Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

He ran out. Running along the beach, looking around him all the time, back, and off in the other direction.

Back to the cave again to think. He could see no tracks in the sand. It must have taken to the air. And unless it had flown far away, he’d need to scan the ground above him.

The odd glances he’d directed at the tops of the great cliffs while he’d been running became more systematic now.

And there.

There it was.

High up on a rocky ledge, perhaps thirty feet from the top of the cliff, was an angel.

Antinous raised his hands toward it.

The sky was gray, the water was gray, the beach was gray. A rippling line of white was stretched across the surface of the sand each time a wave came in. There was a touch of breeze.

The angel looked out over the sea. It stood erect, one shoulder leaning against the edge of the cliff behind it. Its wings were lowered. They reached to its ankles and seemed to be pointing downward. It hadn’t yet seen Antinous.

“Oh, most lovely of creatures!” he cried. “Oh, divine purity!”

The angel turned its head and looked down at him. There was no fear at having been discovered in that look, nor annoyance nor irritation, simply apathy.

It gazed at Antinous, turned its head back, and looked across the sea again, but its expression was no longer immersed in it, and in the next instant it leaned forward, spread its wings, and glided out across the water.

Antinous fell to his knees on the sand.

One might perhaps expect the Normandy experience to have a stimulating effect on him. He’d seen them again, they were still here, that ought to have strengthened his interest and efforts. But the opposite was the case. The beautiful angel soaring between sky and sea seemed more to demoralize him. He realized that the distance between him and the angels was vast, something he’d known all along ever since he’d first seen them, but which he’d suppressed. Now he had to face the truth. He might possibly find them again and watch them from a distance as he had just done. But he’d never get close to them. The chasm was too great.

He left Normandy and walked southward, home to Ardo, where he remained the whole winter. The next spring one senses that the will that drove him on was no longer so self-evident. But he didn’t give up. If he couldn’t make contact with them, if he couldn’t catch or kill one of them, he might at least see them. That was no small thing. No, it was no small thing at all. Maybe it was enough?

Of course it was enough.

Why should he exhibit them to others? Wasn’t it him they had filled? And wasn’t it him they were to fill again?

Once again the longing was there. He felt a slight bitterness, he wrote, at having been so preoccupied with proving his own theory that he hadn’t been able to value what he’d actually experienced in Normandy.

Why ask for more than that?

He’d seen the angel, and now he wanted to see it again. His childhood yearning, which had been so pure, which hadn’t been sullied with pride, returned to him. To be in their proximity again, even if only for a short time, was the only thing he wanted.

It was at about this time that he ceased writing altogether. Bergotti goes to great pains to explain why this happened, as has almost everyone else who has studied Bellori. In most cases it is explained by the fact that Bellori’s long-harbored scorn for the written word was finally taken to heart, hastened by the feelings the sight of the angel in Normandy left in him; that the desire to understand and elucidate what he saw was driving him away from these experiences.

This sounds plausible as far as it goes. But if one looks more closely at what he wrote ( We know nothing. Nor is there anything to know .), it strikes me that it goes much further and deeper than the desire to live more intensely in the world. Bellori had spent an entire life writing, thinking, and researching. He had written a huge work about angels, the most comprehensive of its kind. And then he distances himself from everything in two sentences. And not only that. All human activity is brushed aside as if it were a fly.

What brought him to it?

I have no doubt at all that the answer lies in the situation in which those sentences were written, which no one so far has paid any attention to, for the simple reason that it’s seemingly a completely neutral one. In the autumn of 1603 Bellori was in Padua, he’d come there from the south on his way home for the winter. He was sitting on the edge of a small pool, under the shade of an acacia tree, writing. A bit about his trip over the hills, the beautiful deep blue autumn sky, the cold air, the glittering roofs of the town in front of him. A bit about the old man he’d seen in a narrow, umbral passage between two houses, and who had sent shivers down his spine, as both the man’s legs had been amputated and he sat on a kind of box with wheels in the shade. That in itself was no reason to make his flesh creep, although it was disturbing enough, no, the really unpleasant thing was the look he had turned on Antinous. He’d never before seen so much pent-up fury in the eyes of anyone. He had hastened on up the hill, there’d been some clucking hens in a back garden, a woman emptying a tub of water in the square, she was bare-legged and he’d had to exert his willpower to the utmost not to turn his head and look back at her. Then he wrote about how the cool, sharp wind made him long for winter and about a thought he’d had earlier that day, when he’d passed a small, dead animal swarming with flies. The flies are the dead , he’d thought suddenly, and even though he knew it was a meaningless idea, he couldn’t get it out of his mind. There are so many flies, and they are born so easily. Suppose the number of newly hatched flies every day actually matched the number of people who died in the same period? He wrote this, and then, presumably to rid himself of the mood this thought had put him in, he wrote about the water in the pool by his side, the soothing rippling from it, the red and yellow leaves that floated on its surface, the patterns on them like the branchings of certain veins.

