Karl Knausgaard

Literature is not primarily a place for truths, it is the space where truths play out. For the answer to the question—that I write because I am going to die—to have the intended effect, for it to strike one as truth, a space must first be created in which it can be said. That is what writing is: creating a space in which something can be said.

I write because I am going to die.

I paint because I have lost trust in the world.

spoken by the author with his sweater tucked into his trousers.

an attempt to re-create faith in the world.

Everyone who has attempted to paint knows that it is a painstaking and complicated process, governed by a special form of thought, visual and unreflecting, almost like the colors and shapes themselves.

nd the chasm separating death’s solemnity from life’s unceremoniousness became apparent. This distance is literary, it is precisely that space literature explores,

There must have been some incongruity between his experience of reality and the dominant way of depicting it, an incongruity so great that he couldn’t simply accept the existing painterly idiom if he wanted to be true to himself,

ut this of course says nothing about whether miracles occur or do not occur, only that we can never be certain that what we see in fact exists outside our minds, or exists in the way that we see it.

I know that my body will die, however hard that may be to believe—but equally I know that the part of me that is will never die.

Life after death cannot be proven—but neither can it be disproved. No scientist can with any certainty say that life after death does not occur. He may say that much would suggest it does not, and substantiate his claim with reference to the logic of matter and the physical world. But logical parameters will naturally capture only what is logical; the non-logical slips through its mesh.
Does the non-logical exist?
If we stand at the boundary of the logical, is there anything beyond? Anything we might sense or discern?
Let us proceed step by step.
What is death?
What is the body?