Thursday, January 03, 2013

Bit #3

Probably my favorite passage in the whole novel, and one that has given me a minor revelation of my own! From Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Volume 1:
I was after enrichment. And what enriched me while reading Adorno, for example, lay not in what I read, but in the perception of myself while I was reading. I was someone who read Adorno! And in this heavy, intricate, detailed, precise language whose aim was to elevate thought ever higher, and where every period was set like a mountaineer's cleat, there was something else, this particular approach to the mood of reality, the shadow of these sentences that could evoke in me a vague desire to use the language with this particular mood on something real, on something living. Not on an argument, but on a lynx, for example, or on a blackbird or a cement mixer. For it was not the case that language cloaked reality in its moods, but vice versa, reality arose from them.

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