All my adult life I have kept a distance from other people, it has been my way of coping, because I become so incredibly close to others in my though… - Karl Ove Knausgård

I had always liked staying the night with other families, having your own room with a freshly made bed, full of unfamiliar objects, with a towel and a washcloth nicely laid out, and from there straight into the heart of family life, despite there always being, no matter whom I visited, an uncomfortable side, because even though people always try to keep existing tensions in the background whenever guests are present, the tensions are still noticeable, and you can never know if it is your presence that has caused them or whether they are just there and indeed your presence is helping to suppress them. A third possibility is, of course, that all these tensions were just tensions that lived their own lives in my head.

There was also something panicked about my desire to acquire knowledge, in sudden terrible insights I saw that actually I didn’t know anything and it was urgent, I didn’t have a second to lose. It was almost impossible to adapt this urgency to the slowness that reading required.

I would have given a fortune to know what the people sitting there were thinking. What the world looked like to them. Imagine if it was radically different from what I saw. If it was full of pleasure at the dark leather of the sofa, the black surface of the coffee and its bitter taste, not to mention the yellow eye of custard in the center of the puff pastry’s winding and cracked terrain. What if the whole of this world sang inside them? What if they were full to bursting with the many delights the day had bestowed on them?