I just finished a book. “En av oss sover” by Josefine Klougart. For the most part, I didn’t understand it. The story was so evasive, and I constantly forgot what had happened on the previous page. Abstract.
But there were glimpses. Paragraphs that were like poems, thoughts that shot right out of the page and into me. (Now, I know it isn’t ideal, me translating a text that’s already been translated from the original Danish, but it’s what we’ve got and this touched me. So. There you go.)
… but then I also think: that this is how it is with him. That he doesn’t really know. And this: that he presumes that that’s how it should be: that one has to know something.
I think: one doesn’t know anything, one wants something. Maybe it’s that simple too.
The wanting. And taking responsibility for the wanting. Making an effort to make something happen. So many people I meet seem to be just floating along. Afraid to be responsible, in case things don’t turn out well. I can’t do that. I want things. And I make them happen. And more often than not, things don’t turn out the way I expected, and sometimes they even turn out really bad. But what’s the alternative? I can’t just sit and let life pass me by out of indecision.
Or:
To go into the sorrow and be there. Maybe one thinks that the movement backwards into the nostalgic is a harmless movement, and therefore that one can be unconcerned without a body. But it is the most worrying thing I can imagine. To go backwards out over the precipice without one’s own body, tumble without body and die like that. Bodiless. I insist on being a worrying person in a world that constantly lures nostalgia out of me, that sort of battle. To go backwards and forward at the same time. The nostalgia comes from a fear of dying, from simply not living enough, not having feelings big enough. I want to try to see the feelings that exist, stay in the sorrow that is; and only return to be here. In my own body, a frightful face.
I think the book tells many stories. But for me, it is about sorrow. About living with it. That it is part of life, giving texture and depth.
Yes. I did not get it fully, the book. But the glimpses of clarity made it worth it.
Katja Malmborg 