Karl Ove Knausgaard: “Living Is Being Greedy For Days”

August 29, 2011. 2:12.
I am in the flat in Malmö, which shows signs of hav­ing been empty for close on three months: all the plants have withered, the air is dry, dusty, and there is a foul smell in the bathroom; water must somehow have been left to stand in the pipes. The rest of the family is in Glemmingebro. I talked to Vanja on the phone yesterday, she said, Dad, you’re not allowed to be in Malmö until Friday, you have to come tonight. I said that if she gave me permission to stay in Malmö until Friday the book I was writing would be completely finished. She said, Finished? I said, yes. Then you’ll have to work all the time, she said. You shouldn’t eat or sleep, just work. I’ll do that, I said. But when I sat down this morning, I had such a headache and felt so lethargic I couldn’t work. It has happened a couple of times over the past three years, all of a sudden I’m unable to do anything, I find it an enormous strain to get out of bed, dress, and go to the kitchen to butter a few slices of bread, almost impossible. It lasts one, maybe two days and then it goes, and everything is as before. Once it lasted a week, Linda was so worried about me that she forced me to go to the doctor, although I never go. I was given a full examination and even an ECG. Nothing. I was fit as a fiddle. I knew I was, but I went in order to reassure Linda, who, I know, is sometimes afraid I might drop dead from a heart attack. It is an interest­ing phenomenon, standing outside everything you used to be inside, when things you normally do without a second thought become unattainable. That is what it’s like to get old, I think with fear in my heart, only slower, your strength is gradually sapped until ultimately you stand outside the life you once lived and you no longer have the strength to recover, with maybe 20 years left to live. But what is living? It is doing things and being at the center of the world. If you are deprived of that, of acting, doing, being at the center of the world, a distance develops between you and the world, you observe it but you are not part of it, and this estrangement is the start of death. Living is being greedy for days, no matter whether they are good or bad. Dying is being weary of days, when they no longer matter or cannot matter because you are no longer inside them, but on the outside. Being whisked off by an illness or a sudden accident is another thing, a different death, more brutal for those around you, but perhaps more merciful for the life that comes to an end, because it happens when life is in full spate, you are in the midst of it, and there is no slow fade. But of course I don’t know. The opposite might be true, that it is best to be sated with days and watch the world slowly become weaker and weaker, lighter and lighter, until eventually it disappears and ceases to exist.

*

In the time it has taken to write this book four people in my close family have died. Aunty Ingunn, Uncle Magne, my great-uncle Anstein, and my father-in-law, Roland. I liked all of them, they were fine people. Now they are no more. From the more distant family further uncles and aunts have died, of whom I have no more than vague memories. Geir’s mother, Signe Arnhild, has died, Christina’s mother, Eivor, has died, and two of Geir’s friends, Marco and Peter. The latter two were young. The others were in their midsixties to midseventies. The births: my cousin Yngvild’s son, Sigurd August, whose christening Linda and I went to in January in Brussels, Linda’s girlfriend’s first child, Annie, and Geir and Christine’s second child, Gisle. Our three children, Vanja, Heidi, and John, have gone from being four years, two years, and six months old when I started writing, to being seven and a half, almost six, and four today. The remorseless wind of time, which takes away as much as it brings, has also swept through these pages.

I am not the same person as when I started either. That is I am the same person, but my relations with other people have changed. A lot was revealed when the books, and with them my private life, were made public. Everyone I know has been put through an ordeal. It hasn’t been easy for anyone. It has been hardest for Linda. Being a relative, irrespective of what emotions are involved, is both a bond and a role. Yngve is a brother, Sissel is a mother, Ingrid is a mother-in-law. Whatever Yngve did, even if he killed someone and ended up in prison, he would still be my brother and I wouldn’t be able to turn my back on him. Being a father myself, I understand what it is like to be a parent and I know that what applies to your brother applies a thousand times to your children. Whatever Vanja, Heidi, or John do, I will always for­give them and I will always be there for them. Anything else is inconceivable. I thought of the aftermath of the brutal massacre on Utøya in Norway on July 22, when the father of the perpetrator said his son should have killed himself. A man with children can say that, but not a father. For parents, chil­dren, and siblings there is a guarantee, that the bond between them cannot be severed. This is so because the role is not connected with acts but with the bond. At least this has always been guaranteed for me. Mom and Yngve might be hurt or saddened by what I wrote, they might be angry with me, and they might distance themselves from me, but they would still be my mother and brother the day they, or I, die. The bond is indestructible, and of course that is for good or ill. For my father, who was so closely attached to his mother, it was also problematic because he never really freed himself to become his own man. For my mother, when I was in my teens and we lived together, the most important priority was that I should be myself and feel free. The final consequence of this is my book, which completes a trajectory that started when I was 16. The question then was not so much who I was as where I belonged. Now the questions have merged into one and the same. And, as when I was 16, it has been about freeing myself. In this book I have tried to write myself free from everything that ties, perhaps first and foremost the ties to my father, but also the ties to my mother, not the emotional ones, they are indestructible, as indeed are those to my father, but from all the values and attitudes she has transferred to me, both directly and indirectly. She has had an immense influence on me, but she doesn’t any longer.

