Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

I went into the street with the cup in my hand. A slight feeling of unease arose within me at seeing it out here, the cup belonged indoors, not outdoors; outdoors, there was something naked and exposed about it, and as I crossed the street I decided to buy a coffee at the 7-Eleven the following morning, and use their cup, made of cardboard, designed for outdoor use, from then on. There were a couple of benches outside the nearby hospital, and I walked up to them, ensconced myself on the ice-covered slats, lit a cigarette, and glanced down the street. The coffee was already lukewarm. The thermometer outside the kitchen window at home had shown minus twenty that morning, and even though the sun was shining it could not be much warmer now. Minus fifteen, perhaps.

I took the mobile phone from my pocket to see if anyone had called. Well, not anyone: we were expecting a child in a week’s time, so I was prepared for Linda to call at any moment and say things were on the move.

At the intersection by the top of the gentle incline the traffic lights began to tick. Soon after, the street below was free of cars. Two middle-aged women came out of the entrance below me and lit up. Wearing white hospital coats, they squeezed their arms against their sides and took small, stabbing steps to keep warm. To me they looked like some strange kind of duck. Then the ticking stopped, and the next moment cars shot out of the hilltop shadow like a pack of baying hounds into the sunlit street below. The studded tires lashed the tarmac. I put the mobile back in my pocket, wrapped my hands around the cup. The steam from the coffee rose slowly and mingled with the breath from my mouth. On the school playground that lay squashed between two blocks of flats twenty meters up from my office the shouts of children suddenly fell quiet, it was only now that I noticed. The bell had rung. The sounds here were new and unfamiliar to me, the same was true of the rhythm in which they surfaced, but I would soon get used to them, to such an extent that they would fade into the background again. You know too little and it doesn’t exist. You know too much and it doesn’t exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. But how to get there?

This was the question I asked myself, sitting in a suburb of Stockholm drinking coffee, my muscles contracting with the cold and the cigarette smoke dissolving into the vast mass of air above me.

The shouts from the school playground came at specific intervals and were one of the many rhythms that traversed the district everyday, from the time the traffic began to get heavy in the morning until, as if emerging on the other side, it began to lighten in late afternoon. The workmen gathering in cafés and bakeries for breakfast at half past six, with their protective boots and strong, grimy hands, their folding rulers tucked into trouser pockets and their constantly ringing mobile phones. The less easily identifiable men and women who filled the streets in the following hour, whose soft well-dressed exteriors said no more about them than that they spent their days in some office, and could equally well have been lawyers as TV journalists or architects, could equally well have been advertising copy writers as clerks in an insurance company. The nurses and orderlies the buses disgorged in front of the hospital, mostly middle-aged, mostly women, with the occasional young man, in groups that increased in size as eight o’clock approached, then decreased until in the end there was only a pensioner with a wheelie bag alighting onto the pavement during the quiet mornings when mothers and fathers began to appear with their strollers and the street traffic was dominated by vans, trucks, pickups, buses, and taxis.

At this time, with the sun flashing on the windows on the opposite side of the street from the office, and with footsteps no longer, or at least seldom, echoing down the stairwell outside, groups of nursery children barely taller than sheep walked past, all wearing identical high visibility jackets, often serious-faced, as if spellbound by the adventurous nature of the enterprise, while the seriousness of the nannies, who towered like shepherds above them, felt instead to be verging on boredom. It was also during this period that the noise of all the work going on in the vicinity had enough space around it to come to the fore in one’s consciousness, whether it be a Stockholm Parks and Gardens employee blasting leaves from the lawns or pruning a tree, the Highways Department scraping a layer of tarmac from the street or a landlord totally renovating a block of flats nearby. Then a wave of white-collar workers and business people surged into the streets and filled all the restaurants to the rafters: it was lunchtime. When the wave, equally suddenly, retreated, it left a void which resembled that of the morning, yet had a character of its own, because though the pattern was repeated it was in reverse order: the scattered schoolchildren who passed my window now were on their way home and there was something unrestrained and boisterous about them, whereas when they had walked past on their way to school in the morning they still bore the silent imprint of sleep and the innate wariness we feel toward things that have not yet begun. The sun was shining now on the wall just inside the window, in the corridor the first clomping footsteps could be heard from the stairwell outside, and at the bus stop by the main hospital entrance the crowd of waiting passengers was bigger every time I looked out. More cars were in the street now, the number of pedestrians along the pavement leading to the high-rises was growing. This mounting activity culminated at about five o’clock, after that the area was quiet until the nightlife started at about ten, with crowds of raucous young men and shrill young women, and again at about three when it was over. At around six the buses started operating again, the traffic picked up, people streamed from gateways and stairways, a new day had begun.

So strictly regulated and demarcated was life here that it could be understood both geometrically and biologically. It was hard to believe that this could be related to the teeming, wild, and chaotic conditions of other species, such as the excessive agglomerations of tadpoles or fish spawn or insect eggs where life seemed to swarm up from an inexhaustible well. But it was. Chaos and unpredictability represent both the conditions of life and its decline, one impossible without the other, and even though almost all our efforts are directed toward keeping decline at bay, it does not take more than one brief moment of resignation to be thrust into its light, and not, as now, in shadow. Chaos is a kind of gravity, and the rhythm you can sense in history, of the rise and fall of civilizations, is perhaps caused by this. It is remarkable that the extremes resemble each other, in one sense at any rate, for in both immense chaos and a strictly regulated, demarcated world the individual is nothing, life is everything. In the same way that the heart does not care which life it beats for, the city does not care who fulfills its various functions. When everyone who moves around the city today is dead, in a hundred and fifty years, say, the sound of people’s comings and goings, following the same old patterns, will still ring out. The only new thing will be the faces of those who perform these functions, although not that new because they will resemble us.

I threw the cigarette end on the ground and drank the last drop of the coffee, already cold.

I saw life; I thought about death.

I got up, rubbed my hands on my thighs a few times, and walked down to the intersection. The passing cars left tails of swirling snow behind them. A huge articulated truck came down the hill with its chains clanking, it braked and just managed to shudder to a halt before the crosswalk as the lights changed to red. I always had a bad conscience whenever vehicles had to stop because of me, a kind of imbalance arose, I felt as though I owed them something. The bigger the vehicle, the worse the guilt. I tried to catch the driver’s eye as I crossed so that I could nod to restore the balance. But his eyes were following his hand, which he had raised to take something down from inside the cab, perhaps a map because the truck was Polish. He didn’t see me, but that didn’t matter, in which case braking couldn’t have bothered him to any great extent.