Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

We were nobodies, two young lit. students chatting away in a rickety old house in a small town at the edge of the world, a place where nothing of any significance had ever happened and presumably never would, we had barely started out on our lives and knew nothing about anything, but what we read was not nothing, it concerned matters of the utmost significance and was written by the greatest thinkers and writers in Western culture, and that was basically a miracle, all you had to do was fill in a library lending slip and you had access to what Plato, Sappho or Aristophanes had written in the incomprehensibly distant mists of time, or Homer, Sophocles, Ovid, Lucullus, Lucretius or Dante, Vasari, da Vinci, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes or Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lukács, Arendt or those who wrote in the modern day, Foucault, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Deleuze, Serres. Not to mention the millions of novels, plays and collections of poetry which were available. All one lending slip and a few days away. We didn’t read any of these to be able to summarise the contents, as we did with the literature on the syllabus, but because they could give us something.

What was this ‘something’?

For my part, it was something being opened up. My whole world consisted of entities I took for granted and which were unshakeable, like rocks and mountains of the mind. The Holocaust was one such entity, the Age of Enlightenment another. I could account for them, I had a clear image of them, as everyone did, but I had never thought about them, never asked myself what circumstances had made them possible, why they happened when they did, and definitely not whether there was any connection between them. As soon as I started to read Horkheimer and Adorno’s book Dialectic of Enlightenment, of which I understood very little, something opened, in that things which could be viewed in one way could also be viewed in another, words lost their force, there was no such thing as the Holocaust, for what the term indicated was so incredibly complicated, right down to the comb in the pocket of the jacket in the pile of jackets in the warehouse, it had belonged to a little girl, the whole of her life exists in the term ‘the Holocaust’, and up again to the big concepts like evil, indifference, guilt, collective guilt, individual responsibility, mass man, mass production, mass extinction. In this way the world was relativised but also more real: lies or misunderstandings or deceit were inherent in notions of reality, not in reality, which was inaccessible to language.

Espen could read a passage aloud that Leonardo da Vinci had written about the movement of a hand, and the simplest of the simple, the most obvious of the obvious, was no longer simple and obvious, it appeared as the mystery it really was.

Yes, we read to each other. Mostly Espen, he could jump up in the middle of a conversation, return with a book and start reading from it, and me too, on rare occasions I found something I considered had value for him too. There was an imbalance in our relationship, Espen led, he was the dominant partner, I followed and was always happy when his face lit up at something I had said or he found interesting, that spurred me on, the ensuing conversation was always good because I was freer, but if he didn’t respond, which also happened, I retreated, held back, forever controlled by his moods, while he, for his part, never placed much weight on what I thought or felt; if he didn’t agree he said so at once, took it as a challenge, but he didn’t draw any link with his own capacities, he never doubted his own abilities as I did.

This was the only thing we couldn’t discuss, what went on between us. He never heard me say that I couldn’t say any more about this matter, as his lack of response had made me too unsure about myself, that I was a mere Zeitblom while he was a Leverkühn, that I was doomed to becoming a literary critic or a cultural correspondent, he to becoming what he was: a poet, a writer, an author.

No two people in Bergen were further apart than Espen and Gunvor. At any rate I couldn’t think of any. Having them in the same room was an exercise in futility, they never got beyond hi, how are you, they had nothing to say to each other, weren’t the slightest bit interested in each other. So I lived two completely separate lives, one with Gunvor, which was all about closeness, being and doing things together, such as making love, having breakfast, visiting her friends, watching films, going for a walk, chatting about whatever entered our heads, everything closely related to our bodies, the smell of her hair, for example, the taste of her skin, the feeling of lying hip to hip in bed and smoking, in other words, sharing life. We talked about brothers and sisters, parents and friends, never about theoreticians or theories, and if we moved on to the university in our conversations it would be to talk about the guy who fell asleep in the reading room, which Gunvor also did once, he had woken up with a start and when he had stood up to leave he had collapsed in a heap. I’m paralysed! I’m paralysed! he had shouted, but then the feeling in his legs returned, they had gone to sleep too, and he got to his feet with a sheepish ashamed expression while everyone around him laughed, not least Gunvor, judging by her mirth as she told me the story.

Yngve and Espen had nothing to say to each other either, they weren’t types I wanted to bring together, and this rift was harder to reconcile myself to because while the differences between Espen and Gunvor also had something to do with them being man and woman, friend and girlfriend, and were therefore quite natural and acceptable, the differences between Yngve and Espen were based on something else. Sometimes I saw what Espen and I did through Yngve’s eyes, then we were transformed into two nerds sitting alone and reading aloud and playing chess and listening to jazz, as far from the social, sociable world of bands and girls and nights out as it was possible to be. Yngve saw that it wasn’t me, and I carried that view with me, I was the guy in the street who liked football and pop music, what was I doing with all this modernist elitist literature? However, it worked the other way too because what Yngve said didn’t always sound so convincing in my ears any more, but this was such a painful thought that I suppressed it the instant it appeared.

I met Kjartan a couple of times that spring, and something had happened to him, I could see that. Although he spoke as he always had, the fire was gone and in his eyes there was a dejection I hadn’t seen in him before. One evening mum phoned to say he had been admitted to the psychiatric ward at the hospital. He had become psychotic, it was serious, he had wrecked the whole of his bedsit, smashed everything in it, thrown the TV out of the window and then he had been taken away. Now he was in Førde, at the hospital there, where mum, Ingunn and Kjellaug, his three sisters, were moving heaven and earth for him to be given the best possible treatment. Mum was beside herself with worry. A psychosis could last a long time and he was still unapproachable.

In the May exam we got Dante. Several students turned and looked at me as the papers were being distributed, I had marketed myself as a Dante fan, I had become a little Dante expert and you could hardly get luckier than this.

But I hadn’t read anything about the canto in the question, so instead of writing about that specific passage, which was about two lovers moving back and forth in the mass of sinners drifting like a flock of birds in the wind who can never come close to each other, I reconstructed the essay I had written about Dante as well as I could, almost verbatim, and referred vaguely to the passage at the start and the end. Espen had also chosen Dante, didn’t think it went particularly well, but it hadn’t been a catastrophe either.