So what was I doing here?

I sat down by the brick fireplace outside the cottage and lit a cigarette. It might have been eleven or maybe half past eleven. The mountainside looked as it must have done when my grandmother worked here in the thirties and forties. Well, everything looked more or less how it must have looked back then. But still, everything was different. It was August 1988, I was a product of the eighties, contemporary with Duran Duran and The Cure, not with the violin and accordion music that my grandfather had heard that time when he and his friend lumbered up here to woo my grandmother and her sister in the twilight. I didn’t belong here, I felt it in my whole body. It didn’t help that I knew that the forest was actually a forest of the eighties and that the mountains were actually mountains of the eighties.

So what was I doing here?

I wanted to write. But I couldn’t, because I was alone, alone to the depths of my soul.

– Knausgaard, My Struggle, Vol. 5 (my. tr.)