The Invention of Solitude

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

Written language absolves one of the need to remember much of the world, for the memories are stored in the words.

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.

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

Every book is an image of solitude.

The moment of illumination that burns across the sky of solitude.

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

It was negligence that governed him, not memory, and even though he went on living in that house all those years, he lived in it as a stranger might have.

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