Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

He stopped, I introduced Ingvild and Morten, he smiled fleetingly, then trained his eyes on mine. There were tears in them.

‘I’m so desperate,’ he said. ‘I’m so bloody desperate.’

He looked at Ingvild.

‘Excuse my language, fair maid.’

He turned back to me.

‘I don’t know what to do. I can’t stand it. I have to get hold of a psychiatrist. I have to talk to someone. I rang one, and do you know what they said? They only take acute cases, I said I was an acute case, I can’t stand it any longer, I said, and they asked whether I had suicidal thoughts. Of course I’ve got suicidal thoughts! I’ve got a broken heart and everything’s going to pot. But apparently that wasn’t acute enough. ’

He fixed his eyes on me. I didn’t know what to say.

‘You study psychology, Ingvild, don’t you?’

She glanced at me before answering.

‘I started a week ago.’

‘Do you know where I can turn in such circumstances?’

She shook her head.

He looked at me again.

‘I may come up and see you tonight. Is that all right?’

‘Yes, of course, come whenever you like,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘See you,’ he said, and strode off again.

‘Is he a close friend?’ Ingvild said when he was out of earshot.

‘Can’t say he is, no,’ I said. ‘He’s the neighbour I was telling you about. I’ve only spoken to him three or four times. He wears his heart on his sleeve. Never seen anything like it.’

‘You can say that again,’ she said. ‘I’ll be off then. Can you call me?’

What a shock. For a brief moment, no more than a second or two, I was unable to breathe.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can.’

When, shortly afterwards, I stopped at the top of the hill and saw the town beneath me, my feeling of happiness was so ecstatic that I didn’t know how I would be able to make it home, sit there and write, eat or sleep. But the world is constructed in such a way that it meets you halfway in moments precisely like these, your inner joy seeks an outer counterpart and finds it, it always does, even in the bleakest regions of the world, for nothing is as relative as beauty. Had the world been different, in my opinion, without mountains and oceans, plains and seas, deserts and forests, and consisted of something quite different, inconceivable to us, as we don’t know anything other than this, we would also have found it beautiful. A world with gloes and raies, evanbillits and conulames, for example, or ibitera, proluffs and lopsits, whatever they might be, we would have sung their praises because that is the way we are, we extol the world and love it although this is not necessary, the world is the world, it is all we have.

So as I walked down the steps towards the town centre on this Wednesday at the end of August I had a place in my heart for everything I beheld. A slab of stone worn smooth in a flight of steps: fantastic. A sway-backed roof side by side with an austere perpendicular brick building: so beautiful. A limp hot-dog wrapper on a drain grille, which the wind lifts a couple of metres and then drops again, this time onto the pavement flecked with white trodden-in chewing gum: incredible. A lean old man hobbling along in a shabby suit carrying a bag bulging with bottles in one hand: what a sight.

The world proffered its hand, and I took it. All the way through the town centre and up the hills on the other side, straight into my bedsit, where I immediately sat down to write my poem.

At the beginning of the first lesson on the following day we handed in our pieces of work. As we sat chatting and drinking coffee they were being copied, we could hear the drone of the photocopier and, as the door was open, see the flashes in the room whenever the machine illuminated the sheet of paper. The pile was ready, Fosse distributed the poems, for the next few minutes we read in silence. Then he threw out his arm and checked his watch, time for the analysis.

There was already a routine: one student read, the others commented in turn, and when the round was over, the teacher gave his analysis. The latter carried the most weight, especially when the teacher was Fosse, because even though he was nervous and never seemed to be at ease, there was a gravitas and a conviction in what he said that made everyone listen whenever he spoke.

He spent a long time on each poem, went through them line by line, sometimes word by word, praised what was good, rejected what wasn’t, highlighted what was promising and could be developed in other directions, concentrated throughout, his gaze fixed on the text, hardly ever on us, making notes on what he said.

My poem, which was the last one we analysed, was about nature. I had tried to describe the beauty and openness of the countryside, and the poem closed with the grass whispering come, as though it were talking to the reader, and expressed the feeling I’d had when I saw the painting. As it was a landscape painting there was nothing modern about the poem, and I had sat over it for a while trying various techniques to make it feel more contemporary and had suddenly thought of a word, widescreen, which I put to use in widescreen-sky, it made the same kind of impression I had created in my prose, the boys’ reality was coloured by what they had seen on TV and read, but mostly TV. This produced the same effect, indirectly. It represented a break with the lyrical and poetic description of nature, I had thought, and when I read the poem aloud to the others it seemed to have that function.

Fosse, wearing a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and blue jeans, stubble on his chin and dark bags under his eyes, didn’t study the poem immediately after I had read it out, as he had done with some of the others, but went straight to the point.

He said he liked Astrup, and I wasn’t the first to choose a painting by him, Olav H. Hauge had done so too. Then he started on the poem. The first line, he said, is a cliché, you can cross that out. The second line is also a cliché. And the third and fourth. The sole value of this poem, he said after rejecting every single line, is the word widescreen-sky. I’ve never seen that before. You can keep that. The rest you can scrub.

‘But then there’s nothing left of the poem,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘But the description of nature and your enthusiasm for it are clichés. There’s nothing of Astrup’s mystique in your poem. You’ve completely trivialised it. But widecreen-sky. As I said, that’s not bad.’

He looked up.

‘That’s it then. Anyone want to come for a beer at Henrik’s?’

Everyone did. We walked together through the drizzle up to the café across the street from Café Opera. I was on the verge of tears and said nothing, knowing full well I could only get away with this while we were walking, you could be silent now but as soon as we sat down I would have to say something and seem happy, or at least interested, so that they wouldn’t realise how much Fosse’s words had hurt me.

However, I thought, as I slumped down on the sofa with a beer on the table in front of me, I mustn’t appear too enthusiastic either, then it would be obvious that I was fighting too hard to act nonchalant.

Petra sat down beside me.

‘Nice poem you wrote.’ She giggled.

I didn’t answer.

‘It’s what I told you, you take yourself too seriously. It’s just a poem, ’ she said. ‘Come on now.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ I said.

She looked at me with those ironic eyes of hers and smiled her ironic smile.

Jon Fosse eyed me.

‘It’s difficult to write good poems,’ he said. ‘Not many people can. You found a great word there, and that’s good, you know.’