Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle’, especially the first and second volumes, is one of the marvels of 21st century literature. I was perplexed when the books didn’t make it to the NYT Best of the Century rankings last year. Anyways, this month, I finally got to reading his Seasons quartet – a set of four books titled (predictably) as Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. The books are written as notes to his youngest daughter and comprises diary entries of certain days of his life and micro essays on a range of topics. While the overall series was just meh, there were flashes of his brilliance that radiated once in a while, all of a sudden. I wonder if there is any other living author who has this seductive ease of reporting on the banal stuff we all encounter on a daily basis – washbasins, bees, buttons, sunsets, laundry etc. Spring was the best of the quartet in which he wrote about his wife Linda’s struggles with clinical depression during her pregnancy.
Sharing some of the marvels that I came across.
On the thought of being with our children when they reach middle-age:
When you reached my present age, I would be over ninety, and if I was still alive then, I would be heading away, taking my leave, in the sense that everything we become attached to, by assigning meaning to it – objects as well as events and people – would be growing more distant, and you, little one, and the life you would then be in the middle of – perhaps with a man, perhaps not, perhaps with children, perhaps not, perhaps with a job that meant a lot to you, perhaps not – would seem to me as a train one sees passing in the forest at dusk, when the air pressure sends the snow swirling and the figures in the lit-up compartments stand out clearly against the black trees and the darkening sky. They would be people like myself, but what they are doing, what they want, what they are thinking and what they feel doesn’t matter much, they and the light that surrounds them vanish between the trees almost before they appear, and I gaze up towards the first faint stars beginning to emerge far above me.
For someone who is mainly responsible for the laundry at home, these lines were on point (How does he come up with such deep ruminations on as mundane a task as picking up clothes to wash and dry):
Once in a while cases of doubt arise, a garment may look unused but be lying in a heap of used clothes, and then one has to do what I saw my mother do countless times when I was growing up, and which then I found monstrous, namely to lift the garment to her nose and sniff it, even if it happened to be a pair of underpants. Now I do the same thing myself, bend forward, press underpants to my nose and snuffle up their odours, like an animal. My relief when the underpants are dirty and smell faintly of urine is almost greater than when they are clean and smell of laundry powder, for then they are going to be laundered and become clean. Even though dirty laundry is simply clothes that have been worn on a body for a day or two, it feels almost like spiritual cleansing to put them in the washing machine, pour in the detergent and start the machine, to say nothing of the feelings that fill me when I remove clean clothes from the dryer and they feel warm against the skin and smell faintly of laundry powder, when the darkness I am in, or the narrow nooks and crannies that block the flow of thoughts or obstruct their passage, can vanish for a few seconds and make me suddenly not guilty but the opposite of guilty, which is not innocent but happy. It is because I want to prolong that feeling that in summer I sometimes hang washed clothes out to dry on the clothes line when the weather is fine, rather than run them through the dryer,
Knausgaard describing himself and his addiction to routine could very well have been about me:
This is being written by a white middle-aged man with a frozen inner self, who walks stiffly and slightly stooped, and who never plays, never dances, never ventures into the wild, uninhibited darkness which we, following the Greeks, call Orphic, the entrance to which is through the repetition of ritual, or in other words the rhythmic. The rhythm, the beat, the thump, the trance. The heart, the blood, the sacrifice
On how apples can instill ‘abundance’ in children
It is still unthinkable for me to throw away an apple core, and when I see my children doing it – sometimes they even throw away half-eaten apples – I am filled with indignation, but I don’t say anything, because I want them to relish life and to have a sense of its abundance. I want them to feel that living is easy. And this is why I’ve changed my attitude towards apples, not through an act of will, but as a result of having seen and understood more, I think, and now I know that it is never really about the world in itself, merely about our way of relating to it.
On wanting our children to ‘explore’ the outside world of play and adventures:
I just wish they would run around and play, climb trees and swim in lakes, be outdoors from early morning to late in the evening in the summer, play football, tennis, cycle, have sword fights, wrestle, build huts, collect bottles for the deposits. The reason I wish this for them is of course that my own childhood was like that. But that was on the surface, it was also filled with valleys of loneliness, despair and hopelessness, which I fled from by reading. And although letters demand a greater effort than images, the effect was the same, something in me was gratified and entertained by an imaginary reality which had practically nothing to do with the actual reality that surrounded me. And what am I doing while your siblings are swimming in a sea of pictures? I am sitting here writing about the world and all the things, animals and plants it contains, without taking part in it.
And this, on our skin and its role in modulating desire:
yet the good feeling awakened by the sight of skin can only rarely be converted into actual touching, exchanging the eye’s distance for the hand’s nearness, because we organise the world in obedience to the eye, not to the hand, in a society where almost everyone is a stranger to each other. The transition from the eye’s reality to the skin’s corresponds to the transition from the social to the private realm, and for someone like me, who has a problem with nearness, who almost never enjoys being touched and who also almost never enjoys touching others, skin is therefore burdened with ambiguity, for my skin too wants to be near other skin, perhaps more than anything else, at the same time as it fears it and therefore seeks to avoid it, or to limit it. So that my skin’s longing is like a dog and my will like a chain I rein it in with
Writing about these excerpts, reminded me of a similair exercise I had done a few years back after reading Cheever’s journals.
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