Most of his thirteen children-five of whom died in childhood-were born on it, too. She died when he was nearly two years old. Tolstoy’s mother had given birth to him on this couch. I sometimes think that the old leather couch Tolstoy kept in his study would be a good symbol of the mortal pulse that Benjamin was talking about. “If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs,” Benjamin writes. Instead of the news of death, there is just news-the “information” that we get so easily in newspapers. Benjamin notes that death has disappeared from contemporary life, safely shuffled away to the hospital, the morgue, the undertaker.
But these days, he suggests, that hearth is cold and empty. It is the fire at which listeners warm their hands. Walter Benjamin, in his great essay “The Storyteller,” written in the nineteen-thirties, argues that classic storytelling is structured around death. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan / Pen American Center Knausgaard has an artistic commitment to ordinariness and inexhaustibility.
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