WHAT KNAUSGAARD THINKS ABOUT IT ALL.

Heaven Up Here by Echo & the Bunnymen: A tremendous wailing springs from them, all longing and beauty and gloom.

Girls: Inside me, a consciousness shot up from below, like a water spout, it was heavy and dark, there was abandon, resignation, impotence, the world closing in on me. There was the awkwardness, the silence, the scared eyes. There were the flushed cheeks and the great unease.

Hemingway: Straight to the point. Simple and clear. With weight behind it.

Familiar places: If I hadn’t had my previous attachment to the area I wouldn’t have noticed anything. The trees would have been any trees, the farm any farms, the bridge any bridge.

Separation: We don’t live our lives alone, but that doesn’t mean we see those alongside whom we live our lives. When dad moved to Northern Norway and was no longer physically in front of me with his body and his voice, his temperament and his eyes, in a way he disappeared out of my life.

Postmodernism: I liked it, or the whole world that I suspected lay behind what stood in the text, but I didn’t know what it was or where it actually existed.

Living in a small place: I was depressed by being under constant observation, by everyone always knowing who I was, by never being allowed to have any peace.

Booze: Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness… all objections and all judgement are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful. Why say no to this?

(From: Dancing in the Dark)

Anders Breivik: a person who has erected a make-believe reality, in which his significance is undisputed.

(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-inexplicable)

THE ‘80s ACCORDING TO KNAUSGAARD.

The thoughts of 18-year old Karl Ove:

Playing records:  I put on Remain in Light and it was impossible not to move, impossible,it ignited every part of my body, me, the world’s least rhythmic eighteen-year-old, sitting there squirming like a snake, to and fro, and I had to have it louder. I turned it up full blast, and then I had to dance.

Girls: I loved everything about them, from the veins in the skin over their wrists to the curves of their ears, and if I saw a breast under a T-shirt or a naked thigh under a summer dress it was as though everything in my insides was let loose.

Definition of pleasure: Eighteen years old and on my way to a party.

Being in love: Everything hurts but nothing is as good…Life will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity which doesn’t hurt so much, but nor is it as good. Only a forty-year-old man could have written that. I am forty now.

Older women: She was around fifty with a white shoe-shop bag on her lap. She was chewing gum, which was a mistake, chewing gum didn’t go with her glasses and hair.

What teenagers are good at: Sitting around in bedrooms. No one could beat us at that.  None of this led anywhere. Well, we probably weren’t very good at doing things that led somewhere…As far as girls were concerned, it was rare we came across one who wouldn’t object if we pulled up her jumper so that we could lower our heads and kiss her nipples. These were great moments.

What a guy from a small town wants: To find life where it was really lived, in the streets of cities, beneath skyscrapers, at glittering parties with beautiful people in unfamiliar apartments. To find the one great love and all the restlessness that involved, and then the acceptance, the relief, the ecstasy.

(#amreading  Dancing in the Dark)