Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

It was as simple as that. And as beautiful. Four categories that contained everything in existence, three that contained the forces, two for the transitions, one that contained the creator.

There was nothing more.

That was all.

Numb in the head after so much concentration, Noah cleared his writing table, doused the light, and went to bed. But he was far too animated to sleep. In his mind he rehearsed all his reasonings again. The deep-seated composure that usually spread through him when he’d brought a task to perfection hadn’t come, and sensitive as he’d learned to be toward his feelings, no matter how vague, he felt that something wasn’t right.

It sometimes happened that he tricked himself into thinking that a problem was solved even when, deep down, he knew it wasn’t. He tried constantly to combat this lack of honesty within himself, but when it came to the rub and he was sitting there after hours of work, whether on a drawing, a system, or a complicated series of thoughts, he sometimes said to himself that that was good enough, that that was as far as he was going to get, and even though at the start he’d specifically told himself that this time , this time he wouldn’t surrender to the wheedling voice, but would go on until the perfectionism of his real self had been fulfilled. But no. When it came, he gave in to it. Every time.

Just as he had this time.

A vague uneasiness had come over him when he’d placed the cherubim under the sun. Something within him knew this wasn’t right. This inner voice, the only thing really worth listening to, he’d ignored.

But, after all, it wasn’t too late. It just took a lot of effort to raise himself to where he had been. Not least because he had already savored the taste of victory.

Noah sighed deeply, pulled back the bedclothes, and got up from his bed for the third time that evening.

In a show of energy he rubbed his hands together and said the cherubim! the cherubim! aloud to himself several times as he lit the candle and picked up the pile of papers from the floor beneath the table.

“Of course they don’t come under the sun!” he said as he sat down. “Of course they don’t!”

He had listed the cherubim under Fire in his original system for the simple reason that they flamed. The cherubim flamed, and had done so for as far back as the memory of man extended. But even then he’d had an inkling that his categorization was too rudimentary. Even though no one had seen the cherubim close up, there was a body of knowledge about them. They belonged to the angelic order, that was certain. And man had been created in the image of the angels, that too was known. So the cherubim had in some way to be like human beings. But did this mean that they were constrained to the same life as man and all other living things on earth? Much pointed to the contrary. The cherubim’s lives were eternal, and therefore more closely linked with “dead things” than “living things.” Could they be another variant of the sun’s “living dead”? The fact that they also burned made the thought tempting.

But then there were the Nephilim.

Noah had never heard of any person who’d ever seen a cherub or an angel. But lots of people had seen Nephilim. Including his father. This had been about ten years before, at the market in Nod. It was dead and was being exhibited in a tent there. It was the biggest sensation at the market that anyone could remember. Lamech had queued the whole morning to get in, and had paid handsomely for the ticket, but without protest: he knew how pleased Noah would be when he got home and could relate everything he’d seen.

For a long time the Nephilim had been nothing more than a rumor, even more nebulous and vague than those about angels, which, despite their vagueness, had existed time out of mind. The Nephilim were new. How new nobody was sure. Perhaps a hundred years old, perhaps five hundred. Most of the people in Nod lived in towns along the coast, and those who settled in the forests kept largely to the edges. But the forest stretched hundreds of miles inland, and it was in this wilderness, so boundlessly uniform in its infinite number of spruce trees and small lakes, that rumor had it the Nephilim lived. Regions so desolate that decades might pass between any human visit. No one could say what they looked like, they were as shy as they were sly; the only thing to go on were the tracks they sometimes left, presumably by accident, and the occasional glimpse of something shadowy between trees far off, which, it had to be admitted, might as easily have been an elk or a bear as a Nephilim.

There were other fantastic creatures on earth; in one place it was said there were huge animals with an arm on their face that they used to hold things and drink with; the sea contained fish as large as houses; some birds of the air not only looked like mice but were blind as well, so really Nephilim shouldn’t have unleashed such a furor. True, they were enormous, some said ten feet high, others nearer fifteen; true, they looked like human beings although they weren’t — but then so did certain giant apes — true, their existence had been unknown to man, but so had that of the white northern bears.

Even so men were dispatched after them. Spring after spring groups of hunters would leave the villages along the coast and set off into the forest to hunt them.

The reason for this was that the rumor concerning the Nephilim arose at about the same time as another rumor. For several generations women had been disappearing in Nod, and not just one every ten years or so, as in the valley Noah came from, but several each year. Two had been found, presumably because their absence had been noticed almost at once, and a search instituted immediately. Both had been heading into the forest, walking completely alone, and didn’t react to the voices calling them, they just carried on walking, slowly and almost like sleepwalkers. They didn’t even react when the men caught up with them and held them still. They just stood quite quietly staring ahead in a way that filled those around them with unease. They weren’t looking at the trees in front of them, nor at the landscape that stretched away behind the trees, or the sky above them. It was as if they were looking into themselves, one of them said later. Someone else said it was as if they could see something the others couldn’t. As if there was something there, right in front of them, which only she, the woman who seemed to be sleepwalking, saw.

Although no living person had seen an angel with his own eyes, they knew enough about them to realize that they were mixed up in this.

Then the first sightings of Nephilim came in, and the matter was settled. Nephilim were half angel, half man.

It was the progeny of these angels that expedition after expedition was sent out to find. But they came back with nothing more than a hazy glimpse here and a half-effaced print there. Until one spring sixteen years before. Three young men, who were homeward bound after overwintering way up in the northeast of the forest, killed one almost by accident. They had followed a river southward for several days, and even though they were short of time, for the spring melt would soon be too great for them to negotiate the flood that lay between them and Nod, they had remained for almost a full day in the forest above some rapids, enthralled by the sight that greeted them from below: five large bears stood in the river catching fish while three cubs tumbled about on the bank. There was something almost humanly lighthearted about the bears’ activities, perhaps that was why the men couldn’t tear themselves away from them. The bears were on all fours in the river and looking down the rapids. The air was flashing with fish. If the fish were too far away, the bears let them pass, if they were within reach, they raised a paw and struck them in flight. Sometimes they would do this standing on their hind legs. The cubs on the bank would occasionally pause in their play and stare at them. If the time between taking each fish got too long, they ambled up the rapids and found a new fishing place. Some of the fish, flapping between their jaws, they ate as they stood out there, some were taken to the bank, where the youngsters approached them inquisitively, only to gobble them down in the next instant, growling at each other.