A Man In Love - by Karl Ove Knausgaard

When I was growing up I was taught to look for the explanation of all human qualities, actions and phenomena in the environment in which they originated. Biological or genetic determiners, the givens, that is, barely existed as an option, and when they did they were viewed with suspicion. Such an attitude can at first sight appear humanistic, inasmuch as it is intimately bound up with the notion that all people are equal, but upon closer examination it could just as well be an expression of a mechanistic attitude to man, who, born empty, allows his life to be shaped by his surroundings.

She was much too pleased with herself, too self-centred for me to find her attractive. I have no problem with uninteresting or unoriginal people – they may have other, more important attributes, such as warmth, consideration, friendliness, a sense of humour or talents such as being able to make a conversation flow to generate an atmosphere of ease around them, the ability to make a family function – but I feel almost physically ill in the presence of boring people who consider themselves especially interesting and who blow their own trumpets.

This was a rule in my life. When I was with other people I was bound to them, the nearness I felt was immense, the empathy great. Indeed, so great that their well-being was always more important than my own. I subordinated myself, almost to the verge of self-effacement; some uncontrollable internal mechanism caused me to put their thoughts and opinions before my own. But the moment I was alone others meant nothing to me. It wasn’t that I disliked them, or nurtured feelings of loathing for them; on the contrary, I liked most of them, and the ones I didn’t actually like I could always see some worth in, some attribute I could identify with, or at least find interesting, something which could occupy my mind for the moment. But liking them was not the same as caring about them. It was the social situation that bound me, the people within it did not. Between these two perspectives there was no halfway house. There was just the small self-effacing one and the large distance-creating one. And in between them was where my daily life lay. Perhaps that was why I had such a hard time living it. Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or made me happy. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to wash floors or change nappies but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it, and always had done. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.

You can say a lot about my self-image, but it was definitely not shaped in the cool chambers of reason. My intellect may be able to understand it, but it did not have the power to control it. One’s self-image not only encompasses the person you are but also the person you want to be, could be or once had been. For the self-image there was no difference between the actual and the hypothetical. It incorporated all ages, all feelings, all drives. When I pushed the buggy all over town and spent my days taking care of my child it was not the case that I was adding something to my life, that it became richer as a result; on the contrary, something was removed from it, part of myself, the bit relating to masculinity.

The sight of the Dostoevsky book on the table was not exactly tempting. The threshold for reading became higher the less I read; it was a typical vicious circle. In addition, I didn’t like being in the world Dostoevsky described. However rapt I could be and however much admiration I had for what he did, I couldn’t rid myself of the distaste I felt when reading his books. No, not distaste. Discomfort was the word. I was uncomfortable in Dostoevsky’s world.

Before Dostoevsky, the ideal, even the Christian ideal, was always pure and strong, it was part of heaven, unattainable for almost everyone. The flesh was weak, the mind frail, but the ideal was unbending. The ideal was about aspiring, enduring, fighting the fight. In Dostoevsky’s books everything is human, or rather, the human world is everything, including the ideals, which are turned on their heads: now they can be achieved if you give up, lose your grip, fill yourself with non-will rather than will. Humility and self-effacement, those are the ideals in Dostoevsky’s foremost novels,

‘I’ve always felt that attraction,’ I continued. ‘Not for India or Burma or Africa, the big differences, that has never interested me. But Japan, for example. Not Tokyo or the cities, but the rural areas in Japan, the small coastal towns. Have you seen how similar the landscape is to ours in Norway? But the culture, their houses and their customs, are totally alien, totally incomprehensible. Or Maine in the USA? Have you seen the coast there? The terrain is so similar to Sørland, but everything man-made is American.

‘Italo Calvino does something similar in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller,’ I said. ‘But it’s not quite as strict of course. The title of each narrative in the end forms its own little narrative.

I wandered beneath the sun-dappled shade from the trees, surrounded by the warm fragrances of the forest, thinking that I was in the middle of my life. Not life as an age, not halfway along life’s path, but in the middle of my existence. My heart trembled.

I was so incredibly sick of having everything inside me, being unable to say the simplest thing to anyone.

I had lost ten kilos, and I had started to write again. I got up at five, had a cigarette and a couple of coffees on the roof terrace, from which there was a view of the whole of Stockholm, then I worked until twelve, ran or swam, and afterwards went into town and sat in a café reading, or just drifted around, unless I met Geir. At half past eight, as the sun was setting and colouring the wall blood-red above the bed, I lay down to read.

‘It’s strange,’ I said as we turned into one of the diagonal streets towards Mariaberget. ‘I’m so happy to be with you, yet I’m unable to say anything. It’s as if you rob me of the power of speech.’

I never give a thought to issues which are only about life, the way it is lived, inside me and around me and which are not about philosophy, literature, art or politics. I feel, and my feelings determine my actions.

I had two different sets of feelings for her. One said you have to get out, she wants too much from you, you’re going to lose all your freedom, waste all your time on her, and what will happen to all you hold dear, your independence and your writing? The other set said, you love her, she gives you something others can’t and she knows who you are. Exactly who you are. Both sets were equally right, but they were incompatible, one excluded the other.

Before, I had always been deep inside myself, observing people from there, like from the back of a garden. Linda brought me out, right to the edge of myself, where everything was near and everything seemed stronger.

More often than not it was me who cooked when we had guests. Not so much because I liked doing it but because it gave me something to hide behind. I could stay in the kitchen when they arrived, poke my head in and say hello, carry on cooking in the kitchen, hidden, until the food was ready to serve and I had to appear. But even then I could hide behind something: a glass had to be filled with wine, another with water, I could take care of that and the instant the first course was finished I could clear the table and set it for the next.

‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘What is?’ I asked. ‘What we’ve been talking about. Or talking about it at all. Peter Handke has a word for it. Erzählnächte I believe he calls them. Nights when people open up and everyone contributes a story.’

Naturally enough, he couldn’t give a flying fart about me, but whenever we met he didn’t pretend to be interested, the way people sometimes do when duty compels and the fracture between thoughts and actions becomes visible in one of those tiny revealing gestures that very few can control, such as the quick glance to another side of the room, meaningless in itself, but when it is followed by a kind of ‘jolt’ as their attention refocuses on you, the ritual as ritual becomes obvious. The feeling that you have been subjected to a charade will of course be disastrous for someone whose life depends on winning people’s trust.

From the living room came the sounds of laughter. I closed the door behind me, put a bottle of cognac, cognac glasses, coffee cups and dishes on a tray, poured the coffee from the machine into a vacuum flask and carried everything into the living room.

the midlife crisis was not a myth: it had begun to hit people around me, and it hit them hard. Some went almost crazy in their despair. For what? For more life. At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. When you were forty you realised it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something. Unless you took one last gamble.

Sometimes I had a bad conscience about being so quiet and uninvolved with Linda’s friends, about my lack of interest in them; it was enough to be present when they were there, like a duty. For me it was a duty, but for Linda it was life, and I didn’t take part. She had never complained, but I had a feeling she wished it were different.