Favorite Passage – Sally Rooney’s “Beautiful World, Where are You?” (2020)

I’ve been thinking about the later parts of your message for a few days now – about whether, as you say, ‘the failure is general.’ I know we agree that civilization is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of micro plastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition. This nostalgic impulse is of course extremely powerful, and has recently been harnessed to great effect by reactionary and fascist political movements, but I’m not convinced that this means the impulse itself is intrinsically fascistic. I think it makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs.

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“I’m always talking about care ethics and the value of human community, but in my real life I don’t take on the work of caring for anyone except myself. Who in the world relies on me for anything? No one. I can blame myself, and I do, but I also think the failure is general. People our age used to get married and have children and conduct love affairs, and now everyone is still single at thirty and lives with housemates they never see. Traditional marriage was obviously not fit for purpose, and almost ubiquitously ended in one kind of failure or another, but at least it was an effort at something, and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life. Of course if we all stay alone and practice celibacy and carefully police our personal boundaries, many problems will be avoided, but it seems we will also have almost nothing left that makes life worthwhile.”

Favorite Passages: Karl Ove Knausgaard – My Struggle (Book 6)

“I thought about Heidi and smiled. She invariably wanted to be carried. If it was up to her she would never walk a single step. She had always been like that, right from the start. I was so close to her then, after she was born. Vanja was jealous and claimed Linda’s attention as much as she could, while I carried Heidi around until she was eighteen months and John came along. It stopped then, our closeness to each other. Every now and again I felt a twinge of sadness about it. But that was how kids were, everything came in phases, and phases came to an end. Before long they would be grown up and the children they used to be, whom I had loved, would be gone. Even seeing photos of them from as recently as a year before could make me feel sadness at the fact that the children they were then no longer existed. But mostly they took up so much of our lives now and whirled up our days with such intensity there was no room left for such feelings. It was all here and now with them.” -p. 23

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So that was the situation when I had to send him the new novel. I knew he wasn’t going to like it, and the thought of him reading it scared me. But there was no way round it. So on the last day of July 2009, a month and a half before the novel was due to be published, I sat down in front of the computer and wrote him a note.

Dear Gunnar,

It’s been a long time. Hope everything’s good with you and the family. I was in Kristiansand this spring at a playwriting seminar and was intending to stop in and see you, only then there was a funeral in Ålesund I had to fly up to – Sissel’s sister Ingunn had died – and my schedule was just too tight. Sissel’s brother-in-law Magne, who was married to Kjellaug, died too in the spring, so it’s been a rough year for Mom. Here in Malmö, though, things are well, all three children are in nursery school now, and Vanja will be starting school in the autumn, so the worst of our toddler years will soon be over.