, an extension of the process, continuity, and in this way, oddly enough, had become a source of our security and our anchor. A plane crash was a ritual, it happened every so often, the same chain of events, and we were never part of it ourselves. A sense of security, but also excitement and intensity, for imagine how terrible the last seconds were for the passengers . . . everything we saw and did contained the intensity that was triggered in us, but had nothing to do with us. What was this? Were we living other people’s lives? Yes, everything we didn’t have and were not experiencing we had and were experiencing even so, because we saw it and we took part in it without being there ourselves. Not only once in a while but every day . . . And not just me and everyone I knew but all major cultures, indeed almost everyone in existence, all bloody humanity. It had explored everything and made it its own, as the ocean does with rain and snow, there were no longer any things or places we had not made our own, and thereby loaded with humanness: our mind had been there. In the context of the divine, humanness was always small and insignificant, and it must have been because of this perspective’s enormous import – which perhaps can only be compared with the significance contained in the recognition that knowledge was always a fall – that the notion of the divine arose in the first place, and had now come to an end. For who brooded over the meaninglessness of life any more? Teenagers. They were the only ones who were preoccupied with existential issues, and as a result there was something puerile and immature about them, and hence it was doubly impossible for adults with their sense of propriety intact to deal with them. However, this is not so strange, for we never feel more strongly and passionately about life than in our teenage years, when we step into the world for the first time, as it were, and all our feelings are new feelings. So there they are, with their big ideas on small orbits, looking this way and that for an opportunity to launch them, as the pressure builds. And who is it they light upon sooner or later but Uncle Dostoevsky? Dostoevsky has become a teenager’s writer, the issue of nihilism a teenage issue. How this has come about is hard to say, but the result is at any rate that the whole of this vast question has been disregarded while at the same time all critical energy is directed to the left, where it is swallowed up in ideas of justice and equality, which of course are the very ones that legitimise and steer the development of our society and the abyss-less life we live within it. The difference between nineteenth-century nihilism and ours is the difference between emptiness and equality. In 1949 the German writer Ernst Jünger wrote that in the future we would have something approaching a world state. Now, when liberal democracy reigns supreme in modern societies, it looks as though he was right. We are all democrats, we are all liberal, and the differences between states, cultures and people are being broken down everywhere. And this movement, what else is it at heart, if not nihilistic? ‘The nihilistic world is in essence a world that is being increasingly reduced, which naturally of necessity coincides with the movement towards a zero point,’ Jünger wrote. A case in point of such a reduction is God being perceived of as ‘good’, or the inclination to find a common denominator for all the complicated tendencies in the world, or the propensity for specialisation, which is another form of reduction, or the determination to convert everything into numerical figures, beauty as well as forests as well as art as well as bodies. For what is money if not an entity that commodifies the most dissimilar things? Or as Jünger writes, ‘Little by little all areas are brought under this single common denominator, even one with its residence as far from causality as the dream.’ In our century even our dreams are alike, even dreams are things we sell. Undifferentiated, which is just another way of saying indifferent. That is where our night is.
somanambulistic
"How pretty you look!" Helena said. "How do you do it?"
Junger to Mishima and Cioran
The Order of Things by Michel Foucault
As is always the case with books that seem to be ground-breaking, they put into words what for me had been suspicions, feelings, hunches. A vague discomfort, a vague displeasure, a vague, untargeted anger. But no direction, no clarity, no exactitude.
misology
The fact that paintings and, to some extent, photographs were so important for me had something to do with this. They contained no words, no concepts, and when I looked at them what I experienced, what made them so important was also non-conceptual. There was something stupid in this, an area that was completely devoid of intelligence, which I had difficulty acknowledging or accepting, yet which perhaps was the most important single element of what I wanted to do.
studied myself in the mirror for a few seconds. My face was pale and slightly bloated, hair unkempt and eyes . . . yes, my eyes . . . staring, but not in an active outward-facing fashion, as though they were looking for something, more as if what they saw was drawn into them, as if they sucked everything in. Since when had I had such eyes?
Holderlin
But this didn’t happen as often as it could have done because Kjartan was there, and Kjartan had sat for a whole year reading Heidegger, had been filled with Heidegger amid the grinding pointless working life of his without a soul to share it with, because no one within a radius of several kilometres had even heard of Heidegger, and no one wanted to either, although I had an inkling he had tried various people, he must have done, so taken with him was he, but it led nowhere, no one understood, no one wanted to understand, he was on his own with this, and then in we walked, his sister Sissel, who was a nursing teacher, interested in politics, literature and philosophy, her son Yngve, who went to university, something Kjartan had always dreamed of doing, more and more so in recent years, and her son Karl Ove. I was seventeen years old, at gymnas, and even though I didn’t understand a word of his poems he knew I read books. That was enough for him. We came in the door and his sluice gates opened. All the thoughts that had accumulated over the last year came flooding out. It didn’t matter that we didn’t understand, it didn’t matter that it was Christmas Eve, that the mutton ribs, potatoes, mashed swede, Christmas ale and aquavit were on the table; he talked about Heidegger from within, without a single communicative link to the outside world, it was Dasein and Das Man, it was Trakl and Hölderlin, the great poet Hölderlin, it was Heraclitus and Socrates, Nietzsche and Plato, it was the birds in the trees and the waves in the fjord, it was man’s Dasein and the advent of existence, it was the sun in the sky and the rain in the air, the cat’s eyes and the plummeting waterfall. With his hair sticking out in all directions, his suit askew and his tie full of stains he sat there talking, his eyes aglow, they were really glowing, and I will always remember it, for it was pitch dark outside, the rain was beating against the windows, it was Christmas Eve in Norway 1986, our Christmas Eve, the presents were under the tree, everyone was dressed up, and the sole topic of conversation was Heidegger. Grandma was shivering, grandad gnawing at a bone, mum listening attentively, Yngve had stopped listening. As for me, I was indifferent to everything, and above all happy it was Christmas. But even though I didn’t understand a word of what Kjartan said, and nothing of what he wrote, nor anything of the poems he praised with such passion, I did understand intuitively that he was right, that there was such a thing as a supreme philosophy and a supreme poetry, and that even if you didn’t understand it, were unable to partake in it, you only had yourself to blame. Since then, whenever I have thought about the supreme, I have thought about Hölderlin, and when I’ve thought about Hölderlin it has always been associated with mountains and fjords, night and rain, the sky and the earth and my uncle’s glowing eyes.
