Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Once I’d put the fish in the freezer in the cellar, I had a shower, changed, fried some potatoes and a couple of sausages and an egg, and ate in front of the living room window. Afterward, I tried to sleep on the sofa, but couldn’t, and I went up to my bedroom to fetch a book from the pile in the corner behind the door. I stood there for at least ten minutes with my eyes scanning the titles. Discourse Concerning the True Notion of the Lord’s Supper. . Inside the Third Reich. . Miracles: Works Above and Contrary to Nature. . Essays on the Theory of the Earth. . Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Immortality. . Eight Lectures on Geology. . Diary of the Voyage of HMS Beagle. . Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley . . It was a case of finding something rigorous. If there was one thing I’d learned, it was that there was no better place to turn than the sober, serene world of language when you were disturbed and filled with contempt for yourself. To feel that first sentence settling like a cool hand on your brow.

Not dull, but rigorous, not dull, but rigorous . The words sang inside me.

The book I took down with me was Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry , which I’d begun several times but never got through, and wouldn’t get through this time either.

I read for a couple of hours. Then I stood in the cellar for a while looking out the window, the smell had good associations and I could see the fog part and the islands’ landward municipal center, with its red and blue and yellow houses, stand out against the blue black of the sky and the glowing green of the moss.

Something was wrong. Something was so wrong that I didn’t know which way to turn.

I stood there for a long time with the phone in my hand.

For a few intense minutes I masturbated over the bathroom sink. A kind of tranquillity came over me when I’d finished, I sank down onto the cold bathroom floor and lay stretched out there for a while, before I undressed, showered and changed, took a walk to the pier, stood looking down into the clear, green water, where things that resembled trees, certainly five feet high and quite motionless, grew.

I realized I was about to start crying, and walked back, into the living room, where I lay down on the sofa. By then the crying was far away again. Fortunately I fell asleep after a few minutes.

When I awoke, it had begun to rain. I went into the kitchen, cut a few slices of bread on the counter and got something to spread on it, took a glass of water, and sat down at the table. Luckily the mood from before my nap had lifted. It seemed overwrought now.

I ate the slices of bread, drank the water.

Outside the window the mountain and the grass glistened with moisture. The two sheep stood immobile under a bush, and I smiled to myself, they seemed so inestimably sad as they stared vacuously ahead of them with their fleeces hanging in wet skeins from their sides. I tapped out a cigarette from the pack and opened the window. The sudden movement caused both sheep to look up at me. Simultaneously a small cloud of garden birds rose from the bush above them. After a few moments’ flapping they settled down on the wire that looped gently from the house wall to a pole on the rise. Not without pleasure I lit the cigarette as I watched them: the soft, almost inaudible crackling as the tobacco was lit, the smoke that seeped down to my lungs and drifted into the tiny airways. How the poisonous materials were deposited and slowly, slowly broke the organ down. Inside me, now .

The thought led to another related one, and I felt a rush of anticipation in my breast, a kind of nervousness. I raised the glass to my lips and emptied the contents in one gulp. Then rose and smashed it in one short blow against the counter. I took the biggest splinter up to the bathroom, where I pulled off my T-shirt and stood in front of the mirror. I could have used a knife, but there is something repugnant about that, the edge slips into the skin without resistance, the pain is sharp, as if something is set in motion inside me, impossible to reach, impossible to get hold of. But glass demands force, and its pain is more even, more obvious.

Yes: a kind of nervousness.

I rested the point of the glass on the skin above my collarbone, hard, until it had dug in and I could pull it down my chest. I waited until droplets of blood began to appear, then I made a new cut, next to the first one, and then another.

There was a resistance in the pain that I liked, it had to be overcome, time after time, and there was a rhythm, which gradually possessed me. Pressing the glass into ever more places, drawing new marks, just letting the blood run and mix, rising above the pain, pressing the glass in, keeping the pressure and pulling it down, letting the blood run, rising above the pain.

When I got to the area around my nipples, I had a rest, leaned forward and dashed my face with cold water, met my own eyes in the mirror. The muscles made it harder, they moved under the pressure from the splinter, sometimes it forced me to close my eyes. It was a matter of willpower. But soon it was done, soon I could make a start on my arms, they were firmer, they were simpler.

What had in the beginning been clearly distinct lines of pain gradually coalesced into one single, burning pain. I looked at my chest in the mirror and tried to find any places where my work had been poor, where I hadn’t pressed hard enough, so that the skin was merely grazed, or places where there were areas of skin that hadn’t been cut. But at last there was nothing more to do, and I went into the bedroom pressing a towel to my chest to suck up the blood. Outside, the rain was still pouring down. I crouched by my suitcase and took out a clean T-shirt. For I while I just stood there, in the middle of the room, not quite knowing what to do. Then I went over to the window, opened it, and glanced over toward the mountains in the east. The thick, gray cloud layer had a hint of blue in it, it gave it a metallic look, which the distant flashes of lightning emphasized. The rain drifted with the wind, struck my face, blew into the room. I was cold, but I remained where I was, looking down into the bay, at the boats rocking at their moorings, at their white, shiny plastic. The water just sloshing onto the planks of the quay, completely transparent. The dark red walls of the sheds, the pale green grass on the slope behind, the blue black sky. The surface of the sea that curved toward the horizon and seemed to support the shimmering light. The breakers that beat against the outermost skerries, how from this distance they seemed to fall in slow motion through the air. Soaking wet I stood there, for the world is beautiful, it’s so beautiful, and I was there in the midst of it.

In the evening, after reading for a few hours, I cut up my face as well. I don’t know why exactly. There was something alluring about it. Very alluring about it. But I’d done it before, and knew that the shame that followed would be almost impossible to bear. It was a case of putting as much time as possible between the event and the shame. So I lay down to sleep. But of course it was impossible. The pain and the warmth of the wounds kept me awake, and I went down to the living room, sat down in the chair by the window, and gazed out at the clouds drifting across the dark sky. Each time the light from the lighthouse swept past, it was as if the shadows outside were roused to life. Some of them retreated instantly, and stood like a group of onlookers around the light, where the remaining shadows writhed and squirmed as if in convulsions, until the light was past and the shadows joined again in close unity.

If I went on like this, I would soon end up as an invalid, I thought, and had to smile, suddenly I could imagine it, me sitting there running a saw back and forth across my thigh, a satisfied smile on my face, the sheet soaked with blood. Tenacity. There would be less of me! The smaller the body, the fewer the problems! The critical, penetrating gaze I gave myself as I sat there without arms and legs: is there any more I can do without? Is there any more I can cut away?