There's a good passage in A Death in the Family which explains that when you are grown up (i.e no longer a child , no longer striving with wonder, activity and boredom), you have the measure of things - the framework in which your life exists, and "that is when time begins to pick up speed" and begins racing through our lives - "before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty ..." The consequence is, as he says when he sees his father both from the perspective of the child he was and the adult now older than his father at that time:
"...on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.
Knausgaard, Karl Ove (2012-03-01). A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1 (My Struggle 1) (p. 10). Random House. Kindle Edition.
The image of time blowing these rock like chunks of meaning is a strange one, located in the fact that the father he is/was observing is wielding a sledgehammer to break rocks and widen their vegetable garden. Shades of Ozymandias, or that riddle in the Hobbit. How can something so insubstantial and ethereal break so much apart.
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