Ties of friendship are different from family ones because they are formed in the social sphere and can be dissolved there. The role of friend can be for life, but it doesn’t have to be. A love relationship is close to a friendship in that it too can be formed and dissolved, but the moment love involves children it becomes a family, as you will be connected with each other via the children. You can separate, live alone, but ineluctably you still belong together through them. Another decisive difference between a friendship and a love relationship is that friendship is limited, it is an exception, which is revealed in its declaration, it refers to another place, where real life takes place. Friendship is a place of refuge from which you can observe life or where something else, set free from its surroundings, can happen. You can drink, you can play football, you can go to concerts, you can go bowling, you can talk about life. A love relationship is not a place of refuge, it is the place to be. It means that you have greater commitments, for you share the place where you reveal yourself as you are and where neither partner can get away from himself or the other person. When I met Linda and fell in love with her, everything else faded into the background, there was only her. This was an exceptional state. When it normalized and everything else returned, the spell was broken. The limitless had limits, the abnormal became the norm, the holiday became the everyday, and we, the lovers, began to argue. We had chil­dren, that too was an exceptional state, during which everything else faded, then it normalized and everything else returned, and the everyday permeated the holiday like water permeating cloth. I had written about that. When I had written about friends or acquaintances I had described only a small part of them, the part they showed me. But nothing of what I wrote was harmful or could threaten them in any way. It might have been unpleasant, but that was because they were mentioned in a novel, not because what was written was revealing or in any way damaging. It was different with my family because they played a larger role in the novel, but the only person I examined in depth was my father, and he had been dead for almost ten years. My relatives also considered the description of my grandmother offensive, but, firstly, I did not agree, and, secondly, she was dead too, and it was her descendants who would have to react to my description of her and the publication of it, which they found insulting, but in that case it wasn’t them I insulted but her mem­ory. The description of Linda was different. We lived together, she was the mother of my children, and I knew virtually everything about her. Linda and I were a “we,” it was “us two.” But the “we” was not all of me, it was what I shared with her, and in all relationships you hold that which you don’t share outside, that which belongs only to the “I.” The moment you bring it in, it belongs to both of you. I hadn’t written about our relationship but about my life within it, and in so doing brought it into the relationship, for now she had to consider my secret thoughts as joint, now we had those in common as well. They weren’t secret in any criminal or underhanded way, they were secret in the sense that I didn’t reveal them because they weren’t relevant to what we shared. They might perhaps have had a negative effect on it. Every­one has such thoughts and everyone knows everyone has them, but in a tacit agreement they are not mentioned and constitute no part of what two people have together. The urge to crane your neck after a beautiful woman in the street, the urge to be alone, an indifference to the people your partner likes or is close to, everything that is done out of duty and not for pleasure. Beyond this, I also presented an image of her that she didn’t know. She suspected it, she may even have known, but in what we shared it was not mentioned and it was therefore nonexistent, it was more like something vaguely threatening but unformed, I imagined. However, not only that, others would also read about it and form their own image of Linda as a result. They didn’t know her, and that didn’t matter, but the very knowledge that this is the image others would get from me would have to be integrated into her identity. Not only the new “This is how I am for Karl Ove when he is alone” but also “Now others can see this is how Karl Ove sees me,” and the power of this was immense, especially for Linda, I knew, who was the kind of person who had dreams and could partly live in those dreams. The dream of love, the dream of family, the dream of a professional career, the dream of a role as writer. In the book love was pervaded with frustration, family life was a series of duties, and she was a character I criticized for not doing enough and burdening me with her limitations. I had asked her to read this and approve it.

How could I have done that?

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From My Struggle: Book 6. Courtesy of Archipelago Books. Copyright 2018 by Karl Ove Knausgaard. English translation copyright by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken.