The Invention of Solitude

In my solitude you haunt me / With reveries of days gone by. / In my solitude you taunt me / With memories that never die

To imagine a solitude so crushing, so unconsolable, that one stops breathing for hundreds of years.

Perhaps Paul Auster’s rich works already prefigure what certain historians foresee as the religion of the future: Christian-Buddhism, that is, a concern with personal salvation linked to an acute awareness of uncertainty and the void.

A voice that speaks, a woman’s voice that speaks, a voice that speaks stories of life and death, has the power to give life.

no—I will not give up nothingness father—I feel nothingness invade me

“All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room.”

Is it true that one must dive to the depths of the sea and save one’s father to become a real boy?

“In this most Christian of worlds / All poets are Jews.”

At his bravest moments, he embraces meaninglessness as the first principle, and then he understands that his obligation is to see what is in front of him (even though it is also inside him) and to say what he sees.