The Logic of Long Distance

A few quick notes after reading the first two volumes of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Why it works: even though My Struggle is personal and autobiographical, it is not confessional. It's personal narrative without guilt or its close brother: aspiration. The other reason it works is that the writing is full of detail, description, not just of inner life, but also of objects and ideas and landscapes. Knausgaard gives us a full picture of experience. His writing is neither subjective nor objective; or maybe better put, Knausgaard's writing makes that distinction irrelevant. While the content of the book is personal: family life, adolescence, work, play, etc., these things are also universal to human experience.  More than that, Knausgaard's resurrection of the person is also a crushing criticism of the way in which 21st century life has destroyed the personal as a source of meaning. It's done this in two ways: 1) through the culture of sameness, in which...

One of the most difficult things in running is coming to terms with yourself. Indeed, part of the reason we run is to avoid this task: how much easier it is to change ourselves, than to live with ourselves! The truly uplifting stories that are passed around in running mostly have to do with leaving old selves behind, whether that old self was a couch potato, overweight, slower, a slave to the tv or computer, etc. While it is true that these stories inspire, I think that perhaps the elation we feel when we hear these stories might also be a feeling of relief. In addition to wowing us, don't these stories also whisper to us a little lie: "You don't have to live with yourself. You can become someone else." We do have to live with ourselves. So, on behalf of this truth, I want to shift this lens of running as a practice of self-transformation a little. If running is about changing the self, making it better, it is also about coming to terms with the self, learning t...