'By "tact" we understand a special sensitivity and sensitiveness to situations and how to behave in them, for which knowledge from general principles does not suffice. Hence an essential part of tact is that it is tacit and unformulable. One can say something tactfully; but that will always mean that one passes over something tactfully and leaves it unsaid, and it is tactless to express what one can only pass over. But to pass over something does not mean to avert one's gaze from it, but to keep an eye on it in such a way that rather than knock into it, one slips by it. Thus tact helps one to preserve distance. It avoids the offensive, the intrusive, the violation of the intimate sphere of the person.'

'Silence is certainly one of the most powerful mediators of tact. In tactful interaction silence can function in different ways. For example, there is the silence that "speaks." This is the tact of the "silent conversation" where chatter would be misplaced, or where intrusive questions may only disturb or hurt. The etymological root of "conversation" has the meaning of "living together, association, company, acquaintance." The noise of words can make it difficult to "hear" the things that the mere conversation of companionship can bring out. In good conversation the silences are as important as the words spoken. Tact knows the power of stillness, how to remain silent.'

In Emerson's chronology one finds: 1875: Journal entries cease. Something to aspire to, to have that matter.

'A l'état de nature, l'homme vit dans l'immédiat; ses besoins ne rencontrent pas d'obstacles et son désir ne dépasse pas les objets qui lui sont offerts… et comme la parole ne peut naitre que lorsqu'il y a un manque à compenser, l'homme naturel ne parle pas.… L'homme de la nature s'en tient à une communication silencieuse, qui n'est même pas une communication, mais seulement un contact.'

'Not until one man speaks to another, does he learn that speech no longer belongs to silence but to man. He learns it through the Thou of the other person, for through the Thou the word first belongs to man and no longer to silence. When two people are conversing with one another, however, a third is always present: Silence is listening. That is what gives breadth to a conversation: when the words are not moving merely within the narrow space occupied by the two speakers, but come from afar, from the place where silence is listening. That gives the words a new fulness. But not only that: the words are spoken as it were from the silence, from that third person, and the listener receives more than the speaker alone is able to give. Silence is the third speaker in such a conversation. At the end of the Platonic dialogues it is always as though silence itself were speaking. The persons who were speaking seem to have become listeners to silence.'

'Reading seems, in fact, to be the synthesis of perception and creation. It posits the essentiality of both the subject and the object. The object is essential because it is strictly transcendent, because it imposes its own structures, and because one must wait for it and observe it; but the subject is also essential because it is required not only to disclose the object (that is, to make it possible for there to be an object) but also so that this object might exist absolutely (that is, to produce it). In a word, the reader is conscious of disclosing in creating, of creating by disclosing. In reality, it is not necessary to believe that reading is a mechanical operation and that signs make an impression upon him as light does upon a photographic plate. If he is inattentive, tired, stupid, or thoughtless, most of the relations will escape him. The object will never 'catch' with him (in the sense in which we say that fire 'catches' or 'doesn't catch'). He will draw some phrases out of the shadow, but they will seem to have appeared at random. If he is at his best, he will project beyond the words a synthetic form, each phrase of which will be no more than a partial function: the 'theme', the 'subject', or the 'meaning'. Thus, from the very beginning, the meaning is no longer contained in the words, since it is he, on the contrary, who allows the significance of each of them to be understood; and the literary object, though realized through language, is never given in language. On the contrary, it is by nature a silence and an opponent of the word. In addition, the hundred thousand words aligned in a book can be read one by one so that the meaning of the work does not emerge. Nothing is accomplished if the reader does not put himself from the very beginning and almost without a guide at the height of this silence; if, in short, he does not invent it and place himself there, and hold on to, the words and sentences which he awakens. And if I am told that it would be more fitting to call this operation a re-invention or a discovery, I shall answer that, first, such a re-invention would be as new and as original an act as the first invention. And, especially, when an object has never existed before, there can be no question of re-inventing it or discovering it. For if the silence about which I am speaking is really the goal at which the author is aiming, he has, at least, never been familiar with it; his silence is subjective and anterior to language. It is the absence of words, the undifferentiated and lived silence of inspiration, which the word will then particularize, whereas the silence produced by the reader is an object. And at the very interior of this object there are more silences—which the author does not mention. It is a question of silences which are so particular that they could not retain any meaning outside the object which causes the reading to appear. However, it is these which give it its density and its particular face.

