I've started reading Karl Ove Knausgård's Autumn. It's written as a series of tender letters to his soon-to-be-born daughter. He wants to describe the world to her and, in so doing, he consecrates the ordinary things of life—apples, a plastic bag, iridescent pools of petrol.
I wanted to share a passage:
These astounding things, which you will soon encounter and see for yourself, are so easy to lose sight of, and there are almost as many ways of doing that as there are people. That is why I am writing this book for you. I want to show you the world, as it is, all around us, all the time. Only by doing so will I myself be able to glimpse it.
What makes life worth living?
No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don't see the world, don't observe the world, don't contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don't distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?
When I remember my childhood with longing, is it this immersion that I miss the most? This sense that there was no separation between me and the clouds? Me and the trees? Me and the sky? Me and a poem or song?
I think about it all the time. The intensity of my childhood. The aliveness of it. Such a contrast to the deadness and soullessness of the world today, and of adulthood in general.
I want that immersion again, that sense of there being no boundary between my body and the world. I still can't believe I am a human form at all.
I used to say I wanted to be words. It took me a long time to accept that I am flesh and blood, that I can be perceived, that I am finite and will one day end.
"In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel
How strange it is to be anything at all