Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

I burned my diaries while I was at it, and then I put the manuscript in a bag and walked downhill towards the town.

The bottom door was open, I went up to the first floor and rang, she answered.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Nice to see you.’

‘Likewise,’ I said.

‘We’re having dinner,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. Would you like to come in anyway?’

‘Yes. Thank you,’ I said.

I went in, took off my shoes, put the bag in the corridor and followed her into the sitting room. Eight people were sitting around the table. Residents in the collective and some of their friends. I knew who everyone was. But they had been invited, I had only dropped by, and as they looked at me there was a strained atmosphere.

‘Would you like to eat with us?’ Ingvild said.

I shook my head.

It was humiliating, getting an extra little plate on the corner, the unbidden guest’s extra little plate.

‘No, I only wanted a few words with you, but we can do that another time.’

‘We can,’ she said.

My face was red, everything was wrong. I had come, made an entrance, now I would go again without anything happening.

‘Bye,’ I said, and could hear how stupid that must have sounded.

‘Bye,’ they said.

Ingvild accompanied me out.

‘I just need the loo,’ I said and made for the toilet. She went into the kitchen, I nipped out, grabbed the plastic bag containing the manuscript, dashed into her room, placed it on her bed, went back out and was putting on my shoes when she reappeared.

Now it definitely would be a surprise, I thought as I ran down the stairs and emerged into the warm summer evening, the streets suffused with sunlight, and that was actually the whole point.

The university was a new start. And, not least, it was something to hold on to. The lectures were a fixed point, the reading room was a fixed point, the books were a fixed point. Irrespective of what happened, irrespective of how dreadful I felt, I could always go up to the reading room and find myself a seat and sit there and read for as long as I wanted, no one could object to that, no one could say there was anything odd about it, it was the very essence of university life. I bought a two-volume encyclopedia of world literature and ploughed my way through, writer by writer, from Homer to the 1960s, tried to remember a line or two about each one, about what they did. I went to the lectures, Kittang on classical poetry, Buvik on classical epics, Linneberg on classical drama. Among all the names and figures were some great emotional insights. Odysseus, who tricked the Cyclops by saying his name was ‘No one’. He was lost, but he gained life. The song of the Sirens. Those who heard it were also lost, felt themselves being drawn to them, did everything in their power to get close and perished. The Sirens were both Eros and Thanatos, desire and death, the most desirable and the most dangerous. Orpheus, who sang so beautifully that everyone who heard him became spellbound and was lost, descended into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice and this was within his power as long as he didn’t turn and look at her, but he did, and so she was lost for ever. A French philosopher by the name of Blanchot had written about this, and I read his essay about Orpheus in which he wrote that art was the force that caused the night to open, but that it is Eurydice he wants and she was the utmost that art could attain. Eurydice was the second night, Blanchot wrote.

These ideas were too grandiose for me, but I was attracted by them and tried to get my head around them, to capture them, to assimilate them, but unsuccessfully, I saw them from the outside, knowing that their full meaning escaped me. Give the sacred back to the sacred? The night of the night? I recognised the main figure, that which appears and disappears at the same moment or the simultaneous presence of the one and the other which cancels out the one, this was a figure I had seen in many poems from that period, and I also felt a particular attraction to the ideas about the night, the second night and death, but as soon as I attempted to think independently about it, in other words beyond the form in which the ideas were presented, it became banal and stupid. It was the same as mountaineering, you had to place your foot exactly there or there, your hand had to grip exactly there or there, if not, you were left standing still or you lost your grip and fell.

The utmost is that which disappears when it is seen or recognised. It was the core of the Orpheus myth. But what is that ?

When I sat in the reading room, which was old and had a kind of sombre atmosphere, and read Blanchot in the afternoon, a completely new feeling arose in me, something I had never felt before, a sort of extreme excitement, as though I found myself in the proximity of something unique, mixed with an equally extreme impatience, I had to go there, and these two feelings were so incompatible that I wanted to jump up and run and shout and sit perfectly still and read on all at the same time. What was strange was that the restlessness began to course through me at the moment when I read something good which I had understood and absorbed, it was as though it was simply impossible to bear. Often I stood up and took a break then, and while I walked along the corridors and up the stairs to the first floor of the canteen, the excitement and the impatience mingled with the dropped jaw of my consciousness, which was to do with my pursuing these paths alone, and that kind of thing, my soul in an inexplicable turmoil, I bought myself a coffee and sat down at a table and tried to appear as calm as possible.

There was also something panicked about my desire to acquire knowledge, in sudden terrible insights I saw that actually I didn’t know anything and it was urgent, I didn’t have a second to lose. It was almost impossible to adapt this urgency to the slowness that reading required.

In the middle of September I went to Florence with Yngve, we took the train down and spent four days at Pensione Palmer not so far from the cathedral, where I had stayed the previous summer during the hitchhiking trip with Lars. We didn’t talk about what had happened between us, we simply skipped over it, we were brothers, this bond was stronger than everything else, yet something had changed, perhaps most of all in me, where the final remnants of naturalness had disappeared, I was conscious of everything that was said and done when we were together. The silences that sprang up were painful, we were brothers after all, we ought to be able to chat in a light-hearted unforced way, but then there was a silence and I sat thinking about something natural I could say to break it. About a band? About Asbjørn or some of his other friends? About football? About what was around us, a town the train passed through, an incident outside the window on the street, a beautiful woman entering the bar where we were? Sometimes this worked well — for example, we could discuss the difference between the girls at home and the ones we saw here, the incredible elegance they had, not just the dresses with their tight jackets and narrow coats, their long boots and small neat scarves, but also the way they walked, studied and genteel, so glaringly different from our girls’ homely Fjällräven gait, which suggested nothing other than forward motion, slightly bent over, eternally prepared for a cloudburst, jogging, strolling, no more, no less, we’re on the go! Yet the sight of the Italian women — girls would be the wrong word for them — was also depressing, they were in a different league, out of reach for us, who were of course of the same unsophisticated material as Norwegian girls, you just had to cast a glance at young Italian men, who were as sharply dressed and elegant as their female counterparts, who knew all the tricks in the book and who, what was more, courted them with an urbanity we could not have achieved if we had practised every day for the next year, in fact, if we had studied elegance and manners at university for six years we wouldn’t have got near them.