# The Reenchanted World ![rw-book-cover](https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/CUT-12.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[Karl Ove Knausgaard]] - Full Title: The Reenchanted World - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: In "The Reenchanted World," Karl Ove Knausgaard explores his complex relationship with technology and nature. He reflects on how modern life has transformed our perception, making us feel disconnected from the physical world. Ultimately, he seeks to reconnect with the materiality of existence and understand the deeper connections between life, technology, and nature. - URL: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/06/the-reenchanted-world-karl-ove-knausgaard-digital-age/ ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > To understand a man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty, Napoleon is supposed to have said. The quotation is probably apocryphal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. For me, it is this world by the river that counts. When I sit down to write a novel, the natural time for it to take place in is the Eighties, as though that era embodied the world’s true form, its essence, and everything that came later were a kind of deviation. Even though I google various topics as I’m writing, the characters in the novel don’t google anything; it never occurs to them. The same is true when I dream. Cell phones and the internet never appear in my dreams, which are populated mostly by the people I was surrounded by forty years ago. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k3zg9tdmtmvqt9d2c1b4zcxv)) > Forty years on, the technology in the gray box is everywhere, shaping my life in every way, which is strange in itself, but perhaps stranger is the fact that I have never cared about it, just taken it for granted and seamlessly incorporated it into my life. Not once in those forty years have I turned my attention to technology and tried to understand it, how it works in itself, how it works in me. It’s as if I had moved to a foreign country and not bothered to learn its language, as if I am content with not understanding what is happening around me and just settling for my own little world. This lately feels like serious neglect. To keep somewhat informed about the political situation in the world is a duty, something one has no right to turn away from. Shouldn’t something similar apply to technology, given the immensity of its influence? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k3zgn5wjttffj2ey43rf72js))