The Hardangerfjord, the second-largest fjord in Norway, carves its way from the North Sea into the distant mountains of Vestland. About halfway up the fjord, where the light on the shore is dark, and the dark of the water is silvered by light, lies the village of Strandebarm. It is home to the Fosse Foundation, an organization dedicated to Jon Fosse—novelist, essayist, and one of the most produced contemporary playwrights in Europe—who was born there, in 1959. The members of the foundation meet in a small gray prayerhouse overlooking the curve of the harbor; a waterfall runs down the black rock face behind it. Down the road from the foundation are two white houses: the house that Fosse grew up in, where his mother still lives, and the house that belonged to his grandparents.
This August, the Fosse Foundation hosted a lunch for the translators, publishers, and journalists who had gathered to attend the Jon Fosse International Symposium. On the top floor, a fiddler played a waltz on the Hardanger fiddle, which is strung with four top strings and, underneath them, four sympathetic strings, which vibrate according to the notes played on top. On the bottom floor, visitors could walk through an exhibit by the textile artist Åse Ljones, who had stitched sentences from Fosse’s writings into sheets, handkerchiefs, and nightgowns. A member of the Fosse Foundation held up one of Ljones’s sheets and asked any one of Fosse’s six translators to translate it. Words were hazarded, corrections grumbled under the breath. There was a sense of competition, of covetousness in the air.
The word that comes to mind to describe all this—the light, the music, the sacred waters, the sacred garments—is “pilgrimage.” One rarely sees living writers treated with such reverence. “I am just a strange guy from the western part of Norway, from the rural part of Norway,” Fosse told me. He grew up a mixture of a communist and an anarchist, a “hippie” who loved playing the fiddle and reading in the countryside. He enrolled at the University of Bergen, where he studied comparative literature and started writing in Nynorsk, the written standard specific to the rural regions of the west. His first novel, “Red, Black,” was published in 1983, followed throughout the next three decades by “Melancholy I” and “Melancholy II,” “Morning and Evening,” “Aliss at the Fire,” and “Trilogy.” After a wildly successful and hectic period during which he worked almost exclusively as a playwright, Fosse converted to Catholicism in 2012, quit drinking, and remarried. He then started writing “Septology,” a seven-volume novel written in a single sentence and exemplifying what he has described as his turn to “slow prose.” (The book was translated, by Damion Searls, for Fitzcarraldo Editions, in the U.K.; a U.S. edition is out this month, from Transit Books.) The narrator of “Septology” is a painter named Asle, a convert to Catholicism, grieving the death of his wife, Ales. The night before Christmas Eve, Asle finds his friend, also a painter named Asle, unconscious in an alley in Bergen, dying of alcohol poisoning. Their memories double, repeat, and gradually blur into a single voice, a diffuse consciousness capable of existing in many times and places at once.
To read Fosse’s plays and novels is to enter into communion with a writer whose presence one feels all the more intensely owing to his air of reserve, his withdrawal. His plays, whose characters usually have generic names—the Man, the Woman, Mother, Child—seize upon the intensity of our primordial relations and are by turns bleak and comic. “Septology” is the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine, as the fourteenth-century theologian Meister Eckhart, whom Fosse has read intently, describes it: “It is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.” None of the comparisons to other writers seem right. Bernhard? Too aggressive. Beckett? Too controlling. Ibsen? “He is the most destructive writer I know,” Fosse claims. “I feel that there’s a kind of—I don’t know if it’s a good English word—but a kind of reconciliation in my writing. Or, to use the Catholic or Christian word, peace.”
Fosse had not come on the outing to the Hardangerfjord, but he had attended the dinner hosted by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture the night before, in Bergen, where the Norwegian Foreign Minister had quoted Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” We chatted over dinner, then met again at the House of Literature, in the Fosse Room, where a black-and-white mural of Fosse’s face benevolently looked down at us. More than the mural, Fosse resembled his description of Asle: long gray ponytail, black overcoat, black shoes, snuffbox in his pocket. He seemed at times pained by the need to speak, yet entirely self-assured in what he said. Often, during our conversation, I felt the same competing impulses to which his writing gives rise: both curiosity and protectiveness toward the man behind the words; both skepticism and faith in his mystical descriptions of how he writes fiction. He struck me, above all, as a profoundly kind person, as expressed by his willingness to speak about everything: grace, love, jealousy, and peace, his near-death experiences, and his love of translating. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
You do not grant many face-to-face interviews.
