That is what life is like, is it not? When we’re young we think there’s more to come, that this is only the beginning, whereas in fact it’s all there… - Karl Ove Knausgård

For that’s how it is, we cover up our mistakes and failings, we invent stories that put ourselves in a more favorable light. Self-deception is perhaps the most human thing of all.

The world is material. We are always in a certain place. Now I am here.

We were rooted in the archaic past, nothing radical about us, our bodies, or needs had changed since the first human saw the light of day somewhere in Africa forty thousand years ago or however long Homo sapiens had existed. But we imagined it was different, and so strong was our imaginative power we not only believed that but we also organized ourselves accordingly, as we sat getting drunk in our cafés and darkened clubs, and dancing our dances that presumably were even more clumsy than those performed, shall we say, twenty-five thousand years ago in the glow of a fire somewhere along the Mediterranean coast.