The life I live is separated from yours by an abyss. It is full of problems, of conflicts, of duties, of things that have to be taken care of, handled, fixed, of wills that must be satisfied, wills that must be resisted and perhaps wounded, all in a continual stream where almost nothing stands still but everything is in motion and everything has to be parried. I am forty-six years old and that is my insight, that life is made up of events that have to be parried. And that the moments of happiness in life all have to do with the opposite. What is the opposite of parrying something? It isn’t to regress, it isn’t to withdraw into your world of light and dark, warm and cold, soft and hard. Nor is it the light of the undifferentiated, it is neither sleep nor rest. The opposite of parrying is creating, making, adding something that wasn’t there before. You were not there before.
All these objects were not just lying there, they made up the room. It was easy to think of the room as essentially an empty cube that had been filled with things, but that room existed only in our minds, it belonged to our way of thinking. All painters possessed this knowledge, that’s why one of the first things they learned was to draw not the objects but the spaces between them. They learned how to relate to space in a way that wasn’t obvious. Even a bathroom, visited several times a day and more familiar than any other place, is held together by an assumption about reality, and can, if one makes an effort and resists the perception of the room created by that assumption, turn into if not exactly a wilderness, then at least something chaotic, a monstrous accumulation of forms and patterns, colours and planes. But why would one?
Ever since she was as small as you are now, your elder sister has taken in everything that went on around her, and ever since then I have wondered whether her great sensitivity was something that came in addition, something she had more of than others, or whether it came about because she had less of whatever it was that in most people kept the world at a distance. If a lot happened in one day, if we had gone for a long walk around town with the pram, she would start to cry when we got home, sometimes inconsolably. When she was a little older, she would sometimes close her eyes and pretend to be asleep in the pram if we ran into someone we knew, or hide if we had visitors at home. These were an infant’s methods of parrying events.
Oh, what a difference there is between simply being in the world, as if immune to all its impressions, and being defenceless and taking everything in. If one is protected, then one is free, then one can do whatever one feels like doing. Back then I noticed a lot of children who seemed to be clad in a protective emotional suit, shielding them from all the millions of impressions, impulses and wills that operated between people, and who without the least inhibition banged toy cars on the floor, ran shouting through rooms or were simply present in a room with such unquestioned naturalness that they shone like miniature suns. Your siblings only behaved like this in places where they felt completely safe, where they had been many times and where they knew everyone. So for us a lot revolved around doing the same things every day, creating a sense of stability and safety.
Since thoughts, emotions and will can be controlled to a certain extent, perhaps even governed, it is surprising that personality is apparently so stable throughout one’s life, so consistent and predictable. We rarely experience people we know going wild, doing or saying something that takes us completely by surprise, which we had never expected of them. Furthermore, it is surprising that the variations between different personalities are so minor that we are never really curious, when we meet a new person, as to what in the world this person might take it into their head to say or do, but always take it for granted that they will be more or less like us. This must be so because we are formed in each other’s image yet are not ourselves aware of this, since personality reigns supreme within the individual, no one has two personalities, or three, and this supremacy, the unique standing that personality has in the individual, makes us unable to see the extent to which it has been formed by other personalities, and that in reality we are like a flock of birds, or a pack of wolves, or a troop of monkeys.
I felt strongly that it was wrong to transplant organs, wrong to manipulate genes, wrong to split atoms, and I had always felt that way, but had never been able to present any arguments for my view. It was as if the very process of argumentation, even the intellect itself, belonged to the world of technology and mechanisation and represented everything in us that didn’t accept limits, that strove towards what lay beyond us, not just in order to understand it, but to conquer it, so that feelings, which belonged to the body and perceived the world through the body’s limitations, were no match for it. Yes, damn it, there was something fundamentally wrong even about the Internet, I felt.
