Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

Maybe she didn’t seem that elated. More like mildly contemplative. Filled with a great inner peace after a long and happy life? In which the perfect contrast between the coffee cup’s cold, hard, white stoneware and the coffee’s hot, fluid, black liquid was only a temporary stopping point on a journey through the world’s noumena and phenomena? For had she not seen foxgloves growing in rocky scree once? Had she not seen a dog pissing against a lamp post in the park on one of those misty November nights that fill the town with such mystique and beauty? Ah, ah, for isn’t the air full of tiny rain particles then that not only lie like a film over skin and wool, metal and wood, but also reflect the light around such that everything glistens and glimmers in the greyness? Had she not seen a man first smash the basement window on the other side of the backyard, and then lift the hasp and crawl in to steal whatever might be inside? The ways of man are indeed weird and wonderful! Did she not have in her possession a little metal stand with salt and pepper cellars, both made of fluted glass, the top made of the same metal as the stand and perforated with lots of small holes so that the salt and pepper, respectively, could sprinkle out? And what had she seen them sprinkle on? Roast pork, a leg of mutton, wonderful yellow omelettes with chopped green chives in, pea soups and joints of beef. Filled to the brim with all these impressions, each and every one, with all their tastes, smells, colours and shapes, in themselves an experience of a lifetime, was it perhaps not surprising that she sought peace and quiet where she sat, and did not appear to want to absorb any more of the world?

At last the man in front of me in the queue had his order placed on the counter, three latte coffees, evidently an extremely demanding task, and the woman serving, with the shoulder-length black hair, the gentle lips and the black eyes which brightened in an instant if there was a customer she knew, they were watching, but now they were neutral, now she was looking at me.

‘A black coffee?’ she said before I had time to ask.

I nodded, and sighed as she turned to get it. So she too had noticed the tall drab man with the jumper stained by baby food who never washed his hair any more.

In the few seconds it took her to find a cup and fill it with coffee I ran my eyes over her. She too had knee-high black boots. It was this winter’s fashion, and I wished it would last for ever.

‘Here you are,’ she said.

I handed her a hundred-krone note, she took it with her well-manicured fingers, I noticed the nail varnish was transparent, she counted up the change at the till and placed it in my hand as the smile she gave me transmuted into a smile for three friends behind me in the queue.

The sight of the Dostoevsky book on the table was not exactly tempting. The threshold for reading became higher the less I read; it was a typical vicious circle. In addition, I didn’t like being in the world Dostoevsky described. However rapt I could be and however much admiration I had for what he did, I couldn’t rid myself of the distaste I felt when reading his books. No, not distaste. Discomfort was the word. I was uncomfortable in Dostoevsky’s world. But I opened the book anyway and settled down on the chair to read, after glancing round the room to make sure no one saw me doing it.

