And yet my mom’s boyfriend didn’t say that he saw evil in the corner. He said that he saw the Devil. To matter to us, abstract forces have to become concrete. At that point, they risk becoming hackneyed, unimpressive, absurd, even silly. “What was hidden in the depths would often appear so flat when brought to the surface,” an artist named Tove thinks in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel “The Third Realm.” “The meaning would be squashed if the symbols were too familiar.” Tove wants to depict the intensity of having a body—a violent, irresistible reality that breaks down the boundaries between living things. But she can’t do it—in fact, she laments that her drawings look like New Yorker cartoons. This doesn’t mean that the intensity she recognizes doesn’t exist, only that she’s failing to properly understand or represent it. It could be that some of the forces that shape our lives will always resist being represented. They may be too big or strange to fit into our heads.