Although much had changed in my life since then my attitude to poetry was basically the same. I could read it, but poems never opened themselves to me, and that was because I had no ‘right’ to them: they were not for me. When I approached them I felt like a fraud, and I was indeed always unmasked, because what they always said as well, these poems, was, Who do you think you are, coming in here? That was what Osip Mandelstam’s poems said, that was what Ezra Pound’s poems said, that was what Gottfried Benn’s poems said, that was what Johannes Bobrowski’s poems said. You had to earn the right to read them. How? It was simple. You opened a book, read, and if the poems opened themselves to you, you had the right, if not, you didn’t. In my early twenties and still full of notions of what I could be, it bothered me a lot that I was one of those for whom the poems did not open. For the consequences of this were serious, much more so than merely being excluded from a literary genre. It also passed judgment on me. The poems looked into another reality, or saw reality in a different way, one which was truer than the way I knew, and the fact that it was not possible to acquire the ability to see and that it was something you either had or you didn’t condemned me to a life on a lower plane, indeed, it made me one of the lowly. The pain of that insight was immense. And strictly speaking there were only three ways of reacting. The first was to admit it to yourself and accept it for what it was. I was an ordinary man who would live an ordinary life and find meaning where I was, nowhere else. In practice that was the way it looked too. I liked watching football and played too whenever I had the chance, I liked pop music and played drums in a band a couple of times a week, I attended lectures at university, went out a fair amount or lay on the sofa at home watching TV in the evenings with the woman I was with at the time. The second way was to deny everything, by telling yourself that it existed inside you but it had not yet come to fruition, and then live a life in the world of literature, perhaps as a critic, perhaps as a university lecturer, perhaps as an author, because it was entirely possible to stay afloat in that world without literature ever opening up to you. You could write a whole dissertation about Hölderlin, for example, by describing the poems, discussing what they dealt with and in what ways the themes found expression, through the syntax, the choice of words, the use of imagery; you could write about the relationship between Hellenic and Christian modes, about the role of the countryside in his poems, about the role of the weather, or how the poems relate to the actual politico-historical reality in which they had arisen, independent of whether the main emphasis was on the biographical, for example his German Protestant background, or on the enormous influence of the French Revolution. You could write about his relationship to other German idealists, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Novalis, or the relationship to Pindar in the late poems. You could write about his unorthodox translations of Sophocles, or read the poems in the light of what he says about writing in his letters. You could also read Hölderlin’s poetry with reference to Heidegger’s understanding of it, or go one step further and write about the clash between Heidegger and Adorno over Hölderlin. You could also write about the whole history of his work’s reception, or of his works in translation. It was possible to do all of this without Hölderlin’s poems ever opening themselves. The same could be done with all poets, and of course it has been. You could also, if you were willing to put in the hard work, write poems yourself if you were one of those for whom poems did not open themselves; after all, only a poet would see the difference between poetry and poetry that resembles poetry. Of these two methods the first, accepting the fact, was the better, but also the more difficult option. The second method, denying it, was easier but also more unpleasant because you were constantly on the verge of the insight that what you were doing actually had no value. And if you lived in the world of literature it was precisely value you were seeking. The third method, which was based on rejecting the whole issue, was therefore the best. There is nothing higher. There is no such thing as privileged insight. Nothing is better or truer than anything else. The poems did not open themselves for me, but that did not necessarily mean I was inferior to them, or that what I wrote necessarily had less value. Both of them, the poems that did not open themselves and what I wrote, were basically the same, namely text. If mine proved to be worse, which of course it was, this was not the result of an irremediable condition – I didn’t have it in me – but was something that could be changed through hard work and increasing experience. Up to a certain limit, of course, concepts such as talent and quality were still indispensable; not everyone was able to write well. The crux was that there was no barrier, nothing insuperable, between those who had it and those who did not; those who saw and those who did not. Rather, it was a question of degrees within the same scale. This was a gratifying thought, and not hard to justify, after all this way of thinking had been dominant in all spheres of art and criticism, as well as at universities from the middle of the 1960s until now. The ideas I had nurtured, and which had been such a natural part of me that I didn’t even realise they were ideas, and accordingly had never articulated, only felt, but which nonetheless had had a controlling influence over me, were Romanticism in its purest form, in other words antiquated. The few who engaged seriously with Romanticism were preoccupied with those aspects that fitted into the contemporary world of ideas, such as the fragmentary or the ironic. But for me Romanticism was not the point – if I felt an affinity to any era, it was the Baroque period. I was attracted to its sense of space, its dizzying heights and depths, its notions about life and theatre, mirrors and bodies, light and dark, art and science – it was more my sense of standing outside the essence, standing outside what was most meaningful, outside what constituted existence. Whether this sense was Romantic or not was beside the point. To dull the pain it caused I had over the years defended myself using all three of the above-mentioned methods, and for long periods believed in them, especially the last. My notion that art was the place where the flames of truth and beauty burned, the last remaining place where life could show its true face, was crazy. But now and then this notion broke through, not as a thought, for it could be argued out of existence, but as a feeling. I knew with my whole being that the notion was a lie, that I was deceiving myself. This was what was in my mind as I stood there in the gateway outside the Swedish Writers’ Association in Stockholm one afternoon in March 2002 flicking through Fioreto’s translation of Hölderlin’s last great hymns. Oh, wretched me.
When I thought about Geir it was not his face I visualised but the letters in his name – Geir that is – and a vague memory of someone laughing. The only scene I remember with him was in the bar at Fekterloftet in Bergen. Him laughing and saying, ‘You’re an existentialist!’ Why I should remember that of all things I had no idea. Perhaps because I didn’t know what an existentialist was? And was flattered because my opinions fitted into a well-known philosophical category? I still didn’t know what an existentialist was. I knew the concept, could cite a few names and a time, but was unable to recall the precise definition. The king of approximation, that was me.
Tonje, who I had been with for eight years, sharing my life with her, as wonderful as she was, should have made me happy. Meeting my brother Yngve with his children should have made me happy. All the music around me, all the literature around me, all the art around me, it should have made me happy, happy, happy. All the beauty in the world, which should have been unbearable to behold, left me cold. My friends left me cold. My life left me cold. That was how it was, and that was how it had been for so long that I could no longer stand it and had decided to do something about it. I wanted to be happy again. It sounded stupid, I couldn’t say it to anyone, but that was how it was.
I think it’s Sigurd Slembe. The time to act. To act or not to act. It’s classic Hamlet. To be an actor in your own life or a spectator.’ ‘And you are?’ ‘Good question.’ A silence arose. Then he said, ‘I’m probably a spectator, with elements of choreographed action. But I don’t really know. I think there’s a lot inside me that I can’t see. And so it doesn’t exist. And you?’ ‘Spectator.’ ‘But you’re here. And yesterday you were in Bergen.’ ‘Yes. But this is not the result of any decision. It was forced.’ ‘That’s perhaps another way of making a decision, hm? Letting whatever happens do it for you?
