The first segment of Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard's sprawling, six volume memoir, My Struggle, was recently published in English. Ruminating on a range of topics, he's particularly fascinated by "why Western culture has such ritualistic and social demand to cover up dead bodies." David Masciotra relays Knausgaard's answer:
Death, he argues, is the last remaining reminder of something beyond the domain of human intelligence. Religious experience is no longer powerful in Western Culture. Art is dehumanized to a point of lacking transcendent capabilities, and therefore death is the last part of life beyond the control of the intellect – outside the realm of technique. Death is the ultimate mystery of the mystery within life, but for the living, death is also a lesson in humility. As Knausgaard concludes, “For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives, but in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.”
The Dish 