...The subjects seem, at first, like a motley mix of the pedestrian, the sacred and profane. But a pattern emerges. Most of the entries deal with the threshold of where the body ends and the world begins. Knausgaard considers buttons, and what it means that every day we use them to ritually lock ourselves off from the world. Flies excite his imagination because they’re covered in taste buds: “When everything they brush against is also tasted, it must seem still less clear to them what is them and what is the world.” In a way so it is with infants, he writes earlier in the book, who “don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves.”...link
