In the Café of Lost Youth (New York Review Books Classics)

by Patrick Modiano

I’ve always believed that certain places are like magnets and draw you towards them should you happen to walk within their radius. And this occurs imperceptibly, without you even suspecting. All it takes is a sloping street, a sunny sidewalk, or maybe a shady one. Or perhaps a downpour. And this leads you straight there, to the exact spot you’re meant to wash up.

For me, autumn has never been a sad season. The dying leaves and the days that grow shorter and shorter have never evoked the end of something for me but instead brought with them anticipation for the future.

That’s the advantage of being twenty years older than someone: They don’t know your past. And even if they ask you a couple of distracted questions about what your life has been up until that point, you can make it up completely. A new life. They’re not going to go and check. As you tell of this imaginary life, great breaths of fresh air rush across a closed room in which you have been unable to breathe for a long time. A window abruptly opens, the shutters bang in the breeze. You have, once again, a future before you.

We never grow up. As the years go by, many people and many things end up seeming so humorous and so pathetic that all you can do is try to look at them through the eyes of a child.

Well, sure, I understood. In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.

Later I revisited that same intoxication every time I broke off all ties with someone. I was never really myself when I wasn’t running away. My only happy memories are memories of flight and escape.

Our having met, when I think about it now, seems like the meeting of two people who were completely without moorings in life. I think that we were both alone in the world.