Karl Ove Knausgaard's "Private Eye"

I want to return to a piece that appeared in the February 3, 2025, New Yorker – Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “Private Eye.” It’s a profile of the British painter Celia Paul. Knausgaard visits her at her London studio and writes about it. He says,

When I followed her into the flat on this early-autumn day, it was therefore a little like stepping into a painting. I recognized the floor, worn and dark and made of linoleum, I recognized the plain, white walls, I recognized the window facing the museum, the light that fell through it. And Paul’s face was so familiar that it might have belonged to one of my close friends. But—and this struck me at once—reality is always much more than that which can be fixed in images, infinitely more. The other’s face continually changing, one’s own thoughts in constant flux. The various surfaces, the way light is reflected off each of them, always shifting. The history of objects, and what they signal about status, class, the personality of their owner. Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it. So what we do is look for patterns, for whatever can be fitted into a stable structure. It is a way of managing reality: we must be able to pull out a chair and sit without expending time on the chair itself. And why should we spend time on a chair, anyway? What point would there be in taking a closer look at it, in seeing what it is really like?

That “Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it” seems to me to express something fundamental – a key to art and writing. Close looking unlocks the significance of even the most banal-seeming objects. Writing about Knausgaard, James Wood puts it this way:

Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary—the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (“the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation”)—is steadily retreating; in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and life back to the soccer boots and to the grass, and to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Old Spice and Ajax. [“Serious Noticing”]

How I love that “adventure of the ordinary.” The whole passage is brilliant. Knausgaard’s “Private Eye” reminded me of it. 

Postscript: The above portrait of Celia Paul is by Alice Zoo.