The Invention of Solitude

“In the presence of extraordinary reality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.”

Himmler: “I have made the decision to annihilate every Jewish child from the face of the earth.”

“You will note that where you would think should be the end of Jonah, there was his safety.”

The point is: his life was not centered around the place where he lived.

Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present.

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.

For the past few days, in fact, I have begun to feel that the story I am trying to tell is somehow incompatible with language, that the degree to which it resists language is an exact measure of how closely I have come to saying something important, and that when the moment arrives for me to say the one truly important thing (assuming it exists), I

Except for a brief moment when he was hired as an assistant in Thomas Edison’s laboratory (only to have the job taken away from him the next day because Edison learned he was a Jew), my father never worked for anyone but himself.

It is a way of living one’s life so that nothing is ever lost.

No sooner have I thought one thing than it evokes another thing, and then another thing, until there is an accumulation of detail so dense that I feel I am going to suffocate. Never before have I been so aware of the rift between thinking and writing.