The Invention of Solitude

by Paul Auster

There is nothing here to welcome him, no promise of a soma holiday to woo him into oblivion.

When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at his son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father.

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

Memory: the space in which a thing happens for the second time.