‘Good morning!’ he said. ‘It’s seven o’clock! Don’t tell me you’re a night owl?’ I sat up and scowled at him. ‘I usually get up at one in the afternoon,’ I said. ‘And I can’t talk to anyone for the first hour.’ ‘Worse luck you!’ Geir said.
culture vultures
sauntered
Is it OK if I drop by occasionally? You feel a bit like my family. And if I come out here for Sunday lunch with you?’ ‘Apart from the fact that it’s Monday, I have the same feeling. But I find it hard to make the father–son relationship fit. So it would have to be Caesar and Brutus.’ ‘Which of us is Caesar?’ ‘Don’t ask such a silly question. Sooner or later you’ll stab me in the back. But just come. We can continue talking out here.’
"But you're writing?" She grimaced, looked down. "I'm trying. And you?" "Same here. I'm trying." She smiled.
Gesticulating, that was what I had been doing. And for so long.
coquettishness
ignominy
ensconced
You were married, weren't you? Yes. In a way I still am. Oh.
Linda and I went to the cinema. For some idiotic reason we saw the new Star Wars film, it was for children, and having confirmed that, we went to Folkoperan and sat without saying much. I was depressed as I left, I was so incredibly sick of having everything inside me, being unable to say the simplest thing to anyone.
Grandad had a gun, I remember. Sometimes he used to shoot crows. He injured one of them – that is, he shot off a leg. It survived and it’s still at the farm now. At least, according to Kjartan, it is. A one-legged crow with staring eyes.’ ‘Fantastic,’ Linda said. ‘A kind of avian Captain Ahab,’ I said. ‘And grandad patrolling the ground like the great white whale.’
Do you long to get away now?’ ‘Are you crazy? This summer must be the first since I was sixteen that I haven’t.’ We got up and headed towards Djurgården Bridge. ‘Did you know that the first airships couldn’t be steered, and so to solve the problem they tried to train birds of prey, falcons I suppose, but perhaps eagles as well, to fly with long cables in their beaks?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘All I know is that I love you.’
At that time Linda and I were still in the glow zone, and she must have seen that I was glowing with love and joie de vivre. In Stockholm a little more than six months later everything was different. I was full of grudges, the relationship was so claustrophobic and dark that I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t, I was too weak, I thought about her, I pitied her, without me she would be lost, I was too weak, I loved her.
The owner of the flat I was renting was going to sell it, so I moved all my possessions, that is all my books, to a warehouse outside town on one of the first days in January, cleaned up, handed over the keys.
punctilious
"Which bat has taken up residency in your belfry now?"
Fascinating,’ he said. ‘What is?’ I asked. ‘What we’ve been talking about. Or talking about it at all. Peter Handke has a word for it. Erzählnächte I believe he calls them. Nights when people open up and everyone contributes a story.’
‘I don’t have any holidays,’ Geir said. ‘What do you mean?’ Anders asked. ‘This year?’ ‘No, ever. I work every day all week, Saturdays and Sundays included, and all the weeks in the year, apart from Christmas Eve perhaps.’ ‘Why?’ Anders asked. Geir laughed.
effervescent
But a novel about sandals and camels, that was no good. Once I had written in a notebook, ‘The Bible enacted in Norway’ and ‘Abraham in the Setesdal Hills’. It was an idiotic thought, both too small and too large for a novel, but now that it was suddenly back in my mind I needed it in a completely different way and thought, to hell with it, I’ll start and see what happens. I had Cain hitting a rock with a sledgehammer in a Scandinavian landscape at dusk. Asked Linda if I could read it to her, she said yes, of course, I said, but it’s so unbelievably stupid, you know, she said, that’s often when you’re good, well, I said, but not this time. Come on, read it! she said from the chair. I read it. She kept saying, that’s fantastic, that’s absolutely fantastic, you have to go on, and I did, kept writing until the day of Vanja’s christening in May, which was held at my mother’s in Jølster. When we returned we went to Idö in the archipelago outside Västervik, where Vidar, Ingrid’s partner, had a summer house. While Linda and Ingrid were together with Vanja I sat writing, it was June, the novel had to be done and dusted in six weeks, but even though the Cain and Abel story was ready it was still too little. I lied to my editor for the first time, said I only had some fine-tuning to do, while in fact I launched into a story I knew would become the real novel. I wrote like a madman, this was never ever going to work, I had lunch and dinner with Linda and the others, watched the European football championships with her in the evenings, otherwise I was in a small room hammering away at the keyboard. After we came home from Idö I realised that this was all or nothing, I told Linda I was moving into the office, I would have to write day and night. You can’t do that, she said, that’s not on, you’ve got a family, or have you forgotten? It’s summer, or have you forgotten? Am I supposed to look after your daughter on my own? Yes, I said. That’s the way it is. No, it isn’t, she said, I won’t let you. OK, I said, but I’ll do it anyway. And I did. I was totally manic. I wrote all the time, sleeping two or three hours a day, the only thing that had any meaning was the novel I was writing. Linda went to her mother’s and called me several times a day. She was so angry that she screamed, actually screamed down the phone. I just held it away from my ear and kept writing. She said she would leave me. Go, I said. I don’t care, I have to write. And it was true. She would have to go if that was what she wanted. She said, I will. You’ll never see us again. Fine, I said. I wrote twenty pages a day. I didn’t see any letters or words, any sentences or shapes, just countryside and people, and Linda rang and screamed, said I was a sugar daddy, said I was a bastard, said I was an unfeeling monster, said I was the worst person in the world and that she cursed the day she had met me. Fine, I said, leave me then, I don’t care, and I meant it, I didn’t care, no one was going to stand in the way of this, she slammed down the phone, she rang two minutes later and continued to swear at me, I was on my own now, she would bring up Vanja alone, fine by me, I said, she cried, she begged, she pleaded, what I was doing to her was the worst thing anyone could do, leaving her alone. But I didn’t care, I wrote night and day, and then out of the blue she rang and said she was coming home the following day, would I go to the station and meet them? Yes, I would.
terse
askance
Some music wouldn’t be a bad idea. I stood in front of the CD racks. Picked out Emmylou Harris’s Anthology, which we had played a lot in recent weeks, and put it on. It was easy to protect yourself against music when you were prepared or just had it on as background, because it was simple, undemanding and sentimental, but when I was not prepared, like now, or was really listening, it hit home with me. My feelings soared and before I knew what was happening my eyes were moist. It was only then that I realised how little I normally felt, how numb I had become. When I was eighteen I was full of such feelings all the time, the world seemed more intense, and that was why I wanted to write, it was the sole reason, I wanted to touch something music touched. The human voice’s lament and sorrow, joy and delight, I wanted to evoke everything the world had bestowed upon us. How could I forget that?
