Actually there were only two forms of existence, I reflected: one that was tied to a place and one that wasn't. Both had always existed. Neither coul… - Karl Ove Knausgård

Was it the shrill, sickly tone I heard everywhere that I couldn’t stand, the one that arose from all the pseudo people and pseudo places, pseudo events and pseudo conflicts our lives passed through, that which we saw but did not participate in, and the distance that modern life in this way had opened up to our own, actually inalienable here and now?

Perhaps they were dead and imagined they were living? Perhaps everyone was dead? Perhaps he’d always been dead? That what he’d always assumed was life was actually death?

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.