More and more often it occurs to me that we live in two realities, one that is physical, material, biological, chemical, the world of objects and bodies, which perhaps we might call reality of the first order, and one that is abstract, immaterial, linguistic and cognitive, the world of relationships and social interactions, which we might call reality of the second order. The first reality is governed by absolute laws which leave no doubt – water freezes at a certain temperature, the apple detaches from the tree when it reaches a certain weight and the gust of wind attains a certain strength, it falls to the ground at a certain velocity, and the impact with the ground causes the flesh of the fruit beneath the skin to bruise in a certain pattern – while the other reality is relative and negotiable. This would be easy to grasp if the two worlds existed side by side, but of course that’s not how things are. One world exists within the other, so that an object, for instance a red bucket, is both a red bucket in its own right – conforming to the laws of physics by, for example, melting if it is placed close to a fire, into patterns and forms which are governed by the various factors involved, and which cannot evolve differently – and simultaneously a mental image in the mind of the person contemplating it, where it exists in many different forms: a mass-produced, standardised object standing on the leaf-covered ground next to a pile of soil, recently dug up, in the potato field, hard and non-degradable amid a soft and continually changing nature; a red hollow with a handle for carrying water or gathering up potatoes or apples, standing in a corner of the kitchen; a red glow of something that someone has left behind out in the field, where the fact of having been left behind is really the central aspect, what it says about the people who have left it there, and their careless and slovenly ways; one of the many things that belonged to my parents, which I cannot look at without thinking of my father and of the years we lived together; a red surface melted into a pattern that resembles a human face, from the time my mother set it down a little too close to the fire – yes, over the course of the years that face has come to overshadow the bucket, I see only that face, sticking its tongue out at me across the span of three decades. That a plastic cylinder with a bottom, standing in my mother’s broom cupboard, could have so many different identities and be associated with so many feelings...
The person with no attachments is an anomaly, since almost everything we do is about forming attachments to others and about establishing relationships that feel permanent, that we can trust will last. So strong is this inclination that the attachment doesn’t have to be to people we know, friends or family, to become significant; it can be to a voice on the radio, a face on television, a sales assistant at the supermarket, a first-person narrator in a book. The only time I’ve been physically alone over a longer period, when I spent a few months on a small island to write, and the absence of other people felt like a hard-to-define yet powerful deficiency, almost physical, akin to other states of deficiency such as that of salt or sunlight, I grew attached to certain voices on the radio, I turned it on whenever their programmes were about to air, there was pleasure associated with listening to them just as meeting a friend can be associated with pleasure. The same was true of a diary I was reading at the time. It comforted me, although for many this will seem a meagre comfort, since these odd friendships weren’t mutual, neither the voice on the radio nor the author of the book knew who I was, they naturally never felt any connection to me, and I suppose even I felt that the comfort they offered was scant, just as one tends to think of the comfort lonely old people find in television as being meagre and actually rather awful, for they are people made of flesh and blood, and the faces on TV, which they perhaps smile at occasionally, are merely pixels luring them into an artificial closeness, something deeply inauthentic, a reality they only pretend to believe in.
If one is approaching the age of fifty and begins to list all the people one has met or heard of who have come to a bad end, it seems staggering, as if life is a hard and joyless burden which only a few manage to get through without being pushed down into the darkness. But that’s not how it is, because this roll of individuals doesn’t take time into consideration, that vast sea of days and nights which waters down every event, and which is constantly expanding, growing larger. Any cataloguing of cases distorts reality, and what we think of as our lives, in which the decisive moments are crowded close together, is to reality as a map is to the terrain, or the stars to the starry sky: viewed from here, the distance between them appears insignificant, from here one would think the stars in the universe are as closely packed as a shoal of herring, but if one were to travel out to them, one would realise that the truth about the universe is the space in between.
That is why a work like Jens Bjørneboe’s trilogy The History of Bestiality, that catalogue of infamies, atrocities and abuses, is true sentence for sentence, but as a whole it is a deception. Certainly evil exists, but it is insignificant in relation to non-evil. Certainly darkness exists, but merely as pinpricks in the light. Certainly life is painful, but the pain is merely a kind of invisible channel that we follow through what is otherwise neutral or good, and which we sooner or later emerge from.
A child for me symbolised a turning point, a new beginning, at the same time as it entailed a commitment of a kind that I probably knew I needed, deep inside, at the bottom of myself, where I knew that it made me a better person. I liked myself when I was with the children, that was one of the great joys they gave me, and I liked no one as much as I liked them. A new child would create more love, and it would make it impossible for me ever to choose another life than with my family.
I had only taken this route a couple of times before, and it felt as if I was driving through the outer reaches of my memory, where I never knew what the next stretch would look like but still recognised it as soon as it appeared. It was a little like reading a novel again, where you might feel the approach of something familiar but, however hard you might try, be wholly unable to remember it before it happens, and the event or the description gains that special fullness which arises when the seemingly new, happening as if for the first time, encounters the memory of how it was the last time, and the space between your inner version of reality and external reality for a moment stands open, until the external, which has a much more powerful presence, obliterates the internal reality, and the world becomes one again.