I ran my eye along the row. When I bought films it was always with the idea that they should broaden my horizons. They should have their own special imagery I could assimilate, or forge a relationship with places whose potential I hadn’t considered or be set in an unfamiliar time or culture. In short, I chose films for all the wrong reasons, because when evening came and we wanted to see one of them we could never be bothered to watch two hours of some Japanese event from the 1960s in black and white or the great open expanses of Rome’s suburbs, where the only thing that happened was that some stunningly beautiful people met who were fundamentally alienated from the world, as tended to be the case with films of that era. No, when evening came and we sat down to watch a film we wanted to be entertained. And it had to be with as little effort and inconvenience as possible. It was the same with everything. I hardly read books any more; if there was a newspaper around I preferred to read that. And the threshold just kept rising. It was idiotic because this life gave you nothing, it only made time pass. If we saw a good film it stirred us and set things in motion, for that is how it is: the world is always the same, it is the way we view it that changes. Everyday life, which could bear down on us like a foot treading on a head, could also transport us with delight. Everything depended on the seeing eye. If the eye saw the water that was everywhere in Tarkovsky’s films, for example, which changed the world into a kind of terrarium, where everything trickled and ran, floated and drifted, where all the characters could melt away from the picture and only coffee cups on a table were left, filling slowly with the falling rain, against a background of intense, almost menacing green vegetation, yes, then the eye would also be able to see the same wild existential depths unfold in everyday life. For we were flesh and blood, sinews and bone, around us plants and trees grew, insects buzzed, birds flew, clouds drifted, rain fell. The eye which gave meaning to the world was a constant possibility, but we almost always decided against it, at least it was like that in our lives.
paroxysm
Two weeks after he turned forty Yngve left Kari and moved into a house on his own. It had all happened very suddenly. Only when he had been here last time had he told me about his plans. Yngve seldom talked about personal matters, he kept almost everything to himself – unless I asked him direct questions, that is. But that didn’t always happen. Besides, I didn’t need him to confide in me to know that he had been living a life he didn’t want. So when he told me it was over, I was happy on his behalf. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help thinking about dad, who had left my mother just a few weeks before he turned forty. The age coincidence, which in this case was down to a week, was neither a family nor a genetic matter and the midlife crisis was not a myth: it had begun to hit people around me, and it hit them hard. Some went almost crazy in their despair. For what? For more life. At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. When you were forty you realised it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something. Unless you took one last gamble.
The past is only one of many possible futures, as Thure Erik was wont to say. It wasn’t the past you had to avoid and ignore, it was its ossification. The same applied to the present. And when the movement art cultivated became static, that was what you had to avoid and ignore. Not because it was modern, in tune with our times, but because it wasn’t moving, it was dead.
vehemence
travestied
When you visualised the future and conjured up a world in which urban life had spread everywhere and man had achieved his long-desired symbiosis with the machine, you never took account of the simplest elements, beer for example, so golden and flavoursome and robust, made from grain in the field and hops in the meadow, or bread, or beetroot with its sweet but dark earthy taste, all this which we had always eaten and drunk at tables made of wood, inside windows through which beams of sunlight fell. What did people do in those seventeenth-century palaces, with their liveried servants, high-heeled shoes and powdered wigs pulled down over skulls full of seventeenth-century thoughts, what else if not drink beer and wine, eat bread and meat and piss and shit? The same applied to the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Conceptions of humanity changed constantly, conceptions of the world and nature too, all manner of strange ideas and beliefs emerged and vanished, useful and useless objects were discovered, science penetrated ever deeper into the world’s mysteries, machines grew in number, speeds increased and ever greater areas of old lifestyles were abandoned, but no one dreamed of discarding beer or changing it. Malt, hops, water. Field, meadow, stream. And basically that was how it was with everything. We were rooted in the archaic past, nothing radical about us, our bodies or needs had not changed since the first human saw the light of day somewhere in Africa 40,000 years ago or however long Homo sapiens had existed. But we imagined it was different, and so strong was our imaginative power we not only believed that but we also organised ourselves accordingly, as we sat getting drunk in our cafés and darkened clubs, and dancing our dances that presumably were even more clumsy than those performed, shall we say, 25,000 years ago in the glow of a fire somewhere along the Mediterranean coast.