I prefer to do interviews by e-mail. I feel that it’s often easier to write, even in English, than to speak.
I have interviewed several writers who claim that the reason they write is because they cannot speak.
Yes, it’s a bit like that for me. The man from the foreign department quoted Wittgenstein: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. You know this famous twist by Jacques Derrida: “What you cannot say, you have to write.” That’s closer to the way I think about it.
Derrida is extremely present in your early essays in “An Angel Walks Through the Stage.” One can sense his patterns of thought in many of your plays and novels, particularly around the play of speech and silence.
I started studying Derrida back in 1979. At least here in Norway, the university, or the spirit of the university, was very influenced by Marxism. We had an extreme Maoist party that was very strong among academics and writers and folks like that. It was the spirit of the time, even for me. I started studying sociology. And I felt like it was completely stupid. This way of thinking, this positivistic way of calculating things—it was nothing at all. So I jumped over to philosophy. And there was a big change in those years from Marx to the French post-structuralists. I remember reading Derrida for the first time, in the Norwegian countryside somewhere. It was a Danish translation of “Of Grammatology.”
“Of Grammatology” somehow had an influence on me. You have read Martin Heidegger’s “Sein und Zeit.” I studied and read Heidegger very much. It was difficult, but also very inspiring. I felt that what Derrida was doing was turning Heidegger on his head. The main question for Heidegger was: what is common to everything that exists? The main question for Derrida was the opposite: what makes all that exists different? And I thought that the act of writing is something very peculiar. It’s not like talking. It’s something different, very different. And that also gave me a kind of connection, of course, to Derrida and his concept of writing.
And then I started studying comparative literature. By then, I had already written my first novel and various literary things. The theory of the novel was my main subject. These theories always had the narrator as the basic concept: narrator, person, character, the relation between their points of view. And they are important enough, but still I felt that the basic concept for a theory of fiction ought not to be the narrator, which derives from the oral tradition. It ought to be the writer. The way I thought of the writer was as the bodily part of what was written, the materiality that went into your writing. And I wanted to write my own small theory of narration or of written fiction with the writer as the main concept.
And that also came from playing music. The first text I wrote, when I was twelve or thirteen, was the lyrics to a song. I wrote some poems and small stories. And I felt that when I wrote for myself and by myself, not for school, it was very private. I had found a place where I liked to stay.
Tell me about that place.
It’s a secure place. And it’s still the place I found at the age of twelve by myself. I’m sixty-two now, and that place—it isn’t me, but it’s in me somehow. It’s different from me as a person. I normally say that I’m Jon the person. And then there’s an official image of me. That’s Jon Fosse. But the writer, he has no name.
That place is for listening and for movement, and it’s a very safe place to stay. But it can also be scary, because it’s the route for me to enter the unknown. I have to go to the borders of my mind, and I have to cross these borders. And to cross these borders is frightening if you’re feeling very fragile. I was like that for some years. I simply didn’t dare to write my own things because I was afraid of crossing these borders in myself. When I’m writing well, I have this very clear and distinct feeling that what I’m writing on is already written. It’s somewhere out there. I just have to write it down before it disappears.
Sometimes I manage that straightaway. In “Morning and Evening,” for instance, I wrote its two parts without changing anything at all, almost. Or my first play, “Someone Is Going to Come”—I also wrote that in one go, without changing anything. But, with a long novel, like “Septology,” I changed quite a lot. I had to search for the text that I felt was there. I had to try to find it.
It’s fascinating—this experience of entering a new place, a new universe each time I manage to write well. And I always think that I’m prepared—that someday I won’t manage to write anymore, and that’s fine. That’s O.K. I think it’s a kind of gift that you have. Whoever or whatever is giving it to me, I don’t know.
I was thinking about the unknown on the fjord, about the darkness and the stillness of the water. You spent a great deal of your childhood on a boat in the middle of the water. Being out there helped me visualize or feel your work’s mood.
When I grew up, I and the other children around had a very free upbringing. We were allowed to go out on a boat alone when we were seven, eight years old. And some of my best memories from growing up were when I went out on a boat with my father to fish in the afternoon and at night, especially during the summer or early autumn. The experience of being in the boat when it’s getting dark, in this landscape, on this shore—I don’t like the word picture, but it’s this kind of picture that I feel more like a color or like a sound. I never ever imagine anything clearly or literally when I write. It’s an act of listening. I listen to something.
