Running for Your Life: “Inadvertent” by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Some notes from the Why I Write series, a front pocket-sized paperback  called “Inadvertent” by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

“[Writing is] to lose sight of yourself, and yet to use yourself, or that part of yourself that was beyond the control of your ego. And then to see something foreign appear on the page in front of you. Thoughts you had never (my emphasis) had before, images you had never seen. It was the form that created them.”                                                             

This insight from KOK is a reflection on how new writing sprung after his reader love of Proust, “In Search of Lost Time.”

Remembrance as recovery – How in Proust each recovered memory serves to give shape to a promise – it is not Marcel who somehow stands astride humanity like some mythical colossus, rather that by honoring the humble observations of a life electrified by sensitivities, by doubt, by a kind of hard-won knowledge that come from sincere self-nourishing introspection, Proust has given us a literature that stands the test of time, that offers lessons to the better angels in all of us.

Harder still is to find the pure joy in that gift of literature. The starting point is always the same, though. To sit down. And read.

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