What do you mean by high morals?’ I asked. ‘Well, you’re a deeply ethical person. There is an ethical foundation at the base of your personality and it is irreducible. You react in a purely physical way to inappropriate behaviour, the shame that overwhelms you is not abstract or conceptual but a hundred-per-cent physical, and you cannot escape it. You’re not a dissembler. Nor a moralist though. You know I have a predilection for Victorianism, their system with the front stage where everything is visible and a back stage where everything is hidden. I don’t think that kind of life makes anyone happier, but there is more life. You’re a Protestant through and through. Protestantism, that’s inner life, that’s being at one with yourself. You couldn’t live a double life even if you wanted to, it’s not something you can make happen. There’s a one-to-one relationship between life and morality in you. So you are ethically unassailable. Most people are Peer Gynt. They fudge their way along life’s road, don’t they? You don’t. Everything you do you do with the uttermost seriousness and conscientiousness. Have you ever skipped a line of the manuscripts you read, for example? Has it ever happened that you haven’t read them from the first page to the last?’ ‘No.’ ‘No, and there’s something in that. You can’t fudge anything. You can’t. You’re an arch-Protestant. And as I’ve said before, you’re an auditor of happiness. If you have some success, generally something others would die for, you just cross it off in the ledger. You’re not happy about anything. When you’re at one with yourself, which you are almost all the time, you’re much, much more disciplined than me. And you know what I’m like with all my systems. There are unmapped areas in your mind where you can lose control, but when you don’t go there, and nowadays invariably you don’t, you are absolutely ruthless in your morality. You are exposed to temptations far more than me or anyone else. If you had been me you would have lived a double life. But you can’t do that. You are doomed to a simple life. Ha ha ha! You’re no Peer Gynt and I think that is the heart of your nature. Your ideal is the innocent, innocence. And what is innocence? I’m right at the other end. Baudelaire writes about it, about Virginia, do you remember, the picture of pure innocence, which is confronted with the caricature, and she hears coarse laughter and realises that something dishonourable has happened, but she doesn’t know what. She doesn’t know! She folds her wings around herself. And then we’re back to the painting by Caravaggio, you know, The Cardsharps, where he’s tricked by all the others. That’s you. That’s innocence as well. And in that innocence, which in your case also lies in the past, the thirteen-year-old you wrote about in Out of the World, and the crazy nostalgia trip you have for the 1970s . . . Linda has some of this too. How was it she was described? Like a mixture of Madame Bovary and Kaspar Hauser?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Kaspar Hauser, he’s the enigma of course. Now I never met your previous wife, Tonje, but I’ve seen photos of her, and although she’s not like Linda there was something innocent about her, her appearance. Not that I think she is innocent, necessarily, but she gives that impression. Innocence of this kind is typical of you. Purity and innocence don’t interest me. However, it’s very clear in you. You’re a deeply moral and a deeply innocent person. What is innocence? It is that which has not been touched by the world, that which has not been destroyed, it is like water into which a stone has never been thrown. It’s not that you don’t have lusts, that you don’t have desire, for you do, it’s just that you conserve innocence. Your insanely huge longing for beauty comes in here as well. It wasn’t by chance that you chose to write about angels. That’s the purest of the pure. You can’t get purer than that.’ ‘But not in my novel. There it’s about the bodily, the physical side of them.’ ‘Well, nevertheless, they are the very symbol of purity. And of the fall. But you have made them human, allowed them to fall, not into sin, but into human-ness.’ ‘If you take an abstract view of this, in a way you’re right. The thirteen- year-old, that was innocence, and what happened to it? It had to be made physical.’ ‘What a way to put it!’ ‘Yeah, well, OK. She had to be screwed then. And the angels had to become human. So there’s a connection. But all this takes place in the subconscious. Deep down. So, in that sense, it’s not real. I might be heading in that direction, but I’m not aware of it. Of course, I didn’t know I had written a book about shame before reading the blurb on the cover. And I didn’t think about innocence and the thirteen-year-old until long after.’ ‘It’s there though. Perfectly obvious and not a shred of doubt.’ ‘OK. But hidden from me. And it strikes me there’s something you’re forgetting. Innocence is related to stupidity. What you’re talking about is stupidity, isn’t it? About ignorance?’ ‘No, no, far from it,’ Geir said. ‘Innocence and purity have become a symbol of stupidity, but that’s nowadays. We live in a culture where the person with the most experience wins. It’s sick. Everyone knows which way modernism is going, you create a form by breaking up a form, in an endless regression; just let it continue, and for as long as it does, experience will have the upper hand. The unique feature of our times, the pure or independent act, is, as you know, to renounce, not to accept. Accepting is too easy. There’s nothing to be achieved by it. That’s more or less where I place you. Almost saint-like, in other words.’ I smiled. The waitress came with our beer. ‘Skål,’ I said. ‘Skål,’ he said. I took a long swig, wiped the froth from my mouth with the back of my hand and put the glass on the beer mat in front of me. There was something uplifting about the light, golden colour, it seemed to me. I looked at Geir. ‘Saint-like?’ I repeated. ‘Yes. Saints in the Catholic faith could have been close to your way of believing and thinking and acting.’ ‘You don’t think you’re going a little too far now?’ ‘No, not at all. For me, what you do is utter mutilation.’ ‘Of what?’ ‘Of life, of opportunities, of living, of creating. Creating life, not literature. For me, you live in an almost frightening asceticism. Or rather, you wallow in asceticism. As I see it, it’s extremely unusual. Extremely deviant. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone, or heard of anyone . . . well, as I said, then I have to go back to the saints or the Church fathers.’ ‘Stop right there.’ ‘You did ask. There’s no other conceptual framework for you. There are no external characteristics, there’s no morality at stake, there’s no social morality, that’s not where it is. It’s in religion. Without a god though, that’s clear. You’re the only person I know who can take communion despite not believing in God and not commit blasphemy. The only person I know.’ ‘No one else you know has done it, I suppose?’ ‘They have, but not with purity! I did it when I got confirmed. I did it for money. Then I renounced the Church. What did I spend the money on? Well, I bought a knife. But that’s not what we were talking about. What were we talking about again?’ ‘Me.’ ‘Yes, that’s right. You have something in common with Beckett, in fact. Not in the way you write, but in the saintliness. It’s what Cioran says somewhere: “Compared with Beckett I’m a whore.” Ha ha ha! I think that’s absolutely spot on. Ha ha ha! And by the way Cioran was reckoned to be one of the most incorruptible people around. I look at your life and regard it as totally wasted. For that matter, I think that of everyone, but your life is even more wasted because there is more to waste. Your morality is not about tax declarations, as that idiot thought, but about your nature. Your nature, nothing less. And it is this enormous discrepancy between you and me which allows us to talk every day. Sympatio is the right term for it. I can sympathise with your fate. Because it is a fate, there is nothing you can do about it. All I can do is watch. Nothing can be done for you. There is nothing anyone can do. I feel sorry for you. But I can only view it as a tragedy unfolding at close quarters. As you know, a tragedy is when a great person goes through bad times. In contrast to a comedy, which is when a bad person goes through good times.’ ‘Why tragedy?’ ‘Because it is so joyless. Because your life is so joyless. You have such unbelievable reserves and so much talent, which stops there. It becomes art, but never more than that. You’re like Midas. Everything he touches turns to gold, but he gains no pleasure from it. Wherever he goes everything around him sparkles and glitters. Others search and search, and when they find a nugget, they sell it to acquire life, splendour, music, dance, enjoyment, luxury, or at least a bit of pussy, right, throw themselves at a woman just to forget they exist for an hour or two. What you lust for is innocence and this is an impossible equation. Lust and innocence can never be compatible. The ultimate is no longer the ultimate when you’ve stuck your dick in it. You have been allotted the Midas role, you can have everything and how many people do you think can have that? Almost no one. How many would turn it down? Even fewer. One, to my knowledge. If this isn’t a tragedy, then I don’t know what is. Could your journalist have made anything of this, do you reckon?’ ‘No.’ ‘No. He has his journo scales with which he weighs everything. Everyone is lumped into the same pot by journalists. That’s the basis of the whole system. But like that he won’t get close, not even close, to you or who you are. So we can forget it.’ ‘It’s the same for everyone, Geir.’ ‘We-ell, maybe, maybe not. Your distorted self-image and your yearning to be like everyone else also come into this.’ ‘That’s what you say. I say that the picture you paint of me is one only you could have painted. Yngve or mum or any one of my relatives or friends wouldn’t have had a clue what you were talking about.’ ‘That doesn’t make it any less true, does it?’ ‘No, not necessarily, but I’m reminded of what she said about you once, that you big up everyone around you because you want your own life to be great.’ ‘But it is. Everyone’s life is as great as they make it. I’m the hero in my own life, aren’t I. Well-known people, famous people, people everyone knows, they aren’t well known or famous in themselves, in their own right; someone has made them well known, someone has written about them, filmed them, talked about them, analysed them, admired them. That’s how they become great for others. But it’s just scene-setting. Should my scene- setting be any the less true? No, quite the opposite, because the people I know are in the same room as me, I can touch them, look them in the eye when we talk, we meet in the here and now, and of course we don’t do that with any of all those names swirling around us all the time. I’m the Underground Man and you’re Icarus.’ The waitress came towards us with the food. A piece of pork protruded from a sea of white onion sauce like an island on the plate she put down in front of Geir. On mine there was a dark heap of meatballs beside bright green mushy peas and red lingonberry sauce, all in a thick cream sauce. The potatoes were served in a separate dish. ‘Thank you,’ I said, looking up at the waitress. ‘May I have another please?’ ‘A Staro, yes,’ she said, and looked at Geir. He unfolded the serviette over his lap and shook his head. ‘I’ll wait, thanks.’ I drained the last drop from the glass and put three potatoes on my plate. ‘That wasn’t a compliment in case you thought it was,’ Geir said. ‘What wasn’t?’ I said. ‘The saint image. No modern person wants to be a saint. What is a saintly life? Suffering, sacrifice and death. Who the hell would want a great inner life if they don’t have any outer life? People only think of what introversion can give them in terms of external life and success. What is the modern view of a prayer? There is only one kind of prayer for modern people and that is as an expression of desire. You don’t pray unless there is something you want.’ ‘I want loads of things.’ ‘Yes, of course. But they don’t give you any pleasure. Not to strive for a happy life is the most provocative thing you can do. And again this is not a compliment. Not at all. I want life. It’s all that counts.’ ‘Talking to you is like going to the devil for therapy,’ I said, putting the dish of potatoes in front of him. ‘But the devil always loses in the end,’ he said. ‘We don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s not the end yet.’ ‘You’re right. But there’s nothing to indicate that he’s going to win. At any rate, not that I can see.’ ‘Even when God is no longer among us?’ ‘Among us is the right expression. Before, he wasn’t here, he was above us. Now we’ve internalised him. Incorporated him.’ We ate in silence for a few minutes. ‘Well?’ Geir said. ‘How has your day been?’ ‘It hasn’t really been a day,’ I said. ‘I tried to write a speech, you know the one, but it was just rubbish, so I’ve been reading instead.’ ‘I suppose you could have done worse.’ ‘Yes, probably. But I’ve noticed how angry I am at all that. You’ll never understand, by the way.’ ‘What’s “all that”?’ Geir asked, putting down his glass. ‘In this particular case it’s the feeling I have when I’m forced to write about my two books. I’m forced to pretend it’s meaningful, otherwise it’s impossible to talk about them, and it’s a bit like patting yourself on the back, isn’t it. It’s repugnant because then I have to stand there talking in complimentary terms about my own books, and those listening are actually interested. Why? Afterwards they come to me wanting to tell me how fantastic the books are and what an unbelievably wonderful talk it was, and I don’t want to meet their eyes, I don’t want to see them, I want to escape from the hell, because I’m a prisoner there, do you understand? There is no worse fate than being subjected to bloody praise. Georg Johannesen spoke about “praise competence”. The distinction is redundant, it implies that valuable praise exists, but it doesn’t. And the higher the authority, the worse it is. At first I’m embarrassed, I have nothing to hide behind, and then I lose my temper. When people start treating me in that special way. You know what I mean. Oh no, shit, you don’t know what I mean at all! You’re right at the bottom of the ladder, aren’t you! You want to climb. Ha ha ha.’ ‘Ha ha ha.’ ‘That stuff about praise is not quite true, by the way,’ I continued. ‘If you say something is good, that has meaning. If Geir praises me, it has meaning. And Linda, of course, and Tore and Espen and Thure Erik. All those who are close to me. It’s all the outsiders I’m talking about. Where I no longer have any control. I don’t know what it is . . . All I know is that success is not to be trusted. I notice that I get angry just talking about it.’ ‘There are two things you’ve said that I’ve taken note of and have made me think a lot,’ Geir said, looking at me with his knife and fork hovering over his plate. ‘The first was when you were talking about Harry Martinson’s suicide. He cut open his stomach after receiving the Nobel Prize. You said you could understand exactly why.’ ‘Yes, but that’s obvious,’ I said. ‘Getting the Nobel Prize for literature is the greatest dishonour of all for a writer. And his prize was systematically called into question. He was Swedish, he was a member of the Swedish Academy, it was clear there was some kind of cronyism going on, that he didn’t really deserve it. And if he didn’t deserve it, the whole affair was a mockery. You have to be bloody strong if you’re going to get over that sort of mockery. And for Martinson, with all his inferiority complexes, it must have been unbearable. If that was why he did it. What was the second?’ ‘Hm?’ ‘You said there were two things I’d said which had stuck in your mind. What was the second?’ ‘Oh, that was Jastrau in Tom Kristensen’s Havoc. Do you remember?’ I shook my head. ‘There’s no safer place for secrets than in you,’ he said. ‘You forget everything. Your brain’s like Swiss cheese without the cheese. You told me Havoc was the scariest book you’d ever read. You said the fall in it wasn’t a fall. He just let go, let himself go, gave up everything he had, to drink, and in the book that seemed like a real alternative. A good alternative, that is. Just letting go of everything you have, letting yourself go. Like from the quayside.’ ‘Now I remember. He writes so well about what it’s like to be drunk. How fantastic it can be. And then you have the feeling it’s not such a big deal. I hadn’t thought about the lazy, unresisting side of the fall before. At the time I saw it as something dramatic, something far-reaching. And it was shocking to think of it as everyday routine, arbitrary and maybe even wonderful. Because it is indeed wonderful. The second day of inebriation, for example. The thoughts that come into your mind . . .’ ‘Ha ha ha!’ ‘You could never let go,’ I said. ‘Could you?’ ‘No. Could you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Ha ha ha! But almost everyone I know has done. Stefan boozes all the time on his farm, doesn’t he. Boozes, grills whole pigs and drives a tractor. When I was at home this summer Odd Gunnar was drinking whisky from a milk tumbler. The pretext for filling it to the brim was that I was visiting him. But I didn’t drink. And then there’s Tony. But he’s a drug addict, that’s a bit different.’
surfeit
bemused
People lay strewn around you like skittles.
