Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

At last the bread is ready. He takes the loaves out of the oven and leaves them to cool, places food and drink on the table, notes how their physical presence makes his heart pound in his breast, senses the coolness about them, but fights down these feelings, rubs his hands, and exclaims merrily:

“There’s nothing like a good meal!”

There is no reply. Although the biblical text simply states that they eat, I’m pretty sure they must have been very hungry and dispatched the food without any attempt to hide their greed. The precise words are, . and they ate . The unexpected period brings the sentence up short. But the language is merely a vehicle, and the meaning of the language is thrown further by the momentum of its accumulated speed, across the period, out of the sentence, and down through the lines, where, of course, it can no longer be read, only conjectured.

They eat. While one hand grasps the joint of meat their teeth are busy stripping, the other feels blindly across the table for a piece of bread or cheese, to be ready the instant the mouthful is swallowed, if it isn’t already cupping the beaker of wine that Lot is careful to replenish, apparently unnoticed by them, occupied as they are in stuffing themselves with what is before them. They slurp and smack their lips, their jaws shine with fat, now and again their eyeballs roll upward, making their eyes seem white and empty. Even though the sight fills Lot with fear, he wants the meal to last, because while they are eating they don’t notice their surroundings, and in the street outside people have begun to shout his name. And so he rises unobtrusively as soon as anything on the table runs short, slips into his larder and fetches more food, which he places before them as discreetly as possible, trying not to draw attention to himself and shatter their trancelike state.

Perhaps things will be all right after all, he thinks. After a meal like this they’ll certainly feel sleepy, and if he announces that he is going to retire for the night, they may very well be tempted to follow his example. The evening is well advanced, he realizes. And he has already made up a bed for them.

These thoughts lift Lot’s spirits. Then he becomes aware that the two angels are looking at him. Red with embarrassment, he asks them if they’ve had enough to eat. They nod and thank him for the meal. It’s quiet outside. Once he’s cleared the table, he stretches his arms above his head and yawns.

“It’s late,” he says. “Maybe it’s time to think about turning in?”

The angels push back their chairs and rise. The fervor of their eating has vanished without trace and the Lord’s two servants once again exude dignity and calm, and for an instant Lot imagines he’s dreamed the whole thing.

“I’ve put you in here,” he says, pointing to the room next door. “If you’d care to follow me. .”

It’s going to be all right! he thinks. It’s going to be all right!

Just then someone knocks loudly at the front door. Lot feigns unconcern, and continues across the room, but behind him the angels have stopped.

“What was that?” one of them asks.

“Oh, probably just a few kids,” says Lot. “Nothing to worry about.”

Then a shout from the street penetrates the room.

“Lot!” goes the cry. “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them.”

There’s no avoiding it. Candle in hand, he walks past the two angels and opens the door to the multitude that has gathered outside. But still he hasn’t lost hope. For as it says in the Bible: Lot went out to the men, shut the door after him, and said, “I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly.”

The key thing here is not the appeal he makes to his fellow citizens, but the information that he first ensures the door is closed behind him. So Lot is still trying to prevent the angels from finding out what is going on. There is something touching about this, I feel; what a desperation he must have felt to try to keep angels in ignorance with the aid of a closed door.

“Look, I’ve got two daughters, neither of whom have lain with a man,” he says. “Let me bring them out to you, and you can do with them as you think fit! Just leave these men alone, as they have sought shelter under the shadow of my roof!”

But they won’t listen to him.

“Get out of the way!” they shout. “Here is this man living among us as a stranger, and he always wants to set himself up as a judge! Things will go worse with you than with them!”

Furiously they press in upon him and rush forward to break down the door.

Just then the angels step in. They grab Lot, haul him into the house, and shut the door behind them, while at the same time striking the crowd blind so that it can’t pursue them any further. It almost looks as if they’re filled with wrath on Lot’s behalf. Presumably their sympathy for him must have grown during the course of the evening, they must have sat there smiling to themselves at his futile attempts to conceal his motives from them.

“If you have anyone here, either sons-in-law or sons or daughters or any others who are connected with you in the city, you must get them away from this place!” they tell him. “For now we shall destroy this place, because a great outcry about them has reached the Lord, and the Lord has sent us to destroy it.”

Lot does what he’s told, he goes out and speaks to his sons-in-law, but he lacks credibility, they think he’s joking. Then, of all things, he goes to bed, for the next thing that is written is: When morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, “Arise, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you be consumed in the punishment of the city.”

When Lot hesitates, the angels take all four by the hand and lead them out of the city. Later that day the city is razed to the ground, and every living thing exterminated. The next morning, we are told, smoke is rising from the ground like the smoke from a furnace.

This is an extraordinary tale, and the angels’ role in it is not easy to grasp. Traditionally angels are the link between the divine and the human, at once messengers and the message itself. The message carried by the angel that appeared to Mary about her being with child is also the thing that makes her conceive. The angels are action and meaning in one. Everything they do has to be interpreted. That is why their actions are normally so large and obvious, like the gestures of actors on a stage, which again are made with the distance of the audience in mind, and for this reason the angels’ behavior toward Lot seems so strange. Isn’t he too small for them? Aren’t they too close to him? Yes, one might say, but couldn’t that be the whole point? That, in doing it, they want to elevate this small, upright, and considerate man, as well as justify the terrible things that follow: the only pure person is spared, everyone else is impure and deserves to be punished. And that’s certainly true, seen from our perspective. But it must seem different to the angels. What we may think of them means nothing. They don’t belong here, just as they don’t belong in heaven; transition between the two is their element. Compassion is alien to them, they are indifferent to us and all our affairs, thus the semblance of cruelty that angels often exude.

But they showed consideration and feeling as far as Lot was concerned.

What could have been its cause?

I believe the explanation is simple. Angels can, as is well-known, assume any shape. But what is less well-known is that the shape they assume contains an element of danger for them, as well. If they inhabit it for too long, it will begin to affect them, and finally, if they haven’t heeded the warning signs, it will take them over entirely. In Sodom they appeared as human beings. Clearly the idea was to go through the city, separate sinners from nonsinners, and then raze it. But Lot’s intervention disturbed this chain of events. Initially they said no to his invitation, but then they must have thought: Why not? A morsel to eat and a short rest can’t do any harm. Once they’d entered his house, they had to sit there and wait for the bread to bake, angelic still in their silence, dignity, and coolness, but slowly taking stock of their surroundings and noting everything that never usually impinges on an angel’s consciousness, so that, by the time the meal was over, they had been fatally caught up in Lot’s trivial existence. This frail man suddenly meant something to them, and the impulses that governed their actions became more attuned to him than to the task they had been sent to accomplish. This may explain the fury with which Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. As soon as Lot was out of sight, they came to themselves again, understood how weak they’d been, and took it out on the two cities. For they didn’t just destroy all the houses and inhabitants, but also the entire plain and everything that grew in the fields; and they turned Lot’s wife, who was unable to relinquish the past, not even the evil parts of it, into a pillar of salt.