My Struggle

I stood there, gray with tiredness in the bright light, watching her, with no chance of reaching the place where she was, let alone helping her.

At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. When you were forty you realized it was all here, banal everyday li

went into the bathroom, grabbed the glass on the sink and hurled it at the wall with all the strength I could muster. I waited to hear if there was any reaction. Then I took the biggest shard I could find and started cutting my face. I did it methodically, making the cuts as deep as I could, and covered my whole face. The chin, cheeks, forehead, no

If I have learned one thing over these years that seems to me immensely important, particularly in an era such as ours, overflowing with such mediocrity, it is the following: Don’t believe you are anybody. Do not fucking believe you are somebody. Because you are not. You’re just a smug, mediocre little shit. Do not believe that you’re anything spec

A life is simple to understand, the elements that determine it are few. In mine there were two. My father and the fact that I had never belonged anywhere.

Everything was raised, higher and higher, the intensity increased, and within the tightly set framework, which in the end comprised only mother and son, a kind of boundlessness arose, something wild and reckless. Into it disappeared plot and space, what was left was emotion, and it was stark, you were looking straight into the essence of human exis

The past is only one of many possible futures, as Thure Erik was wont to say. It wasn’t the past you had to avoid and ignore, it was its ossification. The same applied to the present. And when the movement art cultivated became static that was what you had to avoid and ignore.

And it is never easy to confront life-changing news, especially when you are deeply embroiled in the everyday and the banal, which we always are. They absorb almost everything, make almost everything small, apart from the few events that are so immense they lay waste to all the everyday trivia around you. Big news is like that and it is not possibl

I walked beside her, burning with shame because people were looking at us, burning with guilt because I had been drinking and burning with terror because, in her unbridled rage, she went straight for me and the person I was.