Voices

Voice

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Wolves of Eternity

Human Flourishing Literature Education

A personal doodle illustration selected for this voice.
Photograph by Greg Conrad Smith of artwork, 2026.

“Why are you reading when you don’t have to?” Sevoshka would often say to me [Alevtina] whenever I sat down with a book on some subject or other that was completely alien to him.

“You were the sort who actually liked school, weren’t you?” I explained to him then that I liked learning and that it had to do with the world, not school.

He didn’t understand. p. 437, Alevtina speaking, Wolves of Eternity by Knausgaard And yet gradually literature became more of a supplement, something extraneous, not the be-all and end-all I’d thought it was.

So what was the be-all and end-all? What did I want? Or more exactly: what did I want to know? p. 464 … feelings of professional stagnation …

Tsvetaeva: However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest.

We are all wolves of the dense forest of eternity.

–Karl Ove Knausgaard, Wolves of Eternity

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