What do you hear?
I hear what I write. But I don’t see. I don’t imagine. And where it comes from, I don’t know. Of course, it’s mine. It’s my language and I’m using something I know about as material.
The logic of the text you are writing creates what I might call form. The content belongs to the form, and the form you have to make new for each and every text. And this form is to a large degree connected to what I could call a universe. I am creating a universe. Let’s say “Septology” is one universe. “Trilogy” is quite another universe.
But your universes are all connected. They share a logic and a form. Often, they share characters, or, at least, character names. They issue from what Asle, the narrator of “Septology,” describes as his “innermost picture.” They exist as a whole, a living entity.
That’s the other side of it. They need to be a universe, a unique universe. I think all three parts of “Trilogy” are unique universes. But at the same time they are connected. That’s what makes it a novel, these three novellas together. And “Trilogy” and “Septology” are also connected. I use the same names over and over again and more or less the same places. And the same motifs are recurring. A lot of people are drowning or looking out of the window, often toward the sea or the fjord. It’s a bit like being a painter who is painting another tree, as so many have done before, but he’s doing it his own way. And, quite often, a good painter uses the same motif over and over again, and he makes a new image each time. I hope that I manage to do something of the same.
How do religion and literature come together for you?
I had a kind of religious turn in my life that had to do with entering this unknown. I was an atheist, but I couldn’t explain what happened when I wrote, what made it happen. Where does it come from? I couldn’t answer it. You can always explain the brain in a scientific way, but you can’t catch the light, or the spirit, of it. It’s something else. Literature in itself knows more than the theory of literature knows.
Asle thinks something similar about God: “Because God is both a very faraway absence, yes well, being itself, yes, and a very close presence.”
Even if “Septology” is not autobiographical at all, there are thoughts and there are traits that resemble me—the way Asle looks, with his gray hair. I decided to make it autofictional by making the main character look like me, to play with the genre, and then write it my way, as fiction. But there are thoughts, especially in the more essayistic parts, that are close to my own way of thinking. For instance, this idea that God is so close that you cannot experience him and so distant that you cannot think of him. But the happy few still have experiences of what might be called God.
Asle’s sense of religion is not particularly doctrinal or dogmatic. How do you think about the relationship between God and the Church and its dogmas?
If you are a real believer, you do not believe in dogmas or institutions. If God is a reality for you, you believe on another level. But that doesn’t mean that religious dogmas and institutions aren’t necessary. If the mystery of faith has survived for two thousand years, it has to do with the Church becoming an institution. You need a kind of common understanding. But that doesn’t mean that the dogmas are true in a religious way.
In the world we are living in, I feel that the powers are economic powers, which are so strong. They run it all. And you have some forces that are on the other side, and the Church is one of them. And for the church to exist—and the Catholic Church is the strongest one—you have to force Catholicism in a way. The Church is the most important institution, as far as I can see, of anti-capitalist theology. You have literature and art as another institution, but they aren’t as strong as the churches.
What does grace mean to you?
I’ve been thinking a lot about that concept.
It is important to me.
It’s the same with me. It’s an important concept. Sometimes, when I manage to write, I view it as a gift, as a kind of grace. It’s not deserved in a way. You sitting here with me in person—I don’t feel that I deserve it. Even one production of one of my plays—each production takes a lot of work for the actors to learn the lines and the scenography and everything. I’ve made so many people do so much, and I don’t deserve it. It’s more than I deserve.
To manage to write and to write well, that’s grace. And I think perhaps life in itself might be a kind of grace. I can completely understand people who decide to leave this life. It’s an awful place in many ways. You can also think of death as a grace. To be here all the time, it must be awful.
It involves suffering.
In this fallen world, to use that Christian phrase, life is a kind of gift and a kind of grace. But then it becomes all too paradoxical. Everything for me, in a way, ends up in a paradox. And sometimes I feel I’m so full of contradictions that I can hardly understand how I manage to stay together, to be one.
You write very beautifully about childhood. Is childhood a time free of paradox? Of innocence?
