Birth, death, and the abyss of unlearning
Karl Ove Knausgaard:
School is a place where we teach our children how things are. It creates a common understanding of how society, nature, and culture work, and a common sense of trust in the world. It makes the world self-explanatory and easy to operate in, not random. Doubt, wonder, the sudden abyss that opens up when we learn that we actually don’t know anything, come much later, if at all. But having a child, which is also something completely self-explanatory until it happens, or losing a loved one and seeing his or her dead body, which is also something self-explanatory until you’re standing there facing the abyss — this void that children come from and that the dead have disappeared into — is an unlearning. In these zones between life and death, what is self-evident has no power; in them there is no certainty. And it has always been this way, because death and birth have always been with us. Everyone who has seen a child being born, everyone who has seen a person lying dead, has been at a place where all knowledge, all insight, is invalidated. It is the place of the beginning of life, the place of the end of life. It is life’s borderland, where no other knowledge exists except the simplest: we all come from, and we all return to, this shell of flesh that is like us but no longer in us.
“Fate,” in In the Land of the Cyclops: Essays, p. 76
