Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Author:Karl Ove Knausgaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Bottles

Though the bottle’s basic form is always the same, a smooth cylinder-shaped body which narrows into a neck, its physiognomy is surprisingly multifarious. Between the squat short-necked bottle and the slender long-necked one there are infinite varieties. Bottles are made to store liquids, mainly those that we drink – the liquids we don’t drink, such as perfume, petrol, paint, are generally stored in flasks, drums and cans – and as is the case with most forms, the shape of a bottle is almost entirely eclipsed by its contents, which is what we see, think of and associate with it: wine, beer, spirits, soft drinks. That the bottle itself is almost wholly invisible, that our thoughts, which follow our gaze, hardly ever fasten on it, is striking, since after all the bottle always determines how we view its contents. Few things are more undifferentiated than liquids, and no one can distinguish between beers when they are kept in large vats or barrels; it is only when it is bottled that beer gains its identity and becomes what we think of when we see it, while the thing that conveys this identity, the bottle, its distinctive form and colour, disappears. In literature this phenomenon is held up as an ideal: the form should shape the text but not be conspicuous in itself, what matters are the emotions and thoughts it evokes, while the text itself, to those who discern it, should be as cold and clear as glass. Another essential feature of bottles is that they are mass-produced. They are stacked on pallets and distributed from production plants via sales points to the individual household, where they are so common that a house without them is hardly imaginable. When I was little I thought of bottles as brothers, and if one bottle was standing by itself on the table, the large brown one-litre bottle from Arendal Brewery, for instance, with its characteristic yellow label depicting a ship in full sail stuck on the side, I felt sorry for it, while conversely I felt happy on the occasions when it stood there together with two or three of its jolly brothers or in a crate down in the cellar with the whole lot of them, as if asleep. But though the bottles were identical, they meant different things. At home on the living-room table they stood for joy, they meant that daddy was indulging himself a little, while outside, in the hands of youths they were synonymous with the forbidden and the wicked, or in the hands of grown-ups with alcoholism, which was terrible, though I didn’t know exactly why, except that it entailed a drastic loss of dignity. There was only one drunkard in the neighbourhood where I grew up, he lived in one of the houses that were there before the housing development appeared, and we knew nothing about him apart from that. Once when he was pushing his bicycle up the hill with two white plastic bags dangling from the handlebars, I ran up to him, incited by my playmates.

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