First we take Manhattan

Tao Lin reports on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s New York event with Zadie Smith.

After the Q&A, Mr. Knausgaard went upstairs and moved energetically through the crowd, like a football player that was a thin strong elf with silvery hair, toward the signing area. I estimate he was 6’3”. An audience member who’d read books one to three of My Struggle as well as a previous, 612-page novel by Mr. Knausgaard set in biblical times and about angels, noticed Mr. Knausgaard “used a lot of product in his hair.”

To be human—to exist in concrete reality and the imagination, to be material and immaterial—is to be paradoxical. And to transcend humanity—or, if that’s impossible, to go to where one can touch the wall, which bodies can’t cross, separating the human from the sublime—one first needs to be human, and embody paradox.

I imagine Mr. Knausgaard feeling on some level charged by his own existence, aware he’s closer to, or at least now positioned adjacent, the sublime as a result of the amount and scale of paradox he has accumulated in his life and, as a kind of side effect, generated in the world.

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