Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Perhaps the most characteristic thing about earthly fire was that it was totally dependent on other objects for its life. This meant that it was impossible to avoid questioning whether these objects were part of the nature of fire. The fire that burned green wood was different to a fire of dry wood. Did this mean that fire belonged in a manner of speaking to the object it consumed?

If all fire had been bound to objects, this might have been an obvious conclusion to draw. But in the sun there was fire in its pure form, fire that burned both eternally and independently of other objects.

In other words, the earthly fire was impure, inextricably linked with matter, whereas that on the sun was pure. The question then was what was the relationship earthly fire had to the two extremities on which it impinged?

Noah himself had seen how fire pounced on everything in its path, from dried grass to the bushes on the forest edge, from the bushes up to the lowest branches of trees, in the next instant to envelop the whole tree with its flames, so there was no doubt in his soul that fire was active. He had known its will, it wanted more, nothing else, just more and more, and it leaped on everything.

So fire wasn’t a part of objects, but came to them externally. The fact that fire burned with different force and intensity according to the object it enveloped was a result of objects meeting fire with varying degrees of resistance. If resistance to fire was low, as in dry grass and the pines bordering the field, they would burn up in a matter of minutes; if resistance was great, fire might not get a purchase at all, as with mountains, sand, water, earth.

This was where fire impinged directly on the problems relating to his other categories. What was one to make of the incontestable fact that earthly fire only consumed things that fell under the headings of “living things” and “dead living things” and never those of “dead things”?

This was as far as he’d gotten. And it didn’t look as if he’d get any further this time either. After pondering on the nature of fire for a couple of hours, while somewhere deep inside his consciousness he’d noted the sounds from the house about him, and knew that Barak had gone to bed and that his mother was sitting alone in the living room, he finally gave up, leaned back in his chair, and put his feet on his writing table.

So Anna hadn’t come back, he thought. If she had, his mother would have turned in long ago.

He made up his mind to go down and keep her company. Not just to do a good deed, but also because he was curious about what Anna had been up to that evening. It was unlikely she’d say anything, but if he was there when she got back, he might be able to read it in her.

He got up, gathered the scattered papers into a sheaf, which he straightened, tapping it on the edge of the table several times, replaced the stones on the table by the wall, noticed the bucket and suddenly realized that the ceiling wasn’t dripping anymore, and he’d just picked it up to take it out with him when he heard his mother’s tread on the stairs.

He stood stock-still and heard her open the door to her room, which lay adjacent to his, close it behind her, walk across the room to her table, and sit down.

Bucket in hand, Noah went over to the wall. When he pressed his ear to it, he could hear her humming on the other side. It was the same song she’d been singing to Barak earlier. She’d most probably been singing it all evening, Noah thought, and smiled. He imagined her, the way she’d be loosening the bun on the back of her head and letting her hair down over her shoulders, her eyes staring into the mirror as her hand picked up the brush from the small table and slowly began to work through it.

She had been happy these past few days, he thought. She always was when Lamech was away. But sadness about this state of affairs followed her joy like a shadow. She saw how her children were freer when he wasn’t there, they talked more easily, laughed more often, and although she enjoyed this, for it made her freer as well, it gave her a pang of conscience, it felt as if she were betraying him, and if there was one thing she didn’t want to do it was that. She knew there was no harm in him, but it was undeniable that his silence affected them, when they were all together and when they were with him individually. His silence wasn’t merely an absence of words, it had a life of its own, it ate into them, it tried to make everything like itself. He would come in, take off his outer clothes, sit down at the table, and begin to eat. He would say nothing, and that was the whole trouble. Each time someone attempted to break the silence and say something, silence crowded around the words and choked them. Anna might say something, silence lay there in wait, everyone knew it, then Noah might say something, and Anna might say something in reply, and they might go on like this for a long time, but the silence was lurking there, all the time it was lurking there, and it would never give up, it was always the talk that was stifled in the end.

Only Barak was unaffected by it. He said what he wanted to say as they ate, and when he was alone with his father, he didn’t find the silence the least remarkable or oppressive, on the contrary, he fell in with it himself and could spend a whole day with his father in forest or field without speaking, as Noah knew. Whether this was to do with age or personality, only time would tell. Hopefully personality.

From inside the room came a deep sigh, and then a scraping sound as the chair was pushed back and she stood up. From the rustling that followed Noah knew that she was undressing. After she’d hung her clothes on the back of the chair, there was complete silence in the room. She was certainly looking at herself in the mirror. Not just brief glances, but a long stare, as if seriously scrutinizing herself. What she was thinking, he could only guess. But he sincerely hoped Anna didn’t feature in those thoughts.

Then he heard his mother go to the chest of drawers and open it, take out her nightgown and nightcap, put them on by the bedside, draw the sheet aside, blow out the light, and get into bed. Noah waited a while before he moved. The floorboards creaked and with the house as quiet as it was now his mother couldn’t help but hear him. But within a few minutes she’d begun to snore. Noah went down to the ground floor, made sure all the rooms were empty, in case Anna had returned without his knowing it, opened the front door, went out onto the doorstep in only his socks, and emptied the bucket.

The countryside lay dark before him. It was as if it had sucked the blackness into itself. But the sky was paler, and the blue and green shades that thinned it seemed to cause an undulation in the darkness arching over the mountains. He stood for a long time looking up at it. After a while it struck him that he’d quite forgotten to include winter lights in his scheme; the lights that on cold winter nights set the entire sky ablaze. As they lacked warmth, they couldn’t be listed under “conflagrations” but had to have their own category. Sun , he thought, stars, cherubim, lightning, winter lights, conflagrations . They were what came under “fire.” Of those, the cherubim and the winter lights burned cold, the others hot. But was it fire when it lacked heat? Could there be a kind of negative fire?

It was then he found the solution.

Fire is the living dead .

With the bucket clattering on the doorstep, he opened the door and hurried in, tore up the stairs to his room, where, with hands shaking with excitement, he lit the candle, got out his bundle of papers, sat down, picked up his pen, and began to write.

He hardly noticed when his mother stuck her head in shortly afterward and asked what was the matter, he just mumbled, Nothing’s the matter, Mother , without taking his eyes off the paper. Although he was writing at top speed, he couldn’t keep pace with his thoughts, they welled up within him, and just as travelers establish depots, he scribbled small headings at regular intervals down the pages, to await him there until he reached them with the body of his ideas.