The Morning Star

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  The rows of benches terminated in a kind of portal with a large, stylized lion on each side. Here and there were paintings showing biblical motifs, which must have been even more unfamiliar then, before the advent of photographs and film, in an age when none of the people who came to sit in the church would have been able to travel to Israel to behold with their own eyes the Sea of Galilee, Jerusalem, Bethlehem or Nazareth.

  It must have been like a fairy tale.

  As the maritime eighteenth century with its forests of masts in the harbor was now like a fairy tale to us.

  It felt strange to be present in a space that was so dense with meaning, in the woodland at the edge of the sea, but even stranger, I thought to myself, that none of that meaning remained valid. The insights that were immersed in those symbols, their deposits of meaning, were no longer relevant to us.

  Only a few dithering old folk cared enough to come here now. To them, the church was a kind of spiritual walking aid. Their voices as the priest led them in the hymns were crackled and dry. A single woman, however, sang brightly and with gusto, and perhaps then she heard again her twenty-year-old self, though her song projected now backward rather than forward in life.

  Toward the end of the service, the priest said the creed and I pricked up my ears:

  I believe in God, the Father almighty,

  creator of heaven and earth.

  I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,

  who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

  born of the Virgin Mary,

  suffered under Pontius Pilate,

  was crucified, died, and was buried;

  he descended to the dead.

  On the third day he rose again;

  he ascended into heaven,

  he is seated at the right hand of the Father,

  and he will come to judge the living and the dead.

  I believe in the Holy Spirit,

  the holy catholic Church,

  the communion of saints,

  the forgiveness of sins,

  the resurrection of the body,

  and the life everlasting.

  Amen.

  This too was like a fairy tale. Born of a virgin, yet son of a king. And “the third day,” why not the second or fourth?

  Then followed the intercessions, the repeated confession and prayers that concluded the service, and the attendant, a squinting man in his sixties with wiry white hair who licked his lips incessantly, passed among the congregation for the collection. I found a couple of crumpled 500-krone notes in my trouser pocket, which I gave him, mostly because I felt sorry for him, only a small handful of coins lying at the bottom of the small woven basket he held out toward me.

  Outside: the wind, the mighty sea, the darkened sky.

  Cars, turning one by one in the car park, pulling away onto the road in the flurrying snow.

  I followed the old cart road through the woods, where the wind squeezed its way past the trunks of the trees, dumping its snow against their bark, and emerged after a while into the wide-open space that a few decades earlier had been used as a shooting range and before that, during the war, had served as a landing strip for German aircraft. Now its only purpose was as a place for people to leave their cars when they came to swim and laze on the beach in summer. The concrete ruins of abandoned German fortifications faced the sea, from where the wind now came whipping. It was conceivable, I thought to myself as I crossed that empty space, my head bent against the elements, that it was merely their way of worship that was archaic, belonging to a bygone age, whereas what they believed in was immutable, had always been there and always would be there, and that faith would be able to find—as perhaps it always had found—new pathways to deliverance, from the different places that were the cultures of our different ages?

  The problem in that was Jesus. There was absolutely nothing timeless about him, and nothing immutable. He’d lived in a particular place, in a particular age, at the same time as others known to us from history. Augustus, Herod, Pontius Pilate. And what happened to him happened only once and was never repeated, as is the case for all of us, in all our lives, in the natural circumstances of time under which we live.

  The worship of Jesus Christ amounted to a hallowing of ourselves, did it not? Making God one of us?

  Was this perhaps the germ of the total humanization of existence in which we now lived?

  I reached the end of the clearing and followed the path on into the woods. Everything around me seemed to be in a state of turmoil. The wind rushed in the trees, whose branches creaked and groaned; the waves roared and crashed; the air was a howl. I felt invigorated, though more by the church interior than by the ritual that had taken place there; the sense of being in a space so filled with meaning had been good, even if that meaning was less than relevant to me.

  What did they believe, those who believed?

  I’d never quite understood it.

  Below me, great waves rose up like sea monsters hurling themselves at the shore. The sea crested white as far as I could see; above, the sky was gray-black and low. Where the path veered to the north, the sea disappeared from view, but its noise remained, lingering among the trees as if disconnected from its origin.