I have to talk about it because it’s so fundamental to me: at the age of seven, I was close to death because of an accident. And then, from out there [points to the distance], I could see myself sitting here—I saw myself like that. And everything was peaceful, and I looked at the houses back home, and I felt quite sure that I saw them for the last time as I was going to the doctor. Everything was shimmering and very peaceful, a very happy state, like a cloud of particles of light. This experience is the most important experience from my childhood. And it has been very formative for me as a person, both in good and in bad ways. I think it created me as a kind of artist.
I read all your novels first, and then I read all your plays. And what’s interesting to me about your plays is that they often turn on the most compressed and painful depictions of sexual jealousy. This is much more muted in your novels, or, at least, it’s largely relegated to the background.
The best subject for a play is jealousy. It goes back to ancient times: just put two persons on the stage and then let a third enter. And then you have drama at once. It’s possible to make drama even between two persons, as I do in some of my plays, like “Mother and Child.”
That one was quite painful for me to read.
Yes, it’s a little like Tennessee Williams. But that’s why I got so tired of writing plays—because it was very easy to enter into jealousy. When there’s sexual jealousy on the surface, I often think that, in the silent language of the play, there’s death.
Eros and Thanatos do go together.
They are connected. And to make it a good production you have to manage to get both. If you play it just as a play about erotic jealousy or something, then to me it doesn’t work.
In your play “Someone’s Going to Come,” what makes me feel the most uneasy is how intensely and unremittingly its two characters, the Man and Woman, want to be alone with only each other.
But they share this belonging. That’s their way. They want to escape the world, because, again, the world is a hard place to be. They think that they can somehow escape that.
But you cannot escape the world.
And that’s the point of it. As soon as they’ve done that, as soon as they create their world, somebody is going to come. Somebody will come. And, of course, the world is entered. It’s about the impossibility of being whole—of being just the two of them together. It might be a dream for a lot of us. I guess it’s a part of love in a way, to be part of a kind of wholeness. And I think love is, of course, possible. But not in that way that they have tried to realize it. The play is about a lot of things, as everything I write is, but it is about the impossibility of being together alone.
You have a beautiful line in “Dream of Autumn,” which is maybe my favorite of your plays. A man and a woman are sitting on a bench, flirting, renewing a love affair that was interrupted by his marriage. And he says to her something like “I don’t believe in love. Not that kind of love, love that takes fathers away from their children.”
It’s not a stupid idea.
I don’t think it is, either. But what kind of love is worth believing in, in a fallen world?
I think both of these plays, they are telling you something about love. Both plays know something about what love is. It’s not that I know what the answer is. But I have this feeling that what I’ve written, it’s true in a way. It’s not realism. It’s just not fiction.
And that’s the way I can give you a wise answer. It’s in my writing. Your writing is wiser, and it knows more than you as a person know. It’s bigger. It’s the gift of all great literature, I think. To me, a way to look at it is to think that love is something very unique and, at the same time, completely universal. That goes for human beings, too. There’s something completely unique and something completely universal to a human being. But, to transform the uniqueness of love into authentic literature, that is necessary to create something worth it.
You say in one of your early essays that there’s a difference between the private and the personal. There are many personal things that are also universal: a romantic triangle, for instance, or that relationship of eros to death. The names that attach to these experiences may differ from person to person, but they are fundamentally shared structures of experience.
Yes, I think that’s true. I don’t see my characters as persons, but I feel them as a kind of sound. You have this sound, that sound, and they get closer to one another. There’s a relation between these sounds, and then this relation becomes a new sound. If I’ve managed to write well, then the sounds go together into what I call a song, or, to be ambitious, a composition.
And I think, partly, the reason that my plays have travelled well is because the words, the rhythm, can be re-created in another way—with that sound and that sound but perhaps in a slightly different way. But that makes up a kind of song. You can sing this song in many languages, of course, and you can sing it as a kind of ballad or in an operatic way or whatever. It doesn’t matter as long as you’re doing it well. But that goes more for the plays than for the fiction.
The characters in your plays strike me more as states of being in the world that are inhabitable by anyone.
That’s right. Because, to make it a real play, this or that actor has to make it his own character. And a director has to also visualize it his way. That’s not what I’m doing in my writing. And I feel very strongly as a writer that I’m not a man of the theatre. It’s not my art form in that respect. Because of that, it was very important to me to have my plays published.
