"That is the wolf. The awkward, twisted or stupid part of the soul, the grudges and the envy, the hopelessness and the darkness, the childish joy and the unmanageable desire."
— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)
Date
December 30, 2015
Metaphor
"That is the wolf. The awkward, twisted or stupid part of the soul, the grudges and the envy, the hopelessness and the darkness, the childish joy and the unmanageable desire."
Metaphor in Context
We use systems to keep the wolf from the door, I thought. And systems are nothing but vast complexes of notions and concepts. Everything that helps us lose sight of the petty, pathetic and meaningless parts of our own selves. That is the wolf. The awkward, twisted or stupid part of the soul, the grudges and the envy, the hopelessness and the darkness, the childish joy and the unmanageable desire. The wolf is the part of human nature that the systems have no room for, the aspect of reality that our ideas, the firmament that the brain vaults above our lives, cannot fathom. The wolf is the truth.
(p. 52)
(p. 52)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Reading print edition, text from online. See Karl Ove Knausgaard, "The Terrible Beauty of Brain Surgery," New York Times Magazine (January 3, 2016). <Link to NYTimes.com>
Date of Entry
01/05/2016
