What do writers do when they seriously notice the world? Perhaps they do nothing less than rescue the life of things from their death – from two deaths, one small and one large: from the ‘death’ which literary form always threatens to impose on life, and from actual death. Which is to say, they rescue us from our death. I mean the fading reality that besets details as they recede from us – the memories of our childhood, the almost-forgotten pungency of flavours, smells, textures: the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention. Growing older, says Knausgaard, is like standing in front of a mirror while holding another behind one’s head, and seeing the receding dance of images – ‘becoming smaller and smaller as far as the eye could see’. Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary – the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (‘the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation’) – is steadily retreating; in which things and objects and sensations are pacing towards meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, colour, and life back to the most ordinary things – to football boots and grass, to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Old Spice and Ajax. ‘You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyroka bindings and Koflack boots,’ he writes.
The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coque football boots was just a pair of football boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn’t, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.
Serious Noticing, James Wood