The relationship between your plays and your novels sometimes seems to be one of rhythm—a very deliberate, punctuated, musical alternation between speech and thought.
It’s true. It’s all about rhythm in a way, even in a painting. There’s a rhythm among the elements or the relation between them. Rhythm is easy to say. It’s very, very hard to tell what it is or what it’s doing. All these concepts—like grace, like love, like rhythm—they are easy to use, but they’re very hard to understand in a real way. But it’s obvious when they’re there. When there’s rhythm, you know it. When there’s love, you feel it. And, to me, even God. I’m quite sure that God is present all the time. I don’t feel it like that, though.
There was a debate at lunch between some of your translators about the idea of slow prose. Specifically, some of them—and I would agree with this—were claiming that nothing about it feels especially slow. Why call it that?
I wrote for the theatre for fifteen years. I had two short breaks when I wrote the first and second parts of “Morning and Evening.” And, toward the end of this long period, I also wrote “Aliss at the Fire.” But mainly I wrote plays, plays, plays. And even the prose that I wrote, it was a bit play-like, very concentrated. “Aliss at the Fire” is based on a play called “A Summer Day.” It’s a quotation from Shakespeare’s famous sonnet: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
I came to a point in my life where I had to write a commission of a play. And it was very, very hard to write. It was the last play I wrote. It’s called “These Eyes.” It’s an O.K. play, and that was enough. I wanted to go back home to where I come from, to writing poems and prose, and to stop writing for the theatre. And I said, “O.K., I quit. I’m through with it.”
At the same time, I was travelling too much, and I was drinking far too much. I simply had to stop drinking. I had to be hospitalized to get rid of it. And I converted to the Catholic Church. I met my wife around that time.
I simply changed my life to a very large degree. I stopped doing readings. And I rarely give interviews now. I say no to ninety per cent of things. There are occasions in which I have to take part. When I’m given a prize here or there, I feel I have to go.
Yes, I can tell you don’t like being at events.
But I’m a restless person, so I keep travelling. We have a place in Austria and one in Oslo, and two places here in the western part of Norway. So, I keep travelling between these private places where I have everything I need. Rarely do I travel to other places. Or I travel with my family, but that’s something else. I’m not alone with a bottle of whisky somewhere. You know when you wake up, you think, Where am I? And where the hell is the toilet?
Is there a continuity with who you were before? Or a rupture?
Oh, yeah, there’s a continuity in my writing. All these things that I’m talking about are external. The writing is something else. The writer in me, he’s always consistent. I’m not sure if he’s sober or not, but he’s the same as before.
But we were talking about this concept of slow prose. And I thought that a play doesn’t need a lot of action. But, to manage to work and get truth from the stage to the audience, it needs a very strong intensity and an extreme concentration. And to write such dense text doesn’t necessarily take a lot of time, but, when you’re writing it, it demands a lot of you and it takes a lot of force. I can write extremely fast. If I have a manic side, it’s when I’m writing like this.
But then I wanted to slow down my writing, my life, my everything. That’s how I started: I wanted to write prose and make it slow, these long, flowing sentences. And “Septology” was very long. When I was through with it, it was fifteen hundred pages at least. And then I had to cut some of the essayistic parts. I had some hundred or more theological essays written that I took away from “Septology.”
And you have said that those were attributed to Ales, Asle’s young wife.
Yes, most of them. Some are in dialogue with Asle; they were in a dialogue, but she had long lectures. Now you never learn anything about the thoughts of Ales.
I was thinking about it today: is it fair to cut this or is it wrong? It was [my editor] Cecilie who said that this young girl cannot be that wise, that there must be some realism to it after all.
Would you consider publishing them separately?
One day, I might take a look at it. I’m quite sure she said a lot of wise things. And “Septology” is not a realistic novel in that way, so it wouldn’t have been wrong. I think it was possible for her to say it, to know it. You can be extremely wise at a young age. Perhaps it was wrong, but one never knows. I’m still a bit insecure about it.
I hear that you’re translating now, while you’re in between novels. I wish more novelists would work as translators.
I really like to translate. It’s like reading, in a way, but you get very deep. It’s very deep reading.
