Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

He could find no other cause. There was no cause for these revelations, they weren’t accompanied by commands from God, none of those they appeared to was chosen (other than to see an angel), and he interpreted this lack of motive as being that the revelation’s meaning was the revelation itself. Angels wanted to be seen, and they wanted to be worshipped.

This period merged almost imperceptibly with the next, in which angels were seen by ordinary people, in revelations that clearly were of a totally different stamp. Perhaps they couldn’t even be termed revelations at all. A normal revelation characteristically had three elements: the angel arrived (there was a moment when it wasn’t there, and a moment when it was), the angel was there , and the angel departed (or disappeared). These new revelations that began to take place at the start of the fifteenth century lacked the first and last elements. In these revelations the angel simply was there. Antinous Bellori had himself had one of this sort that night by the river all those years ago. The angels hadn’t shown themselves to him. They were there, and they would have been there whether he’d discovered them or not.

Why were they there?

And in what way were they there?

The sole explanation Bellori found was that they were there because they were forced to be. It wasn’t something they’d chosen. Their attitude, in the middle of the river, fishing and eating, also pointed to this.

The massive adulation must have gone to their heads, blinded by megalomania they hadn’t noticed that the way back was becoming ever longer, and when one day they woke up to find it closed altogether, it was too late: there was no way back. They were trapped here.

That was how it must have been.

And here, with these concluding sentences later so renowned, ends Bellori’s great work about angels:

The angels have fallen. They are out there somewhere .

NO ONE knows where Bellori was living when he finished On the Nature of Angels . Nor do we know what he was thinking, or what he was doing. But taking into account the huge size of the work, it is more than probable that he felt a huge relief — he’d worked at his book about angels for more than six years — and for the same reason an equally great emptiness. Even though we know nothing about him at that period, we can surmise a number of character traits from his later notebooks, which presumably also held good at the time he laid down his pen, leaned back in his chair, and gazed at the vast pile of manuscript that lay on the desk in front of him. Antinous was ambitious, enormously ambitious, and there were very obvious signs of megalomania in his makeup. Now he had written about the angels. And not only had he systematized all the knowledge then available about them, but he’d also penetrated this knowledge, and there, within, he’d arrived at the truth about the angels. And thus the truth about the divine.

There must be at least one young man every day somewhere in the world who thinks he’s discovered the truth, but Bellori was no ordinary young man, he had dedicated the whole of his sentient life to his studies, worked day and night for many years on his book, his talent was among the greatest of his time — and in addition he knew that he was right. He’d seen the proof with his own eyes.

He must have anticipated fame and honor, and he must have been terrified that someone might beat him to it. And so we can assume that it wasn’t many days after he penned the final word that he delivered the manuscript to the printer in Venice.

If he expected fame and honor, we might ask, why had he allowed his manuscript to be published under a pseudonym?

In the first place a pseudonym was absolutely essential. This was the time of the Counter-Reformation, and the religious climate had hardened against all heresies. Most escaped the Inquisition by acknowledging their sin and praying for forgiveness, but not all — according to his notebooks, Antinous recalled in his childhood a miller by the name of Domenico Scandella, who’d been imprisoned in Antinous’s native town for his heretical utterances, and who, when he returned to his own town, hadn’t learned the lesson of what had happened to him, but continued to embroider his theory that the universe had once been a kind of cheesy mass, in which worms developed, and these turned into angels. One of his neighbors denounced him, and the Inquisition began an investigation that ended sixteen years later, when he, like so many of his contemporaries, was sentenced to death by burning. What Antinous had done was far, far worse, because it was systematic, cohesive, and not just written down, but also published. A pseudonym would save him from such a fate, he must have thought, while the fame would be just as great, learned men all over Europe would talk about his work, and did it then matter that no one knew that it was he, Antinous Bellori, who was the author? He knew he was, and it was there within him that the sweetness of renown would be enjoyed.

Along the canals of Venice he went, down into the cellar where long ago he’d come to an agreement about the printing; perhaps he had his cap pulled down to hide his face, perhaps not, but all the same: the manuscript was delivered, soon it would be typeset, soon it would be printed, soon it would be sent all over Europe, soon his fame would no longer be just an abstract phenomenon in his own head, where it had turned and turned like a lamp in a lighthouse all these years, but a reality out in the world.

The manuscript was typeset, the manuscript was printed, the manuscript was sent out to the cities of Europe.

But nothing happened.

There was total silence.

On the Nature of Angels vanished into the great void, as if it had never been written. As so often happens, it is only due to a coincidence that we know anything about this work today. We know that Antinous Bellori studied at the university at Montpellier toward the end of the 1560s. Sir Thomas Browne studied at the same university in the 1620s, and may have come across Bellori’s name there. However, the fact is that in his Pseudodoxia epidemica of 1646 he refers to On the Nature of Angels . There are two lines about it, not much, but enough for the work’s life to be extended. For more than two centuries it lived out this academically minimal existence, known to only a few initiates, until in 1859 it took a new lease on life when Antinous Bellori’s posthumous papers popped up sensationally in a London auction. The manuscripts, which are a chaotic mixture of diary entries, religious speculations, scientific observations and experiments, travelogues, and anatomical studies, were written between the years 1587 and 1606, and turn Bellori into the man we perhaps come closest to in that period. Not because he wrote more personally and revealed more of “himself,” as the popular notion about Bellori has always had it, not at all — both his style’s Baroque tendency to imitate and quote and its continual switching between the observations’ factual and sober coolness and the speculations’ almost crazed eclecticism, so typical of seventeenth-century prose, make it almost impossible to say where his epoch ends and Bellori begins — but because he, in contrast to the other authors and philosophers of the time, had no public in mind as he wrote. He didn’t write about himself, but for himself.

His notes begin the day he leaves his childhood home in Ardo, almost exactly two years after the publication of On the Nature of Angels . He has a pack on his back, a staff in his hand, and he turns his steps northward. Up the mountainside he goes, and when he comes down again two weeks later, he carries on into the forest. He’s in good spirits, according to his entries. He’s been disappointed, he’s been bitter, he’s been so angry that he lost all control and smashed a chair to pieces on the floor, hurled glasses and plates at the walls. But now he’s in good spirits. He’s made a resolution, that’s why he’s walking here, and no matter what befalls him, his resolution is firm.