The New York Trilogy

by Paul Auster

Try to imagine it, Mr. Auster. Nine years. An entire childhood spent in darkness, isolated from the world, with no human contact except an occasional beating.

He kept the records of his experiment there, and I think he finally realized that his work had been a failure. I’m not saying that he regretted anything he had done. But even taking it on his own terms, he knew he had failed. I think he reached some point of final disgust with himself that night and decided to burn his papers. But the fire got out of control, and much of the apartment burned.

“An insane letter. He called Peter a devil boy and said there would be a day of reckoning.”

As the memory of his past gradually came back to him, he was able to recall how he had spent many years on the floor of a darkened room, fed by a man who never spoke to him or let himself be seen. Not long after these disclosures, Kasper was murdered by an unknown man with a dagger in a public park.

He thought of the little coffin that held his son’s body and how he had seen it on the day of the funeral being lowered into the ground. That was isolation, he said to himself. That was silence. It did not help, perhaps, that his son’s name had also been Peter.

For if you do not consider the man before you to be human, there are few restraints of conscience on your behavior towards him.

This is the very last incident of prehistory in the Bible. After that, the Old Testament is exclusively a chronicle of the Hebrews. In other words, the Tower of Babel stands as the last image before the true beginning of the world.

As a boy he had spent many hours under the night sky trying to tally the clusters of pinprick lights with the shapes of bears, bulls, archers, and water carriers. But nothing had ever come of it, and he had felt stupid, as though there were a blind spot in the center of his brain.

“If you don’t like it, why do you go on reading?” “I don’t know.” The girl shrugged once again. “It passes the time, I guess. Anyway, it’s no big deal. It’s just a book.”

He looked bored enough to have been there all his life.

Don Quixote was conducting an experiment. He wanted to test the gullibility of his fellow men. Would it be possible, he wondered, to stand up before the world and with the utmost conviction spew out lies and nonsense? To say that windmills were knights, that a barber’s basin was a helmet, that puppets were real people? Would it be possible to persuade others to agree with what he said, even though they did not believe him? In other words, to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement?

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.

Quinn had always thought of himself as a man who liked to be alone. For the past five years, in fact, he had actively sought it. But it was only now, as his life continued in the alley, that he began to understand the true nature of solitude. He had nothing to fall back on anymore but himself. And of all the things he discovered during the days he was there, this was the one he did not doubt: that he was falling.

“Stillman jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge,” Auster said. “He committed suicide two and a half months ago.”

The case seems simple enough. White wants Blue to follow a man named Black and to keep an eye on him for as long as necessary.

But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.

In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.

Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

You get to a certain point in life, and then it’s too late to change.’”

Didn’t I know about the shootouts on Fifth Avenue? Hadn’t I heard of the Apaches? It was pointless to argue. In defense of my ignorance, I told him that I lived in another neighborhood.