Something delightfully other than work.

As of late, later in the day just before my brain begins fondling dark walls in search of the off switch, I’ve been reading My Struggle, Book One, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. What follows is a preliminary report. Certainly plenty has already been said. Knausgaard writes the way most people think and feel, that is, with a measure of drunken lucidity, where overlapping thoughts and feelings vie for prominence like waves in an unsettled sea, and are deemed (by us, not him) less important due to their sheer unquantifiable number. He is both interested and disinterested, rising and falling, filling and releasing, and either fearless in the face of all of this, or if not, at least able to move wildly and without restraint. That said, Knausgaard prefers observation and inference to confrontation; a result of his birth order, perhaps. Those with a penchant for introspection will find lost parts of their canon here. Where the scalpel of judgement is most cutting, the wounds are self inflicted; the punishment beyond the crime. In earlier years, if we take him at his word, this vitriolic omniscience was directed outward, that is, he was an accurate pest. By the time of writing he seems to have moved outside the glass walls of the cage, and was thus granted a measure of scientific repose. The pest moves to and fro, loving and unloving, caring and uncaring, and the writer, being one and the same, dutifully reports.