However, there are many ways to be trapped; there are many ways of not being free. You have to remember that you’ve had everything you wanted. You’ve had your revenge on those you targeted. You have status. People sit waiting for what you do and wave palm leaves as soon as you show your face. You can write an article about something that interests you and it will be in print in the newspaper of your choice a few days later. People ring and want you to go here, there and everywhere. Newspapers ask you for a comment on all sorts of matters. Your books will be published in Germany and England. Do you understand the freedom there is in that? Do you understand what has opened in your life? You talk about a longing to let go and fall. If I let go I would be standing in the same place. I’m standing right at the bottom. No one’s interested in what I write. No one’s interested in what I think. No one invites me anywhere. I have to force my way in, right? Whenever I enter a room full of people I have to make myself interesting. I don’t pre-exist, like you, I don’t have a name, I have to create everything from scratch every time. I’m sitting at the bottom of a hole in the ground and shouting through a megaphone. It doesn’t matter what I say, no one is listening. And you know that whatever I say from the outside contains a criticism of what is inside. And then by definition you’re self-opinionated. The embittered querulous type. Meanwhile the years pass. I’ll soon be forty and I don’t have any of what I wanted to have. You say it’s brilliant and unique, and perhaps it is, but what good is that? You have everything you want, and you can dispense with it, leave it, make no use of it. But I can’t. I have to get in. I’ve spent twenty years trying. The book I’m busy with now is going to take three years at least. I can already feel how the world around me is losing belief and hence any interest. I’m becoming more and more like a madman refusing to drop his mad project. Everything I say is measured against that. When I said something after my doctorate it was measured against that, that was when I was academically and intellectually alive, now I’m dead. And the more time that passes the better the next book has to be. It’s not enough for the next book to be all right, pretty OK, very good, because I’ve spent a lot of time on it and because my age is, relatively speaking, so advanced that it has to be outstanding. From that perspective, I’m not free. And to link up with what we were talking about before, the Victorian ideal, which wasn’t an ideal but a reality, namely a double life. Therein lies a sorrow too because such a life can never be whole. And of course that’s what everyone dreams of, one love affair, or falling in love with someone, when cynicism and calculation are absent, when everything is whole. Yes, you know. Romance. A double life is a passable resolution of a problem, but it is not unproblematic, if that’s what you reckoned I went around thinking. It’s practical, provisional, pragmatic, in other words, part of life. But it’s not whole, and it’s not ideal. The most important difference between us is not that I’m free and you aren’t. For I don’t believe this to be the case. The most important difference is that I’m happy, a glad soul. And you aren’t.’ ‘I don’t think I’m that unglad—’ ‘Exactly! Unglad. Only you can use a word like that! It says everything about you.’ ‘Unglad is a good word. I’ve seen it in the old Norwegian saga Heimskringla, in point of fact. And the Storm translation is a hundred years old. But perhaps it’s time we changed the subject?’ ‘If you’d said that two years ago I would have understood.’ ‘OK. I can go on. After everything finished with Tonje I went to an island and lived there for two months. I had been there before, I just had to get on the phone and everything was arranged. A house, a small island, right out in the sea, three other people there. It was the end of the winter, so the whole island was frozen and stiff. I walked all over it thinking. And what I thought was that I would have to do everything I could to become a good person. Everything I did should be to that end. But not in the abject, evasive manner that had characterised my behaviour so far, you know, being overcome by shame at the smallest trifle. The indignity of it. No, in the new image I was drawing of myself there was also courage and backbone. Look people straight in the eye, say what I stood for. I had become more and more hunched, you see, I wanted to occupy less and less space, and on the island I began to straighten my back, quite literally. No joking. At the same time I read Hauge’s diaries. All 3,000 pages. It was an enormous consolation.’ ‘He went through worse times, didn’t he?’ ‘He certainly did. But that wasn’t the point. He fought without cease for the same, for the ideal of how he should be, as compared with the person he was. The determination to fight was extraordinarily strong in him. And that in a man who didn’t really do anything, didn’t really experience anything, just read, wrote and fought his inner struggle on a stupid little farm by a stupid little fjord in a stupid little country on the margin of the world.’ ‘No wonder he was prone to going absolutely bananas.’ ‘You get the impression it was also a relief. He gave in, and part of the velocity with which he was hurled off course was born of happiness. He escaped the iron grip on himself and relaxed, so it seemed.’ ‘The question is whether it was God,’ Geir said. ‘The feeling of being seen, of being forced to your knees by something that can see you. We just have a different name for it. The superego or shame or whatever. That was why God was a stronger reality for some than others.’ ‘So the urge to give yourself to baser feelings and wallow in pleasure and vice would be the devil?’ ‘Exactly.’ ‘That’s never attracted me. Apart from when I drink, that is. Then everything goes overboard. What I want to do is travel, see, read and write. To be free. Completely free. And I had a chance to be free on the island because the reality was that I had finished with Tonje. I could have travelled anywhere I wanted – Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Munich. But instead I headed out there, where there wasn’t a soul. I didn’t understand myself, I had no idea who I was, so what I resorted to, all these ideas about being a good person, was simply all I had. I didn’t watch TV, I didn’t read newspapers, and all I ate was crispbread and soup. When I indulged myself out there it was with fishcakes and cauliflower. And oranges. I started doing press-ups and sit-ups. Can you imagine? How desperate do you have to be to start doing press-ups to solve your problems?’ ‘This is all about purity, nothing less. Through and through. Asceticism. Don’t be corrupted by TV or the newspapers, eat as little as possible. Did you drink coffee?’ ‘Yes, I drank coffee. But it’s true what you said about purity. There is something almost fascist about it all.’ ‘Hauge wrote that Hitler was a great man.’ ‘He wasn’t so old then. But the worst of it is that I can understand: that need to rid yourself of all the banality and small-mindedness rotting inside you, all the trivia that can make you angry or unhappy, that can create a desire for something pure and great into which you can dissolve and disappear. It’s getting rid of all the shit, isn’t it? One people, one blood, one earth. Now precisely this has been discredited once and for all. But what lies behind it, I don’t have any problem understanding that. And as sensitive to social pressure, as governed by what others think of me as I am, God knows what I would have done if I’d lived through the 1940s.’ ‘Ha ha ha! Relax. You don’t do what everyone else does now, so you probably wouldn’t have then.’ ‘But when I moved to Stockholm and fell in love with Linda, everything changed. It was as though I had been raised above trivia, none of it mattered, everything was good and there were no problems anywhere. I don’t know how to explain . . . It was as though my inner strength was so great everything outside it was crushed. I was invulnerable, do you understand? Filled with light. Everything was light! I could even read Hölderlin! It was an utterly fantastic time. I’ve never been happier. I was bursting with happiness.’ ‘I can remember. You were up in Bastugatan and positively glowing. You were almost luminous. You played Manu Chao again and again. It was barely possible to talk to you. You were running over with happiness. Sitting in bed like some bloody lotus flower, beaming all over your face.’ ‘The point is that all this is about perspectives. Seen in one way, everything offers pleasure. Seen in another, just sorrow and misery. Do you think I cared about all the rubbish TV and the press stuff us with while I sat up there being happy? Do you think I was ashamed of anything at all? I was tolerant of everything. I couldn’t bloody lose. That was what I told you when you were so terribly depressed and beyond yourself the following autumn. It was all about perspective. Nothing in your world had changed or become an urgent problem except for the way you saw it. But of course you didn’t listen to me; you went to Iraq instead.’ ‘The last thing you want to hear when you’re in the darkness of depression is the babbling of some happy tosser. But I was happy when I returned. It got me out of it.’ ‘Yes, and now the roles are reversed again. Now I’m sitting here and complaining about the wretchedness of life.’ ‘I think it’s the natural order,’ he said. ‘Have you started doing press-ups again?’ ‘Yes.’ He smiled. I smiled too. ‘What the hell am I going to do?’ I said.