  I wanted meaning in my life. But I couldn’t believe in something I didn’t believe in. I couldn’t just plunge in and hope something out there would gather me up, quite simply because I didn’t believe there was anything out there.

  I paused and stared ahead. Tall, straight spruce swayed like ships’ masts in the wind. Farther in was a thick belt of pine, their branches waving, flailing, though the trees themselves stood almost unmoving. There was a different weight about them, a different darkness.

  “God, give me a sign!” I said into the air.

  Did I really say that? I asked myself in the very next instant.

  Was I, a grown man, really standing there in the woods asking God for a sign?

  Embarrassed and ashamed, I forged on, burying my lower face in my thick, wide scarf, my woolly hat pulled down to my eyes. Suddenly all I wanted was the sofa, bed, sleep, darkness.

  Something moved above me and I looked up.

  A large, black bird came flying out of the storm. It flapped about, for a moment hanging suspended on a gust, though its wings were beating still. Then it settled on a branch just above me.

  It was a raven, and it looked straight down at me.

  I didn’t know what to make of it.

  It opened its beak, tipped its head back and squawked three times.

  Krroaa! Krroaa! Krroaa!

  With that, it flapped its wings, flew up above the treetops and vanished from sight.

  Bewildered, I began to walk again. I had asked for a sign, and a bird had come. It was a coincidence, it had to be! If there was a God, an almighty, He surely wouldn’t care what I did or said!

  And yet: a bird had come. It had looked straight at me. And it had cried three times. Not two, not four.

  After I’d been pondering the fairy-tale aspect of Jesus spending three days in the kingdom of the dead.

  The path skirted a small rise in the landscape before leading down toward the sea again. An old sand quarry lay gaping. Not a soul to be seen. Nor any beast or bird.

  When I’d moved to Norway at sixteen to start gymnasium school, I’d spent some time during that first autumn term discussing religion with one of the girls in my class, Kathrine her name was, she was a Christian and defended her faith fiercely. My opinions then hadn’t been that important to me, and the things I said were intended to goad her more than anything else, and to make me interesting to her. In fact, for a few months I hardly thought about anything else but her. One day, she brought a picture with her to school that she wanted to show me. It was a column of light breaking through dense cloud. You say God doesn’t exist, sh
e said, that He’s just an invention. But this is no invention, she said, holding the picture up in front of me. But that’s just the sun, I said. You worship the sun? I was genuinely surprised at her naivety. It hurt her, of course. And now all of a sudden I was the one seeing signs of God’s presence, not in the sun, but in a bird, and not as a credulous sixteen-year-old, but as a grown man at the midpoint of life.

  By the time I got back to the house and let myself in, I’d distanced myself sufficiently from the occurrence to be able to smile at my folly. I stamped the snow from my boots against the door sill, took off my outer layers and hung them on two chairs I pulled up in front of the wood burner, placed three logs on top of the embers, knelt down and blew until the flames began to wrap around them. Then I went into the bedroom, switched the light on and stood in front of the bookshelf. Reading Fear and Trembling, I’d become so enthused by Kierkegaard’s thinking and the style of his writing that I’d immediately ordered his collected works from the Danish publishers. They amounted to more than fifty volumes and to my shame I’d yet to open a single one, since my fervor over the knight of faith and the sphere of infinite resignation, and all the other things Kierkegaard wrote about, had evaporated during the time it took for the box of books to arrive.

  Now my eyes passed along their blue spines. One title contained the word “bird” and I pulled it out. The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. Flicking through the pages, I realized it was a sermon. An interpretation of a passage in the New Testament. I took it with me to the desk in the living room, sat down and began to read.

  When I’d finished, it was dark outside and the wind had subsided.

  I was filled with an emotion so immense I hardly knew what to do with it. Thoughts were suddenly nothing, nada, nichts.

  I closed the book and crouched down in front of the wood burner again, crumpled some newspaper, placed some bits of bark, twigs and other dry sweepings on top, leaned three logs up against each other as if to form a tepee, struck a match and watched as the fire flamed yellow and a circle of black spread across the newspaper, which at the same time curled in on itself and was consumed.

