Spring

If you are afraid of the dark, you seek the light. But what do you do when even the light is filled with terrors?

For that’s how it is, we cover up our mistakes and failings, we invent stories that put ourselves in a more favorable light. Self-deception is perhaps the most human thing of all.

What is literature an expression of, if not an otherwise inaccessible and in reality non-existent closeness?

When someone is going through a difficult time, the difficulties spread out in concentric circles and touch even peripheral situations and relationships. When darkness falls in one person, fire is lit in the other, and thereby all sense of normality vanishes, unless someone struggles to stay within it, without necessarily even realizing what one is doing. For on the one hand, everything is as usual, and it must remain as usual, on the other everything is an emergency. It is the friction between the two levels that starts the fire.

Sometimes it hurts to live, but there is always something to live for. Could you try to remember that?

it is my experience that people are in a sense trapped within themselves, that we all view reality in particular ways and act accordingly, without the possibility of stepping outside ourselves and seeing that that reality is only one of many possible realities, and that we could just as well have acted differently, with as much justification.

I am forty-six years old and that is my insight, that life is made up of events that have to be parried. And that the moments of happiness in life all have to do with the opposite.

But imagine then, my little one, a state of being truly lonely, in which you don’t know anyone, don’t talk to anyone, and where nobody sees you, they merely look away. Such absolute loneliness would be impossible to live in, for why would one go on living at all? Everything within us is directed towards others. Language is directed towards others, and with it our thoughts, and with them, as the innermost existential truth, also the self. As long as the self exists in a space where there are others, even if only in the form of a voice on the radio, a face on TV, a narrator in a book, there is meaning, it can lead a meaningful life. But because the self is structured as an address to someone else, if it is deprived of others it can only be maintained by the will, and since the will of the self is merely the will for there to be others, sooner or later, if not even the slightest hope remains, the self will be extinguished.

We come from far away, from terrifying beauty, for a newborn child who opens its eyes for the first time is like a star, is like a sun, but we live our lives amid pettiness and stupidity, in the world of burned hot dogs and wobbly camping tables. The great and terrifying beauty does not abandon us, it is there all the time, in everything that is always the same, in the sun and the stars, in the bonfire and the darkness, in the blue carpet of flowers beneath the tree. It is of no use to us, it is too big for us, but we can look at it, and we can bow before it.

Love is many things, most of its forms are fleeting, linked to everything that happens, everything that comes and goes, everything that fills us at first, then empties us out, but unconditional love is constant, it glows faintly throughout one's whole life, and I want you to know this - that you too were born into that love, and that it will envelop you, no matter what happens, as long as your mother and I are alive. It may happen that you don't want anything to do with it. It may happen that you turn away from it. And one day you will understand that it doesn't matter, that it doesn't change anything, that unconditional love is the only love that doesn't bind you but sets you free.

But maybe these were just excuses, something I said to comfort myself. For that’s how it is, we cover up our mistakes and failings, we invent stories that put ourselves in a more favourable light. Self-deception is perhaps the most human thing of all.

You smiled as you saw my face approaching, because you didn’t know what tears were either.

Als je de vijftig nadert en je op een rijtje gaat zetten wie van de mensen die je kent of over wie je hebt gehoord het slecht vergaan is, is dat heel heftig, het lijkt alsof het leven een harde en vreugdeloze beproeving is die niet veel mensen doorstaan zonder in het duister te worden neergedrukt. Maar zo is het niet, omdat de opsomming geen rekening houdt met de tijd, die enorme zee van dagen en nachten die alle gebeurtenissen verdunt en die constant expandeert en groter wordt. Iedere opsomming vertekent de werkelijkheid, en dat wat wij als ons leven zien, waarin de beslissende gebeurtenissen elkaar snel opvolgen, staat in verhouding tot de werkelijkheid als een kaart tot het terrein, of de sterren tot de sterrenhemel: van hier af lijkt de afstand ertussen heel klein, van hier af zijn ze net een school haringen, zo dicht als de sterren op elkaar zitten, maar als je erheen zou kunnen reizen, zou je begrijpen dat de waarheid over het heelal de ruimte ertussen is.

The only ones who count are the living.

the easy life is nothing to aspire to, the easy choice is never the worthiest solution, only the difficult life is a life worth living.

Two Scandinavians at a table in an Italian restaurant one rainy spring evening in Sydney, long silences between them, as one can so often observe between married couples in restaurants but never considers a possibility in one’s own life.

in the evenings, while the sun hung above the roof of the summer house, blazing orange, and the shadows kept lengthening, we sat at the long table outside until faces grew indistinct in the darkness and the children had long since gone to bed.