Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

The world into which Noah stepped anew, when the waters had subsided and his ship, after almost a year’s voyage, had once again found firm ground beneath her keel, was therefore new in more than one sense. Not only had the whole of mankind been eradicated, and the whole of his culture with him, not only had all living things died, but even the landscape had changed beyond all recognition. Not only were all the trees gone, and all the grass and all the moss, and all the plants and flowers, but also the valleys and ridges, meadows and plains where they’d grown. Gone were the fjords and the high mountains, gone were the skerries off the coast, gone were the forests and lakes to the east and north of Nod. The landscape Noah saw opening out before him as he walked down from the mountains where the ark had stranded was flat, barren, and mostly covered with sand.

Considering that Noah and his family were the only links between human beings of the first kingdom and the second, scripture pays them surprisingly little attention. Apart from the description of the flood itself, only one episode is mentioned. As this episode involves neither God nor the angels, we must assume that it is there because it is important in itself. This is what it says:

Noah, a man of the soil, began the planting of vineyards. He drank some of the wine, became drunk and lay naked inside his tent. When Ham, father of Canaan, saw his father naked, he told his two brothers outside. So Shem and Japheth took a cloak, put it on their shoulders and walked backwards, and so covered their father’s naked body; their faces were turned the other way, so that they did not see their father naked. When Noah awoke from his drunken sleep, he learnt what his youngest son had done to him, and said:

Cursed be Canaan,

slave of slaves

shall he be to his brothers.

The growing of vines is one indicator that the climate must have been hot. Living in a tent another. For Noah, conditions in this new world must have been the very worst imaginable. He must have viewed the burning sun and the scorched, sandy landscape as a punishment. Presumably he found it ironic. He had left all he held dear, not just a life but an entire world, and he’d done so on a huge wave of water. Where did all this take him? Into a desert. There, beneath the sun, water-starved and shadeless, the new life was to be lived.

Everything here lay open beneath the sun. Here, nothing was concealed.

It’s not difficult to picture him as he worked away at his vines on the gently sloping land at nighttime, under the stars, alone with his memories of what he’d done, only to return to his tent in the gray dawn and the suffering that awaited him there. He would sleep only for the first few hours, while it still was cool enough. For the rest of the day he lay there and drank. He did so alone, losing more and more of his dignity. In this new, open, shadowless world, he no longer found it worth the effort to hide himself. He’d always been ashamed of his grotesque skin color, always hid it from the eyes of others as best he could, but now he didn’t bother, and why should he? If his dignity had been intact, he wouldn’t have lain there naked and drunk as the Bible relates. If it had been, and he’d been lying there as a result of an accident, a loss of self-control, a thing that can happen to the best of us, he would never have cursed his youngest son, who saw him, but himself. His anger is therefore the best evidence of Noah’s degeneration during these years.

THE MOVING spirit of the Swedish Baroque, the illustrious scientist Olof Rudbeck, the discoverer among other things of the lymphatic system, traces the peoples of the Scandinavian Peninsula back to the Scythians in his great work Atlantica (1697), and their roots in turn to the biblical Kittians. Kittim was the grandson of Japheth, according to the genealogy in Genesis 10. If Noah is the common ancestor of all people living now, Japheth is more specifically the common ancestor of those living in the north.

It is from them we Scandinavians are descended. It is there our history begins. The fact that the history of the beginning, of the world that existed before the great flood, was gradually forgotten and finally disappeared from man’s memory isn’t all that strange. One must remember that the great flood destroyed every object from that time. Every building, every field, every tool, every piece of clothing, every vehicle and vessel. Everything was crushed, ground to pieces, torn up, and covered by an incalculable amount of organic matter that had died and rotted to sludge, earth, clay, and by the incalculable amounts of sand that were carried by the water during the year the flood lasted. Furthermore, one has to remember that all the knowledge about the previous world was vested in eight people: Noah and his family.

How much did they really want to remember? How much did they really want to tell?

As little as humanly possible, it’s reasonable to assume. For even the most innocent story from that time contained a landscape, and within that landscape were people whose fate didn’t bear thinking about. Better never to speak or think about it then.

And because it had little resonance with any place in the world as it was then, the little they did tell was forgotten over the course of a few generations.

The only things that have always been remembered are the story of the first people who were driven out of paradise and into the valley, the story of the two brothers Cain and Abel, and the story of the great flood. But all the details about these people and the world they lived in were gradually erased. And as each new age is convinced that it constitutes what is normal, that it represents the true condition of things, the people of the new age soon began to imagine the people of the previous one as an exact replica of themselves, in exactly the same setting. Thus Cain and Abel became nomadlike figures who lived and operated in a flat, burning hot, sand-filled world, of olive and fig trees, oases, camels, asses, robes, tents, and little whitewashed stone houses. Gone were all the pine trees, all the fjords and mountains, all the snow and rain, all the lynxes and bears, wolves and elk. In addition, all the infinitely delicate nuances in the relationship between the brothers were lost over time, such that only the bare details remained: Abel was good, Cain bad, Abel was a shepherd, Cain a tiller of the soil.

But could an entire world really vanish without leaving a single sign of its existence?

No. The great flood destroyed almost everything, and of the pieces still left, almost all were covered with layer upon layer of mud, sludge, earth, clay, and sand. But some things escaped undamaged. Now and then over the centuries strange objects and articles came to light, often in the weirdest places, which couldn’t be traced back to phenomena in the known world. Much of this occurred in obscurity, of course; not a few of the objects from the first realm have come to light under the wondering eye of the farmer or shepherd, been turned this way and that in the hands, only to be thrown back into the bushes again, or taken home and shown to friends and acquaintances, perhaps inherited by a son or daughter, who possibly handed it on to their children, who maybe didn’t quite see the value of the object, and threw it away.

What else could they do? In former times there was no place for historic objects, and no interest in them beyond the neighbors’ curious gaze. Everything was totally unsystematic and haphazard. To write about it was certainly pointless as far as they were concerned. Only with the emergence of the Greek civilization, precursor of the Middle Ages, did anything like an organized culture arise around these various phenomena of the world. One began to collect the various things found out in the natural world, to ask questions about them, where they came from, what they were doing here; an inquisitiveness that eventually encompassed everything.