  God’s kingdom was here.

  I turned round and felt the clothes that were hung from the backs of the two chairs. They were quite dry now. I put them on, sat down on the stool by the door and put my boots on. The snow from earlier had melted into little pools that still lay on the floor, slight, lustrous distensions on the varnished floorboards. The flames leaped in the wood burner. Apart from the hiss and crackle of the fire, the room was quite still.

  God’s kingdom was here.

  I got to my feet, opened the door and went out. The snow-covered ground leading down to the sea in front of me was without movement. Stars shimmered in the clear, dark sky. The temperature had dropped dramatically; it felt like minus five, perhaps even minus ten. A snowdrift was blocking the door of the shed. I decided I might as well shift it, went round the side of the house to the little extension where my father used to keep the car, fetched the spade, went back and began to dig.

  * * *

  —

  I suppose all of us have yearned for freedom at some stage in life. That yearning is like a spring, pressed tighter and tighter together, packed ever harder, until it reaches the point where its compacted force can be compacted no more, and the spring releases. Often, this happens first at the age of seventeen or eighteen, when the young adult leaves the home of the parents, and again in one’s forties, when our new family is torn asunder by it. But it’s not only our need for freedom that changes as we proceed through life, our understanding of it does too. I like to think of society in such a way that a key concept like freedom is construed differently by different groups, and it’s the force that arises in their interactions, in the friction of dissimilarity, that drives society forward—or back, if that’s where the momentum is directed, or round in circles. The yearning for freedom, if acted upon, leads to departure and thereby to something new. We break up, and break away. That the new is so often the same as the old, precipitates counter-insights, which too are prevalent, living their lives alongside our yearnings for freedom, our urges to break away, our beliefs as to the future, they too graduated, from mild to bottomless resignation, from the considerate desire to preserve, to the brutal compulsion to stagnate.

  Hans Jonas, the Jewish philosopher who penned the standard work on Gnosticism, a pupil of Heidegger who, like other prominent pupils of Heidegger, distanced himself from his philosophy, not primarily by condemning it—though he did that too—but by expanding it, outlined toward the end of his life a proposal for a philosophy of biology in the framework of which he traced back such an ethically charged concept as freedom to a time long before man emerged; right back, in fact, to the very first origins of life. Reality, in this conception: matter in the thrall of material forces, without will, constrained by mechanical patterns of action. Streaming lava cooling into mountains, oceans evaporated by sun to become clouds, plummeting atmospheric pressure becoming winds, winds that cause the seas to storm, water eroding the rock, sand carried on the wind. Electrical charges dissecting the sky, bolts of lightning striving toward the ground. Indeed, the burning sun, the twinkling stars, the moon that orbits the earth that orbits the sun, in a disk-shaped galaxy that sails through the universe. Life, even its very first, unimaginably primitive forms, frees itself from this matter and the mechanics of this matter. Life is itself matter, and this is the miracle, that matter frees itself from matter and can do as it will, more or less independently of any system. That for those first hundreds of millions of years such will is so constrained, its room to maneuver so immeasurably small, is of no consequence in relation to the gigantic and unfathomable leap from matter that life entails. But the freedom that so occurs is not unconditional, for what happens when matter is set free is that at once a dependency arises, it too new and unprecedented. Life demands ever-constant supplies of nourishment, whether from the sun, water, soil or other life forms, and if such supplies are curtailed the living matter will revert to dead matter and freedom will come to an end. The dynamic between freedom and dependency is in other words fundamentally the same for monocellular life and bacteria as it is for us.

