Vincent van Gogh - The Mulberry Tree in Autumn (1889)
I want to share more of my thoughts about the books I read. So, that's what this diary will be—a space where I can write about my experience with literature. These entries will be loose, unedited, and casual. I'm not a book critic, and I have no desire to be one!
I will start with my most recent read: Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård's 2019 book, Autumn.
In a previous post, I described the book as a series of letters written to his unborn daughter. That's not entirely true. There are a few letters directly addressed to her, but the rest of the book is actually comprised of short entries about specific objects or concepts. He is not writing specifically to her but for her.
As he puts it, "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."
I've known about Knausgård for a long time. I remember the literary phenomenon of the My Struggle books when they were first released over a decade ago. For some reason, I never sought the books out or felt drawn to them.
In fact, I knew very little about Knausgård or his backstory when I began reading Autumn. I think that was the best way to approach this book.
From what I can gather, Autumn is a more gentle entry point into Knausgård's body of work. We meet him in his forties, as a father, husband, and family man.
This is a tender book, written to a child who has not yet entered the world. Her birth is an opportunity for Knausgård to rediscover life and to describe the world with fresh eyes.
It is this freshness that I loved so much. His mind is quite voracious. He writes about a vast spectrum of objects, ideas, and even historical figures.
He is equally fascinated by chewing gum and van Gogh, rubber boots and Flaubert, oil tankers and buttons. He picks up each item with his words, suspends it before us (and his daughter), and offers it to us anew.
Knausgård's gift consists of making the familiar suddenly strange. He peels back the outer layer to reveal something magical, irregular, or startling about things that we take for granted in our daily lives.
We are reminded that there was a time when nothing about the world made sense, back when we were children, fumbling about, not even aware of our names, our bodies, or the objects all around us.
I found myself wondering what the sky looked like the first time I saw it as a child. At what moment did I apprehend the blue enormity above me? What was the first sunset and sunrise I ever laid my eyes on?
What was the first bird I ever saw? What was the first sound that entered my ears? When I see a sunset or look at the sky or hear birdsong, am I connected to the first time these wonders appeared to my uncomprehending self?
I guess I've written enough. It's best to share the beauty of Knausgård's prose. I've only been an intermediary, and I think his language is worth reveling in.
On lightning:
There are few sights I find more beautiful than that of lightning, and the sound of thunder
always heightens the sense of being alive. Water and air, rain and clouds, they too have been here for ever, but they are such an integral part of life that their ancientness is never apparent in our thoughts or emotions, contrary to lightning and thunder, which only occur now and then, during brief intervals which we are at once familiar with and foreign to, just as we are at once familiar with and foreign to ourselves and the world we are a part of.
On making bread:
knead the flour, the water, the salt and the yeast into a dough, wet and sticky at first, then slightly tacky, until it just barely clings to the skin, leave it to rise, roll out the loaves, put them in the oven, where they develop a hard, faintly burned surface and a soft dry inside. The basic, simple, fundamental aspect of it. Its tangibility and its ancientness: people have been doing this for thousands of years. In fact that whole reality is foreign to me, but whenever I’ve come into contact with it, I’ve enjoyed it. The feeling of being in the world and of being a part of it. To understand that when you touch something, you are actually touching something. Not just seeing, not just thinking, but grasping.
On sleeping:
But if it were possible to see everyone who has retired to their beds in a great city at night, in London, New York or Tokyo, for example, if we imagined that the buildings were made of glass and that all the rooms were lit, the sight would be deeply unsettling. Everywhere there would be people lying motionless in their cocoons, in room after room for miles on end, and not just at street level, along roads and crossroads, but even up in the air, separated by plateaus, some of them twenty metres above ground, some fifty, some a hundred. We would be able to see millions of immobile people who have withdrawn from others in order to lie in a coma throughout the night. Sleep’s vertiginous link to primordial times, not just with human life as it first unfolded on the plains of Africa three hundred thousand years ago, but with life on earth in its very first form, rising out of the sea and coming ashore four hundred million years ago, would become apparent. And a bed would no longer be merely a piece of furniture acquired from a shop, but a boat that every human being has and which we board every evening to let ourselves be carried through the night.
On his family:
It feels like I have started something new, something quite different, and that is this family. I think of it every day, that what matters is now, that the years we are living through now are when everything important happens. My previous life seems more and more distant. I am no longer preoccupied with my own childhood. Not interested in my student years, my twenties. All that seems far, far away. And I can imagine how it will be when what is happening now is over, when the children have moved out, the thought that these were the important years, this is when I was alive. Why didn’t I appreciate it while I had it? Because then, I sometimes think, I hadn’t had it yet. Only what slips through one’s fingers, only what is never expressed in words, has no thoughts, exists completely. That is the price of proximity: you don’t see it. Don’t know that it’s there. Then it is over, then you see it.
On getting older:
Though actually I think that being in one’s twenties is in itself to be restricted. At that age one’s vigour is great, and one looks ahead, keeps one’s eyes fixed on things to come, and of the things found in one’s surroundings the most important are always those that hold the most promise. At the same time, and this is the cruelty of it, this forward-looking gaze is constantly confronted with the limitations of one’s character, constantly coming up against a sense of stagnation – hence the youthful fear of stagnating intellectually. To turn forty is to realise that one’s limitations will last one’s whole life through, but also to know that all the time, whether one likes it or not, and whether one is aware of it or not, new layers are being added to one’s character, a type of knowledge and insight that isn’t directed towards the future, towards what will come to pass or one day be accomplished, but towards the here and now, in the things you do every day, in what you think about them and what you understand of them. That is experience. The vigour one had in one’s twenties is gone, and the will is weaker, but life is richer.
On Vincent van Gogh:
His paintings of landscapes produce none of the emotions that landscapes evoke, it’s as if he isn’t attached to them, as if he is departing and now casts a final look upon the world. The lightness this engenders is peculiar, it resembles nothing else. The lightness doesn’t lie in his technique, as with other painters, for Van Gogh lost his battle with technique, his lightness is of a different kind. By relinquishing technique he gained something else, a carelessness that allows the world to appear unfettered by how we happen to have conceived of it. Van Gogh tried to commit himself to the world but couldn’t do it, he tried to commit himself to painting but couldn’t do it, therefore he rose above them both and committed himself to death; only then did the world and painting become possible for him. For the entire force of these paintings, all their manic light and singular power of penetration, which make them appear as though the celestial were suffusing the earthly and lifting it up, is contingent on the look he casts upon it really being his very last.
On Edvard Munch:
It was during my first visit to the National Gallery in Oslo. I must have been seventeen years old. I walked around the rooms, looked at the paintings, liked them, almost all of them, especially the national romantic ones, they were magnificent, photorealistically beautiful, and the colours were marvellous. Then I entered the room where Munch’s paintings hung. At a stroke, everything else paled. This was what it was all about. Art was the exception. The exception opened up the moment, broke through time and created a presence, in the vortex of which everything became meaningful. The exception is a shining light, it casts no shadow.