Before Dostoevsky, the ideal, even the Christian ideal, was always pure and strong, it was part of heaven, unattainable for almost everyone. The flesh was weak, the mind frail, but the ideal was unbending. The ideal was about aspiring, enduring, fighting the fight. In Dostoevsky’s books everything is human, or rather, the human world is everything, including the ideals, which are turned on their heads: now they can be achieved if you give up, lose your grip, fill yourself with non-will rather than will. Humility and self-effacement, those are the ideals in Dostoevsky’s foremost novels, and inasmuch as they are never realised within the framework of the storyline, therein lies his greatness, because this is precisely a result of his own humility and self-effacement as a writer. Unlike most other great writers, Dostoevsky himself is not discernible in his novels. There are no brilliant turns of phrase that can point to him, there is no definitive moral that can be elicited; he uses all his ingenuity and diligence to individualise people, and since there is so much in man that will not allow itself to be humbled or effaced, the struggle and active striving are always stronger than the passives of mercy and forgiveness, which is how they end up. From here one might go on and examine, for example, the concept of nihilism in his work, which never seems real, always seems like a mere idée fixe , a piece of his era’s intellectual history heaven, for the very reason that humanness bursts forth everywhere, in all its forms, from the most grotesque and brutish to the aristocratically refined and the besmirched, impoverished and worldly splendour-repudiating Jesus ideal, and it quite simply packs everything, including a discussion about nihilism, to the brim with meaning. With a writer like Tolstoy, who also worked and wrote during the period of great upheavals that was the latter half of the nineteenth century and which furthermore was riddled with all manner of religious and moral qualms, everything looks different. There are long descriptions of landscapes and space, customs and costumes, a rifle barrel smoking after a shot has been fired, the report reverberating with a faint echo, a wounded animal rearing up before falling down dead, and the blood steaming as it flows to the ground. Hunting is discussed in lengthy analyses which do not pretend to be anything other than that, an informed account of an objective phenomenon, inserted in an otherwise eventful narrative. This preponderance of deeds and events for their own sake does not exist in Dostoevsky, there is always something lying hidden behind them, a drama of the soul, and this means there is always an aspect of humanness he doesn’t include, the one that binds us to the world outside us. There are many kinds of wind that blow through man, and there are other entities inside him apart from depth of soul. The authors of the books in the Old Testament knew that better than anyone. The richest conceivable portrayal of the possible manifestations of humanness is to be found there, where all possible forms of life are represented, apart from one, for us the only relevant one, namely our inner life. The division of humanness into the subconscious and the conscious, the rational and the irrational, whereby one always explains or clarifies the other, and the perception of God as something you can sink your soul in, such that the struggle ends and peace prevails, are new concepts, inextricably linked to us and our time, which not without reason has also let things slip out of our hands by allowing them to merge with our knowledge of them or with our image of them, while at the same time turning the relationship between man and the world on its head: where before man wandered through the world, now it is the world that wanders through man. And when meaning shifts, meaninglessness follows. It is no longer the abandonment of God which opens us to the night, as it did in the nineteenth century, when the humanness that was left took over everything, as we can see in Dostoevsky and Munch and Freud, when man, perhaps out of need, perhaps out of desire, became his own heaven. However, a single step backwards from that heaven was all that was necessary for all meaning to be lost. Then it was evident that there was a heaven over and above humanness, and that it was not only empty, black and cold, but also endless. How much was humanness worth in the context of the universe? What was man on this earth other than an insect among other insects, a life form among other life forms, which might just as well take the form of algae in a lake or fungi on the forest floor, roe in a fish’s stomach, rats in a nest or a cluster of mussels on a reef? Why should we do one thing rather than another when there was no goal anyway, nor any direction in life, apart from to huddle together, live and then die? Who enquired about the value of this life when it was gone for ever, turned into a fistful of damp earth and a few yellowing brittle bones? The skull, wasn’t it grinning with derision down there in the grave? What difference did a few extra dead bodies make from that perspective? Oh yes, there were other perspectives on this same world; couldn’t it be seen as a miracle of cool rivers and vast forests, whorled snail shells and deep potholes, veins and grey matter, deserted planets and expanding galaxies? Yes, it could, because meaning is not something we are given but which we give. Death makes life meaningless because everything we have ever striven for ceases when life does, and it makes life meaningful too, because its presence makes the little we have of it indispensable, every moment precious. But in my lifetime death was removed from our lives, it no longer existed, except as a constant item in all the newspapers, on the TV news and in films, where it didn’t mark the end of a process, discontinuity, but, on account of daily repetition, represented, on the contrary, an extension of the process, continuity, and in this way, oddly enough, had become a source of our security and our anchor. A plane crash was a ritual, it happened every so often, the same chain of events, and we were never part of it ourselves. A sense of security, but also excitement and intensity, for imagine how terrible the last seconds were for the passengers… everything we saw and did contained the intensity that was triggered in us, but had nothing to do with us. What was this? Were we living other people’s lives? Yes, everything we didn’t have and were not experiencing we had and were experiencing even so, because we saw it and we took part in it without being there ourselves. Not only once in a while but every day… And not just me and everyone I knew but all major cultures, indeed almost everyone in existence, all bloody humanity. It had explored everything and made it its own, as the ocean does with rain and snow, there were no longer any things or places we had not made our own, and thereby loaded with humanness: our mind had been there. In the context of the divine, humanness was always small and insignificant, and it must have been because of this perspective’s enormous import — which perhaps can only be compared with the significance contained in the recognition that knowledge was always a fall — that the notion of the divine arose in the first place, and had now come to an end. For who brooded over the meaninglessness of life any more? Teenagers. They were the only ones who were preoccupied with existential issues, and as a result there was something puerile and immature about them, and hence it was doubly impossible for adults with their sense of propriety intact to deal with them. However, this is not so strange, for we never feel more strongly and passionately about life than in our teenage years, when we step into the world for the first time, as it were, and all our feelings are new feelings. So there they are, with their big ideas on small orbits, looking this way and that for an opportunity to launch them, as the pressure builds. And who is it they light upon sooner or later but Uncle Dostoevsky? Dostoevsky has become a teenager’s writer, the issue of nihilism a teenage issue. How this has come about is hard to say, but the result is at any rate that the whole of this vast question has been disregarded while at the same time all critical energy is directed to the left, where it is swallowed up in ideas of justice and equality, which of course are the very ones that legitimise and steer the development of our society and the abyss-less life we live within it. The difference between nineteenth-century nihilism and ours is the difference between emptiness and equality. In 1949 the German writer Ernst Jünger wrote that in the future we would have something approaching a world state. Now, when liberal democracy reigns supreme in modern societies, it looks as though he was right. We are all democrats, we are all liberal, and the differences between states, cultures and people are being broken down everywhere. And this movement, what else is it at heart, if not nihilistic? ‘The nihilistic world is in essence a world that is being increasingly reduced, which naturally of necessity coincides with the movement towards a zero point,’ Jünger wrote. A case in point of such a reduction is God being perceived of as ‘good’, or the inclination to find a common denominator for all the complicated tendencies in the world, or the propensity for specialisation, which is another form of reduction, or the determination to convert everything into numerical figures, beauty as well as forests as well as art as well as bodies. For what is money if not an entity that commodifies the most dissimilar things? Or as Jünger writes, ‘Little by little all areas are brought under this single common denominator, even one with its residence as far from causality as the dream.’ In our century even our dreams are alike, even dreams are things we sell. Undifferentiated, which is just another way of saying indifferent.