  When I was sixteen, I saw only the one side of freedom. I held it above everything else and called myself an anarchist. What I had in mind then was a kind of absolute freedom: no one should have the right to decide over me, I should be able to do only as I pleased, and the same should apply to everyone. There should be no authorities, no societal superstructure, no boundaries between countries. In discussions I entered into at that time, my opinions naturally met with fierce opposition and much shaking of heads. Society would collapse without some form of hierarchy, and crime would flourish. “What if you got the urge to kill someone, would that be OK, if no one was allowed to decide over another person’s actions and there was nothing to stop you?” “Of course,” I’d tell them, “if you want to kill someone, go ahead, feel free. But you wouldn’t kill another person, would you, even if you could? There’s something stopping you? Those are your morals. It’s your morals that set the limits, no one else’s. People kill each other as it is, don’t they? Even though we’ve got laws against it, and prisons and police, and even though it’s the biggest taboo that exists. People are always going to kill other people, an anarchist society is no exception. But I think there’d be fewer cases. Because it’s not just down to laws and rules of conduct imposed on people, there’s also a huge pressure on people to live up to society’s demands on them to fit in, earn money, obtain goods and status symbols, and those who fall by the wayside find freedom in criminality. Do you understand what I’m saying? In a society where that kind of pressure doesn’t exist, where there’s freedom for everybody, crime, at least to a very large degree, will cease.” “Oh, you’re so naive,” they’d naturally reply. “No, you’re the ones who are naive,” I’d come back at them, quite as naturally. “Man is
fundamentally good, it’s society that turns him bad. Have you ever known a bad baby?”

  It wasn’t difficult to see where these opinions had come from. My father had taken over the family shipping business from his father, and as the eldest son it was expected that I should do likewise. He never said so in as many words, and when I began moving in a different direction, one that quite clearly was incompatible with a career in business, he expressed no disappointment. I understood that he’d already given up on me a long time before. But I felt the pressure, I felt that I’d disappointed him.

  Dad was always working while I was growing up. Usually, he wouldn’t be home until after I’d gone to bed, and although he never laid a hand on me and barely ever raised his voice against me, there was something about him, no matter how mild-mannered and restrained he came across, that told me he didn’t like me. I was overweight as a child, which I’m sure displeased him, and I was so shy that I couldn’t look any visitor in the eye or utter anything sensible, much less comprehensible. He put up with it when we were on our own as a family, but when visitors came I saw that it vexed him, even though he made light of it. Most of all, I liked to play on my own; even when I was twelve years old, my room was filled with action figures and I wasn’t afraid to play with dolls either. My brothers were quite different, Harald especially, who was only a year younger and exploited my weaknesses the best he could when we were children. Powerful is he to whom we give power, as Nietzsche said, but of course I was oblivious to it then and would put up with being treated like a dog if it meant I could be left in peace. If I cried on account of a conflict with Harald, it wouldn’t be Harald who got told off, but me, because I was the eldest and ought properly to be chastising my brother instead of the other way round.

  Later, in adulthood, we got on fine together, and there was nothing wrong with my upbringing for that matter either, not really; we simply belonged to different worlds. Dad stepped down when he reached sixty, and Harald, who had attended the London School of Economics and gone on to enjoy a very successful spell working for Goldman Sachs in the City, stepped up to head the company in his place. Gunnar, three years younger than me, took a similar path and was now CEO of a medical company he’d got involved in while it was still little more than a start-up and which now, having developed a new antidepressant, basically a hallucinogen, was in explosive growth. All three continued to be based in London. Dad had sold the house in Hampstead and taken up residence at a central hotel. He was doing fine, as far as I knew, cultivating his hobby as a collector of art, visiting the exhibitions, private views and dinner parties that were important to him in that respect. His particular interest was for constructivism. There was much that I hadn’t the heart to say to him as far as his art interest was concerned. In his business life, he’d been the fulcrum, in control of everything and generally savvier than most about the way things worked. He appeared to think this carried over to the art world, not least because he found himself so welcome wherever he went. But what made him welcome was his money, and if artists, gallerists and curators listened patiently to him as he held forth about his beloved Russian constructivists or American pop artists, whose work he also purchased in quantity, it was not because they found what he had to say interesting, but because they were being indulgent toward him, the truth being that he most likely bored them. My father was rather small in stature, self-confident without being self-obsessed, dapper and well dressed with his white shirts, blue suits, brown shoes, ties and cufflinks, but his eyes, although kind, could turn cold whenever his cynicism, which I took to be more practiced than hereditary, kicked in. He could assess a man rather well, but a lot of things went over his head, there being very little depth in him.