It was a fine day, he sat there writing, occasionally glancing up at the people who passed by, old and young, men and women, rich and poor, and when he’d emptied himself, he rose, hoisted his pack onto his back, crossed the square, and walked toward the chapel.

I am certain that he saw something inside the chapel that moved him. He was in Padua, where there is the Cappella degli Scrovegni, famed for its Giotto frescoes with their motifs of Christ’s Passion. It’s difficult to prove that it was the sight of them that led to a two-year hiatus in his writing. But despite that, I’m fairly certain it’s what happened. The key lies in Giotto’s picture of Jesus. Not just the key to Bellori’s silence, the importance of which mustn’t be exaggerated, but also to the fate of the angels on earth. That was what silenced him. He understood why the angels were imprisoned here, and so terrible was this insight that he distanced himself from everything he’d thought and done up to then.

The central point in Bellori’s speculations about Jesus in On the Nature of Angels was that he represented no permanent state of the divine, as maintained by the dogma of the Trinity, but came into existence in a so-called kenosis, that is, a “self-emptying” or “self-emptying ecstasy,” that God had emptied himself into Jesus Christ. The event was unique, and the fact that it had occurred in historical time, in the form of a real person’s concrete experiences, was for Bellori the very kernel of the gospel. He believed that the contradictions in the New Testament — which were so great that endless sects and churches were constantly springing up and withering away, all with more or less sensible bases for their views taken from the Gospels — occurred only because of our expectations of the divine. The Gospels are simple narratives about simple people; very few of those Jesus preached his message to could read or write, and even though his nature was somber and complex, with a tendency to brooding and melancholy, everything he said was distinguished by its straightforwardness and universality. The images and parables were taken from a world they all knew, a world of seed corn, sheep, tillers, and shepherds, so when a contradiction suddenly passes his lips, it doesn’t inevitably have to be met with a meditation on the meaningless, nonlinguistic abyss that may have been opened up by the statement, or that one should elaborate all its possibilities in an endless play on language. Perhaps its meaning is simple. Perhaps part of its context has been lost over the years. This was the case with the question of Christ’s identity, according to Bellori. When he said, My Father and I are one , he wasn’t expressing some mystical paradox. The contrast between the assertion, which established two distinct quantities, and the content, which brings them together as one, is valid only if one understands the divine as immutable. Then Jesus is simultaneously both one and not one with the Father, and as this goes against everything we know about identity, the only possible “solution” is to give the paradox an almost divine character and then make it sacred. As the divine is immeasurably far away from us, we simply can’t understand it, but are forced to accept it as it is, in all its incomprehensibility: Jesus is both one and not one with the Father. But if one understands the divine as mutable, the paradox vanishes, and the statement becomes as clear and simple as the other messages Jesus brings. He was God, he becomes man. He is the Father, the Father is him. There is no secret, no riddle. A couple of days before he dies, Jesus says this quite explicitly. Seeing me, he sees who sent me , he says. In other words, he’s sent himself. And just to make sure it hasn’t escaped anyone, he repeats it several times in different words. Everything is entrusted to me by my Father , he says to the disciples. And no one knows the Son but the Father, and no one knows the Father but the Son and those to whom the Son may choose to reveal him . To the Pharisees he says: He who sent me is present with me, and has not left me alone , and when immediately afterward they ask who his father is, he replies: You know neither me nor my Father; if you knew me you would know my Father as well . And during the Last Supper with the disciples: If you knew me you would know my Father too. From now on you do know him; you have seen him .