This Be the Passage

I'm afraid I have to quote some more from A Death in the Family. I hope you won't mind too much. It's just that I got to the exact midpoint of the book on my lunch today, and there, just as literature teachers tell you it's supposed to, an important turning point happened.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, the author/narrator/protagonist, comes to reflect on the book he is in the process of writing at this point in this book he has already written, and on his reasons for writing in general. It turns out to be an attempt at relief from the feeling that everything that can happen in the world is already understood. This feeling is completely wrong, he recognizes, and is caused by the fact that the world we live in is mostly one of our own creation, in our own minds, composed of linguistic categories like concepts and beliefs and ideas. There is always a tension between one's feeling that one already understands everything and one's longing to escape the world that produces and validates that feeling — a tension he is compelled to ease by writing about it.

What I was trying to do, and perhaps what all writers try to do — what on earth do I know? — was to combat fiction with fiction. What I ought to do was affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are, in other words, revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out, because like this I would undoubtedly have a better life, but I couldn't do it, I couldn't; something had congealed inside me, a conviction was rooted inside me, and although it was essentialist, that is outmoded and furthermore romantic, I could not get past it, for the simple reason that it had not only been thought but also experienced, in these sudden states of clear-sightedness that everyone must know, where for a few seconds you catch sight of another world from the one you were in only a moment earlier, where the world seems to step forward and show itself for a brief glimpse before reverting and leaving everything as before…

Reading this at the large staff table while eating my lentil soup, I suddenly gasped with astonishment at the sharp, insightful, but ultimately impotent self-awareness going on here. Someone else at the table asked me if I was still enjoying the book, and all I could do was nod sweatily. What I was reading was exactly what it's our project at the magazine to point people towards and help guide them through. Yet it was being framed in such a psychological/literary rather than moral/spiritual way, I didn't feel capable of talking about it without alienating the other lunchers.

And then came the best description of a mystical experience I think I've ever read:

The last time I experienced this was on a commuter train between Stockholm and Gnesta a few months earlier. The scene outside the window was a sea of whiteness, the sky was grey and damp, we were going through an industrial area, empty railway carriages, gas tanks, factories, everything was white and grey, and the sun was setting in the west, the red rays fading into the mist, and the train in which I was travelling was not one of the rickety old run-down units that usually serviced this route, but brand new, polished and shiny, the seat was new, it smelt new, the doors in front of me opened and closed without friction, and I wasn't thinking of anything in particular, just staring at the burning red ball in the sky and the pleasure that suffused me was so sharp and came with such intensity that it was indistinguishable from pain. What I experienced seemed to me to be of enormous significance. Enormous significance. When the moment had passed the feeling of significance did not diminish, but all of a sudden it became hard to place: exactly what was significant? And why? A train, an industrial area, sun, mist?

So honest and perceptive. I really think he came close here to fulfilling his mission of fighting fiction with fiction. I hope he felt as much relief from getting that out in words as I felt from the recognition that profound yet ineffable glimpses of reality are not just one's own private delusions. They are there to be had and sometimes maybe even effed.