To say that they are unexpressed is hardly the word; for they are precisely the inexpressible. And that is why one does not come upon them at any definite moment in the reading; they are everywhere and nowhere.'

'The "other" tragedy has absorbed many elements from mainstream tragedy and given them new emphasis. One of these elements is precisely that silence. Aristotle's catharsis, if the term has any meaning, would have to be located temporally at the end of the play. This is the point at which the audience must return to the world, when the Pequod disappears under the waves, when the last words of the play are spoken. The applause, as Rilke suggested, serves to ward off whatever it is that would make them change their lives. In traditional tragedy, this moment is charged with both terror and exhilaration, the fear of death and the joy of life. In the "other" tragedy this silence is the underpinning of all the words and actions. It is equally contradictory. It is at once the will to live and the proximity of nothingness.'

'In Schopenhauerian tragedy, the reigning and proper order of the world is silence, and any human achievement or ambition is a disorder that will be purged regardless of the means taken to uphold it. This is a far cry from the clash of orders of the Oresteia, not only because meaningful synthesis is out of the question, but also, again, because it is so devastating a reduction. Even if we were to allow isolated moments of contentment, humor or respite from pain in a work, would that be enough to make a claim for compensation? It may be that we are approaching a time when only Schopenhauerian tragedy will be comprehensible, where any heroism resembling the tradition will be regarded as naive and humorless, where Apollo is incredible and Dionysos jaded. Perhaps this tendency may be traced to the increasing abstraction visible in Kleist and Melville, where instead of making an absolute identification with the state, the family or some other socio-ethical category, the hero identifies mainly with absoluteness itself. What makes Antigone greater than her individual self is now directed toward the intensification of self. Instead of "transcending out" one "transcends in." In Chekhov or Beckett, however, all that remains is the hunger for a transcendental identification. By Waiting for Godot and Endgame, the characters find themselves in a condition much closer to Schopenhauer's resignation. Hope and expectation—the will—are greeted with a cold eye, although they keep involuntarily asserting themselves.'

Reading Knausgaard, I found that an accident exaggerated an effect of the text presumably already intended. I'm given to understand that the first volume and subsequent volumes are to have something to do with the narrator Karl Ove's troubles with alcohol, and his father's. Signs of this already show up in the first part of the first volume, where young Karl Ove is particularly keen, whenever an opportunity to imbibe presents itself, to do so as efficiently and swiftly as possible, partly so that he might enjoy being a different person. This is entangled for him with his adolescent longings, so it makes sense when there is a point at which the narrator's recounting candidly indicates a gap in his awareness, or memory: he drank, then he doesn't know—didn't know, in the situation—what happened next, finding himself suddenly having had greater intimacy with a peer in a social setting. But in the samizdat copy I was reading at the time, some amount of the text that followed had been obliterated, as well, so that I was faced not only with the intended confusion but some unintended confusion when Karl Ove was suddenly caught up in the onset of his first love—for another girl. (I figured this wasn't right, so I located a true copy and got straight on what was missing.)

The principle seems good, though, that the gaps are meant to do work, or prepare for it to be done. The second part picks up with the narrator in adulthood (whether returning to the same point the book had initially been narrated from, or an earlier one, I'm not sure, and haven't checked), after the first part had been contrived to leave off with Karl Ove at about the end of adolescence just when waylaid by being witness to a completely unfathomed vulnerable side to his father—breaking off and picking up again, that is, as if for the adult narrator that had been about as far as the narration of the first part could be taken, before some problem of narrating intervened (and the situation of the narrated Karl Ove at the start of the second part is that of an early-career novelist who has for several years been frozen).

This continues, formally, something that was already a theme from the start: not just the obscurity of the narrator's life then, to the narrator now, but the obscurity of the narrator's life then, to the narrator then; an awareness of its opacity, most so in the opacity of the other lives in it to his.