Oh, Russian formalism, where have you been in my life?
I miss you,’ she said. ‘I’m here,’ I said. ‘What is it? Do you want all of me?’ ‘Yes, that’s what I want,’ she said, taking my hands and drawing me down onto the sofa.
‘Getting snowed in wouldn’t be a problem here,’ the journalist said. ‘You’ve got the odd book or two!’ ‘Most of which I haven’t read,’ I said. ‘And the ones I have I don’t remember a thing about.’
Ibsen had been right. Everything I saw around me confirmed it. Relationships were there to eradicate individuality, to fetter freedom and suppress that which was pushing through. My mother was never so angry as when we discussed the concept of freedom. When I expressed my opinion, she snorted and said that was just an American notion without any content, vacuous and fallacious. We were here for others. But this was the idea that had led to the systematised existence we had now, where unpredictability had vanished and you could go from nursery to school to university and into working life as if it were a tunnel, convinced that your choices had been made of your own free will, while in reality you had been sieved through like grains of sand right from your very first school day: some were sent into practical jobs, some into theoretical, some to the top, some to the bottom, all while being taught that everyone was equal. This was the idea that had made us, at least my generation, have expectations of life, to live in the belief that we could make demands, make real demands and blame every possible circumstance other than ourselves if it didn’t turn out the way we had imagined, that made us rage against the state if a tsunami came and you didn’t receive immediate help. How pathetic was that? Become embittered if you didn’t get the job you had merited. And this was the thinking that meant the fall was no longer a possibility, except for the very weakest, because you could always get money, and pure existence, one where you stand face to face with a life-threatening emergency or peril, had been completely eliminated. This was the thinking that had spawned a culture in which the greatest mediocrities, warm and with a well-fed stomach, trumpeted their cheap platitudes, thus allowing writers such as Lars Saabye Christensen or whoever to be worshipped as if Virgil himself were sitting on the sofa and telling us whether he had used a pen or a typewriter or a computer and what times of the day he wrote. I hated it, I didn’t want to know about it. But who was talking to journalists about how he wrote his mediocre books as though he were some literary giant, a champion of the written word, if not myself? How can you sit there receiving applause when you know that what you have done is not good enough? I had one opportunity. I had to cut all my ties with the flattering, thoroughly corrupt world of culture in which everyone, every single little upstart, was for sale, cut all my ties with the vacuous TV and newspaper world, sit down in a room and read in earnest, not contemporary literature but literature of the highest quality, and then write as if my life depended on it. For twenty years if need be. But I couldn’t grasp the opportunity. I had a family and I owed it to them to be there. I had friends. And I had a weakness in my character which meant that I would say yes, yes, when I wanted to say no, no, which was so afraid of hurting others, which was so afraid of conflict and which was so afraid of not being liked that it could forgo all principles, all dreams, all opportunities, everything that smacked of truth, to prevent this happening. I was a whore. This was the only suitable term.
Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.
But what do you say to have any impact on a man who at one time admired the Spice Girls? To influence a man who once wrote an enthusiastic essay about the sitcom Friends?
In the window before me I can vaguely see the image of my face. Apart from the eyes, which are shining, and the part directly beneath, which dimly reflects light, the whole of the left side lies in shade. Two deep furrows run down the forehead, one deep furrow runs down each cheek, all filled as it were with darkness, and when the eyes are staring and serious, and the mouth turned down at the corners it is impossible not to think of this face as sombre. What is it that has etched itself into you?
One day in March the telephone rang while I was working, the number was unfamiliar, but as it didn’t come from Norway, but was Swedish, I took it anyway. It was a colleague of my mother’s, they were at a seminar in Gothenburg, mum had fainted in a shop and been taken to hospital, where she was now in intensive care. I rang, she’d had a heart attack, was being operated on now and was out of danger. Late that night she rang me herself. I could hear she was weak and perhaps a touch confused. She said the pain had been so great she would rather have died than gone on living. She hadn’t fainted, she had just fallen over. And not in a shop but the street. While she was lying there, she said now, convinced that this was the end, the thought had gone through her head that she’d had a fantastic life. When she said that I froze. There was something so good about it. In addition, she said it had been particularly her childhood that had flashed through her mind as she lay there about to die, as a kind of sudden insight: she’d had an absolutely brilliant childhood, she had been free and happy, it had been fantastic. In the ensuing days what she had said kept returning to me. In a way I was shocked. I could never have thought that. If I keeled over now, and had a few seconds, perhaps minutes, to think before it was all over I would think the opposite. That I hadn’t accomplished anything, I hadn’t seen anything, I hadn’t experienced anything. I want to live. But why don’t I live then? Why, when I’m on board a plane or in a car imagining it’s going to crash or have a collision, why do I think that’s not so bad? That it doesn’t matter? That I might just as well die as live? For this is what I think more often than not. Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatest of them all, because it is the only one that sins against life.

Page last revised on: 2024-02-23