Being alone in an empty flat felt like proof of becoming someone

Evidence

Until I started at the gymnas I had always woken to a house where mum and dad were already up and on their way to work with all that entailed, cigarette smoke, coffee drinking, listening to the radio, eating breakfast and car engines warming up outside in the dark. This was something else, and I loved it. I also loved walking the kilometre or so through the old residential area to school, it always filled me with thoughts I liked, such as that I was someone. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 131

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the memoir’s recurring theme of solitude as both freedom and the seed of the writer’s self. — connects to: Empty rooms feel dead until another living person fills them with character — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 416; Expanded social circles throw the individual back upon himself — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 699; the MOC “The Self That Stumbles: Ego, Pride, and the Recognition Economy”

Related

• Empty rooms feel dead until another living person fills them with character (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Expanded social circles throw the individual back upon himself #expands (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 699
• Empty rooms feel dead until another living person fills them with character #contradicts (0.70) — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 416