Karl Knausgaard: A Time for Everything

But what?

In the early Renaissance, angels began to be portrayed with expressions similar to this, all expressing compassion for man, as if they were only then close enough to comprehend what they saw. But Gabriel’s expression is different, it’s introverted: it isn’t us he’s suffering with, but the angels. He alone has a notion where the path they’re following will lead. The angels are to be pitied , he seems to be saying as they pass us. But the clearest sign that something is wrong can be seen in their halos. Whereas in Cimabue and Giotto’s time they shone so brightly that now and then they seemed like discs of gold, here they are so pale that they can be glimpsed only against a dark background, like Gabriel’s red wings. Against the sky they are transparent. These angels are fallen, but they fall so slowly that they notice nothing themselves.

The fact that it would be another hundred years before these changes began to affect the angels’ lives, bearing, and behavior must mean either that they remained blind in relation to their fate, something that’s hardly plausible considering the length of time involved, or that they simply hadn’t faced up to the consequences of it before, but lived in the hope that this new condition would pass, rather like the way some people shut their eyes to the most serious symptoms imaginable and don’t visit the doctor until the disease has got such a grip that it’s no longer possible to keep the truth hidden, not even from themselves. After becoming an ever-more-common sight in the purlieus of certain Italian city-states during the fifteenth century, the angels slowly began to draw back during the first half of the sixteenth century, presumably in an attempt to resurrect the old order in which an angel’s appearance was as unique and rare an event as it was awe-inspiring and important, but this was unsuccessful, as man’s intimacy with them had become too great. Whether through arrogance or simply a lack of vigilance, they had gone too far. In certain places angels had become such a common sight that even the aura of revelation, the icy fear and ecstatic joy the sight of them had always generated, was gradually diminished. Fathers pointed them out to their children, farmers took them for good auguries, country priests were flattered when they manifested themselves in their churches. It was as if they’d always been there. Even the glow of their fires on the mountainsides outside the towns at night, which at first had caused people such disquiet, particularly as they’d been told that large flocks of angels sat on the ground all night long completely immobile, just staring into the flames, as if they were hypnotized or the living dead, had gradually come to mean the opposite; over the generations a belief had grown up that the angels were just watching over their town. The fact that this intimacy is reflected in only a few sources isn’t at all strange, because human nature takes note of the unusual rather than the commonplace, the exception rather than the rule. They had as little cause to remark on the angels’ roamings across the countryside when they wrote to each other as they had to mention the flight of the birds across the sky. Apart from art, of course, where angels continued to be painted and feted. But even here their supernatural aura waned; they began, more and more, to be seen as beautiful in themselves, in just the same way as an animal or a flower or a landscape is beautiful.

When they did begin to retire, it occurred over several generations so that people didn’t find the change remarkable. For the collective memory only slowly relinquishes its notions, and there the sight of angels would long remain a common phenomenon.

IN 1584 a work called On the Nature of Angels was printed in Venice. The author was anonymous, but there is no longer any doubt that it was Antinous Bellori, who some twenty-two years previously had had that hilltop encounter with two angels. We know that from 1565 to 1572 he did his basic studies at the university in Naples and that subsequently he began medical studies, which were to take him to Montpellier, where he studied anatomy, Padua, where he studied surgery, and Bologna, where as well as studying pharmacology and natural history he also received his doctorate, but the great familiarity with scripture and the whole of the theological canon that characterizes his work bears witness to the fact that in all these years he must have immersed himself in questions concerning the existence of angels. There are no descriptions of Antinous from this time, we know little of the sort of life he led, who he met, or how he earned his living, but if one adds to the great scope of the work the portrait he paints of himself in his later notes, we can assume, with relative certainty, that he was so engrossed in himself and his own ambitions that he seldom gave other people a thought, but spent large portions of the day in his own company, bent over his books in some miserable room somewhere, completely possessed by the thought of committing his unique insight to paper and gaining recognition for it. In other words, he was convinced that truth lay outside the realm of collective knowledge, and that he, through his talent and steadfast will, would be the first to arrive at it. In this, perhaps, he more closely resembled the obsessed young men who, in the first decades of the modern age, ensconced themselves in rooms in great cities all around Europe to think, nervous and tormented and constantly on the edge of breakdown, as portrayed by Dostoyevsky and Hamsun, rather than the image we have of those full-blooded, expansive, life-affirming Baroque characters, but the fact remains that it was here, in the transition between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that this particular persona emerged for the first time. Giordano Bruno was one example, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, and Isaac Newton others. For all of them knowledge was indissolubly linked to their individual lives, severed from the general context from which it had originally been won, with all the resultant loneliness, spiritual crisis, and megalomania. No one has captured this state better than Shakespeare in Hamlet (1604). Hamlet’s tragedy is knowledge, it’s this that has torn him away from his surroundings, and it is his hopeless attempts to reconnect with them that the play deals with. The isolated subject that began to appear in the philosophy of the time wasn’t merely an image, but also a physical reality, from Descartes’ idealized version, as he describes how he spent the entire winter of 1620 indoors, completely alone, in a heated room, where I could come to terms with my own thoughts in peace and quiet , to the cold and lonely life of Newton, who remained friendless throughout his entire student days at Cambridge and later spent his best years almost totally isolated in his study in the same town. Newton, Descartes, Pascal, and Leibniz were mathematicians, and all of them broke the barriers of classical mathematics at an early age. Only Pascal reflected that it was not solely the universe that expanded as a result of their work, but also loneliness. In the posthumously published Pensées (1670), he describes the horror of a world that has been opened up to infinity, where no boundaries exist, neither outer nor inner, for even the minutest thing always reveals something smaller — all of nature’s infinity, with all its stars, planets, valleys and mountains, rivers and seas, animals and insects, is found within the tiniest atom, he writes, which in turn contains the minutest atom in which all of nature’s infinity is found, which in turn contains the minutest atom. . Every attempt to understand this universe, whether by charting its motions, systematizing its products, or searching for its origins, is naturally vain and risible, and Pascal was making real fun of the science of his age. What he never grasped was that the real aim of science isn’t to understand the world, but to close it up. Choosing to turn to God was another mistake, because when reason has once taken the step into infinity, there is no way back, and the God to whom Pascal turned was every bit as abstract and limitless and cold as the mathematics he had some years earlier helped to develop.