I'll go inside

and shut the door behind me and sit down to write just anything that pops up as I keep my pen on the paper and I shall not pay any heed to what is going on outside whether that be children quarreling and shouting for a glass of water on my doorstep or Israelis and Hamaz killing children on the Gaza strip. If that is at all possible.

Strawson's arguments against the narrativity paradigm

are just what we need in order to envigorate a complacent and boring debate about identity and narrativity. He claims the following, and I cite from the intro to his article AGAINST NARRATIVITY.
"The first is a descriptive, empirical thesis about the nature of ordinary human experience: ‘each of us constructs and lives a “narrative” . . . this narrative is us, our identities’ (Oliver Sacks); ‘self is a perpetually rewritten story . . . in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives’ (Jerry Bruner); ‘we are all virtuoso novelists.
. . . We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character . . . of that autobiography is one’s self’ (Dan Dennett).
The second is a normative, ethical claim: we ought to live our lives narratively, or as a story; a ‘basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a narrative’ and have an understanding of our lives ‘as an unfolding story’ (Charles Taylor). A person ‘creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative – a story of his life’, and must be in possession of a full and ‘explicit narrative [of his life] to develop fully as a person’ (Marya Schechtman)."

thanks to the coincidences

of a day I bumped into both Galen Strawson, Michel Houellebecq, Vendela Vida and Nick Hornby within the span of 15 minutes this Friday morning. It started with an intervjue with Mrs. Vida in Klassekampen, who was said to write for the California based magazine The Believer which I happened to remember from Nick Hornby's book THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE. And as I read on in the interview I was introduced to the philosopher Galen Strawson who claims, in his essay AGAINST NARRATIVITY, that there are two types of people (Oh! these endless dicotomies): those who look upon life as a coherent story, and those who experience life as a series of incoherent episodes. And I immediately felt I belonged to the last group, even if these make up only 5% of us, according to Strawson. Then Michel Houellebecq comes in because he is one of the authors mentioned in this particular issue of The Believer. He writes: “Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.”
So why are all those people who are writing and talking about life and the world those that are fed up with it. They seem to care though.

I have been chopping wood

lately, and today I finished what I had brought home and arranged it in piles to dry during the summer. Part of it goes to the cabin, part to my daughter's house and part to myself at home. It is a good feeling to watch the newly cut and piled wood.

I met an Australian man

in his 80's when I was in Tarquinia, the ancient Etruscan city north of Rome. I was visiting some of the Etruscan necropolises, the tombs that have wall paintings. It was a fascinating experience, and I was put in a peculiar mood when an elderly man started talking to me.

At first he commented on some of the paintings, and we exchanged information on ancient rock paintings in our own parts of the world. He about the Aborigins and their painting, and I about what we have in Norway. The he started talking about the experience of getting old; that so much belongs to the past and so little to the future. He talked about being somewhere and doing something for the last time in his life and losing the spontaneous joy and laughter he used to have. There was so little to look forward to, according to him now.

He said that he forced himself to talk to other people, even if he didn't know them, in order to avoid being too silent and locked up in himself. He said his wife complained about that, and I just stood listening and let him talk among these old tombs. It was like being in a graveyard with somebody who was planning to remain there, and it reminded me of my father in his last years. He stopped talking altogether and just sat staring into empty air. It comes with old age, they say.

After about half an hour we parted, and I joined my own group and went to the museum of Tarquinia to learn more about the Etruscans.

he died in 632,

but before that he did some amazing thinking at the same time as he made use of what others had thought earlier. He tried to impose order on the chaos as most of us do, and he established a few fixed rules for everything, and presented this in various curans as laws in what was later called the Koran, the lawbook. About women he said:
-Women can inherit goods.
-A man may not leave his wife simply because he has met another woman he likes.
-It is forbidden to use violence to make a woman sleep with you.
-Leave your wife alone if she is not feeling well.
Muhammad's laws were so unacceptable that the men conspired to kill him in his sleep.

more on reading and writing

I’ve just read the first 25 pages of a book I bought last week. It is “My Father’s Notebook” by the Iranian writer Kadar Abdollah. That is not his real name navn, but a name to commemorate one of his friends murdered by the Iranian regime. His real name is Hossein Sadgadi Ghaemuraghami Frahani, born in Iran in 1952, where he studied physics and was active in the student movement. He fled from his home country in 1985, and has since 1988 lived in the Netherlands. ”My Father’s Notebook” is impressively translated from Dutch into English by Susan Massotty. The Norwegian translation came in 2002, translated by Guro Dimmen with the title “Spikerskrift”.

Here is a quote, an uncle talking to his deaf-mute nephew in sign language:
I can't write. I can't even read, Akbar signed.
You don't have to read, but you do have to write. Just scrible something in your notebook. One page every day. Or maybe just a couple of sentences. Anyway, try it. Go upstairs, write something in your book, then come and show it to me.

This is from page 19, and the great story has not even begun.