When I was quite young, in fact, I read the translations of Olav Hauge. They are collected in one volume called “Translated Poems.” And I read Georg Trakl, the Austrian poet, and I really fell in love with this poetry because Hauge had translated it. And then I bought Trakl’s collected poems in German, and I didn’t know German well at the time, but I managed to read them. It wasn’t that difficult because he’s like me: he keeps repeating himself. And you can even say that, more than me, all of his poems are, in a way, just one poem. I started trying to translate some of his poetry and some versions I included in one or two collections of my own poems.
I was in my teens when I read Trakl for the first time, and, two, three years ago, I translated one of his collections, “Sebastian im Traum.” It’s been with me for fifty years or something like that. And then this year I published a translation of “The Elegies.”
You have also translated Kafka’s “The Trial.”
Yes, to really great reviews. And I was happy with that. My publisher, who is German, went through each and every word, every period, of my translation. You can trust it. I think it’s the most reliable translation into any Scandinavian language. That was the first time I ever translated a novel. It was after “Septology.” I felt that I needed a break to do something else. I decided to try to translate a novel for the first time, and it was “The Trial,” one of my favorite novels.
I’ve translated a lot of plays, especially the Greek tragedies by the three masters: Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. It’s an act of listening to this voice, this ancient voice. And they have very distinct voices, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. It’s very easy for me to hear and to write that voice in the way I write, in my language, in this time. I love to do that.
And now you’re translating Gerald Murnane’s “The Plains.”
I don’t know how I ended up reading Murnane. He has not been translated into Norwegian before. I read about him somewhere, and he felt like an interesting writer, and “The Plains” is his most translated and famous novel. And it’s published in Swedish and Danish. When it comes to literature, I can read German and English O.K., but I prefer to read in a Scandinavian language. So, I read it in Swedish and I really liked it. And then I decided that I wanted to try to translate it myself.
Learning that you were translating Murnane reminded me of the Hardanger fiddle, with the strings on top and the sympathetic strings underneath. You and Murnane seem to share a certain set of commitments.
That’s a good picture. To meet a literary voice that really talks to you, it’s rare. It’s like a new friendship. It doesn’t happen that often.
How do you translate “The Plains” into Nynorsk?
“Slettene.” It’s quite accurate. In German, it’s “Die Ebenen.” Where I live in Austria, you have this huge, flat landscape called the Pannonian Plain. It’s a bit like the Australian landscape.
I feel that Murnane has a quite unique voice and way of seeing. I’ve never read anything like “The Plains,” but it resembles my writing—this sense of distance and closeness. We are writing in different ways, but I can tell that there’s a similar way of seeing that’s behind it.
A similar discipline or concentration, perhaps.
The way I write when I concentrate—everything needs to be precise and correct. I don’t accept it if a comma is wrong. I know it. If I change something on page 4, I’ll have to change something in some other place. I don’t know how many such connections I could make. They are not conscious. When you enter such a universe and you are, in a way, separate from the real world—when you make up this universe of your own—it’s not yours.
There is an impersonal logic to its form.
As a writer, I experience it as a necessity—something you have to do exactly like this or like that. As a reader, you see it as a logic.
Writing without necessity is nothing, I would say. And that’s its force. I think there are thousands of rules that I have to follow when I’m writing a novel. Most of them are saying no to this, or yes to that. And, to follow all these rules and to listen to them, it demands much more memory and mental capacity than I believe I have as a person. But I think we are much more than we know. We are capable of strange things.
Among them the ability, or perhaps the understanding, to organize the relationships of the parts of the novel or the art work to the whole.
Yes, it’s all about the whole, the sense of wholeness. And it’s the wholeness that’s the soul of the writing. The message comes from the wholeness of it, from its silent language. It’s the wholeness that remains silent and insists on silence. And, to create this wholeness, every part has to belong to it. I think peace has to do with the achievement of this wholeness. And this is what a person never could achieve consciously.
That’s why I prefer not to plan anything, to know anything in advance. I just trust. By the time I’ve written, let’s say, one, five, ten pages, everything, in a way, is already there. It’s defined, more or less, by then.
Do you often think about death?
No. I think the closer you get, the older you get, the less you think about it.
I think it was Cicero who said that philosophy is a way of learning to die. And I think literature is also a way of learning to die. It’s as much about death as about life. I guess this has to do with the form of great literature, of art. Art is alive when you create it, and there’s a reader who can bring it to life again. But as an object it’s dead. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
