You must be really desperate
I am almost done with My Strggle Book Two. And I am just beginning to understand what his struggle is. It's not something tangible, like I want to have this or not have that, blablabla, for that would be too easy. Instead, the struggle is what always evades one. He can only feel the symptom without knowing the cause. The struggle leaves one no fighting chance because he cannot even know what it is other than that it exists. And there is something divine or, rather, infinitely human about this struggle.
In Book One the struggle more or less manfests as love, or perception of death, or ambition. And I was totally fooled. I thought, see, that was his struggle! But no, those are only the symptoms.
The real struggle exists in (but is not) the ephemirality of ... everything?
In Book Two Geir said to Karl Ove, "you must be really desperate to try to solve your problems with sit ups and push ups". The fight to the external world had become so futile that the one thing worth doing is self change?
What's the context of their conversation? They were just in some bar talking about life. Karl Ove had just done christening his first child. It was, with one or two episodes of arugments, more or less a good day for Karl Ove. But he is not happy. Or is not as happy as he wished he could be, even though, by this point, he is already very achieved.
The sympotom manifests as that he has no time for writing, which is his one love, because he needs to take care of Vanja, his first born baby. Well... what can one do about that?
But some intuition tells me that that's not his real problem. In fact, it is not even his problem. The problem is the nature of time. Fleeting. One can never get enough of.
The way I saw it, Geir proposed a solution, which is the so-called Victorian life. Namely a double life. The side that is open to others is formal and in order and happy. And the side that one keeps to himself, the back stage, is real and possibly not that good. But, I suppose, that side is more suppressed than the other.
Martin, my friend, said if you are convinced you are happy then you are happy. I guess life is not all about truth but instead about convincing. What a tough life it must be for those truth seekers...
Karl Ove is incapable of a double life. He can only live with the kernel of himself. So, in a way, is his struggle ... inability of lying?
Danie Suess:
I am tempted to list those things, but the time for listing is over.
Diane Suess:
then I drove the mile west to the sea which had decided t obe loud that day, the sunset, oh, ragged and bloody as a piece of raw meat in the jaws of some big olden carnivore, and I cried a little, for none of it! none of it will last!