Liv Ullmann made the screen version of Private Confessions, and the film nearly hypnotised me when I saw it at the age of twenty-seven. I can’t have understood very much of it, at least not in the way I understand it now. But it had great emotional force, and I was defenceless against it. At the time I thought that what the film showed was ‘the naked life’. Therefore it didn’t matter that the experiences it dealt with, infidelity in marriage and the turmoil it occasioned, were not ones that I myself had had, not even remotely. For the emotions they unleashed didn’t belong to the act of infidelity, or so I thought, but to the naked life. Life as it appears when the outward forms break down, or when one is absolutely true to oneself, which are perhaps one and the same thing. I had long considered that knowledge was academic knowledge, that experience was academic experience, and that this was what a writer, a film director or an artist should convey. That a novel, a film or a work of art contained an insight, and that reading meant wresting this insight from the work. At the time when I first saw Liv Ullmann’s movie and read Ingmar Bergman’s books, I began to think that academic knowledge, academic experience, intellectual insights were nothing but a form of protection against the naked life. And that most books, films and works of art were too. This ran counter to everything I had learned, it was downright anti-intellectual, but at the same time it was consistent with something I had always known, and beginning in my late teens had always resisted, namely the superiority of ingenuousness.
I have grown more deterministic over the years, more and more often I think that one doesn’t really have a choice, that who you are shapes your response to the situations that arise, and that you become who you are in response to the situations you have found yourself in and had to deal with in the course of your life. This is not a way of excusing wrong or bad or evil acts, but it is my experience that people are in a sense trapped within themselves, that we all view reality in particular ways and act accordingly, without the possibility of stepping outside ourselves and seeing that that reality is only one of many possible realities, and that we could just as well have acted differently, with as much justification.
That is why I wrote that self-deception is the most human thing of all. Self-deception isn’t a lie, it’s a survival mechanism. You too will deceive yourself, it’s just a question of to what degree, and the only advice I can give you is to try to remember that others may see and experience the same things as you in an entirely different way, and that they have as much right to their viewpoint as you do. But it is difficult. It may be the most difficult thing of all. Because it is just as important to be true to yourself, to hold on to your beliefs and think your own thoughts, not other people’s. It is so easy to walk into one picture of reality and then let that picture sway you, even though on certain points it goes against what you really feel, experience and believe. What do you do then? The easiest thing is to adjust your feelings, experiences and thoughts, for a picture of reality is both simpler and more pleasant to relate to than reality itself. This brings us back to self-deception, the most human thing of all. And perhaps the following is nothing but self-deception: the easy life is nothing to aspire to, the easy choice is never the worthiest solution, only the difficult life is a life worth living. I don’t know. But I think that’s how it is. What would seem to contradict this, is that I wish you and your siblings simple, easy, long and happy lives.
When we bought the laundry baskets, I had wanted them to be plastic, I remembered. That was because the laundry basket we had had while I was growing up was plastic. Blue plastic mesh. I had thought of it as a little chap in the corner who willingly allowed his lid to be taken off so he could be stuffed full of wonderfully dirty laundry. So to me only plastic laundry baskets were the real thing. Can you imagine! I was over forty years old and completely ruled by a notion from my childhood. Your mother was able to persuade me that these were better, that the material was nicer and that plastic was really industrial-looking and ugly – she didn’t say that, for if she had used the word ugly, I would have got all cranky – and now I could take pleasure in looking at these two baskets with their interlacing wire and beige cloth inner bags. But how many other notions were there, how many other odd preferences did I have that went back to my childhood, which I was ignorant of or didn’t question?
It was Walpurgis night, the evening when spring is welcomed with song in Sweden. I hadn’t known of the custom until I moved to this country twelve years ago, and it surprised me just as much every year. That Swedes of all people, who see themselves as the most modern people on earth and who want nothing to do with the past or with the archaic, for whom everything fixed and immobile is reactionary, even the body, which to them is not a tangible biological fact belonging to nature, but a cultural construction, a kind of artefact for which guidelines are drawn up in universities – that the Swedes, of all people, should gather once a year around huge bonfires, the most archaic thing of all, singing old songs in praise of spring, the very point being that even the new is also always old, this was hard for me to fathom.
The triviality of the ketchup and mustard bottles, the blackened hot dogs, the camping table where the soft drinks were lined up, was almost inconceivable there beneath the stars, in the dancing light of the bonfire. It was as if I was standing in a banal world and gazing into a magical one, as if our lives played out in the borderland between two parallel realities. We come from far away, from terrifying beauty, for a newborn child who opens its eyes for the first time is like a star, is like a sun, but we live our lives amid pettiness and stupidity, in the world of burned hot dogs and wobbly camping tables. The great and terrifying beauty does not abandon us, it is there all the time, in everything that is always the same, in the sun and the stars, in the bonfire and the darkness, in the blue carpet of flowers beneath the tree. It is of no use to us, it is too big for us, but we can look at it, and we can bow before it.
Do you understand? Sometimes it hurts to live, but there is always something to live for. Could you try to remember that?