The year was 2020, and the place was New York, and our depressed protagonist of that moment was me. Like everybody else, I was trying to find ways to stay sane. Taking long walks through the city. Watching Love Is Blind and Tiger King and Ozark in an apartment with my girlfriend where we’d just wiped down all the groceries with Clorox. Getting on several anti-depressants. It’s hard to remember what was March and what was April and what was May of that year.
One day I was being sent to work from home, the next, Rudy Gobert was rubbing a microphone, and suddenly the world was gone, and we all fell into a Randolph Carter half-slumber.
And then there was Paul Auster. The writer whose words woke me up.
I’d skimmed City of Glass in high school, and by skimmed, I mean I mostly spark-noted it. But – I think it was an interview with Alejandro Zambra (a fellow Auster disciple) – who turned me back onto The New York Trilogy. I read the following passage, and not only did I feel seen – I felt like through this man’s words – seeing was possible.
“Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.”
And that, in a nutshell, was the feeling of reading Auster. It read like movement. And that movement took you to a place of aimlessness – of nowheresville – but through that wandering, you could be found.
Through the rest of that pandemic year, I devoured every Auster book I could find. The New York Trilogy – the novellas that put him on the map in the mid 1980s – inverted detective tropes to comment on the aimless forever-quest of finding purpose in one’s life. His second novel, In the Country of Last Things, follows a girl’s dark odyssey into a nameless city where poverty and struggle rule a contemporary shadow-realm; a place familiar and petrifying; culminating in a quiet and contemplative synthesis on the importance of human connection. Later novels like The Brooklyn Follies or 4, 3, 2, 1 tackled similar themes through broken-glass lenses: tackling postmodernism without ever feeling pretentious or missing a character-driven style that so many “weighty” novels tend to do. They were always human. And that humanity was always a window through which the intellectualism could be personified and understood.
In the novel Mr. Vertigo – an epic story about a boy who is quite literally taught to fly by a sort-of-abusive, sort-of-loving, magical realist Jew named Master Yehudi – there’s a quote that speaks to all of Auster’s oeuvre.
“Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air… You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.”
Reading Auster is hovering. It’s letting your mind fall limp and letting the words wash over you – and then just as the strangeness of his plots and the uniquity of his worlds are what you’re considering – you return to the self. You return to the characters. And that’s when everything starts to fly.
I can’t purport to know much about Auster the man besides what I’ve read. He lost a son and a granddaughter two years ago in one of the saddest and most awful pieces of news I’ve ever seen. He was raised in New Jersey but relocated to Brooklyn, becoming a fixture of the literary scene therein. He and Don DeLillo dedicated books to one another – a platonic power couple if there ever was one. By all accounts, he was a dedicated husband to his wife Siri; a loving father to his surviving daughter Sophie; and a righteous baseball fan.
But I did not know Paul Auster the human. I know Paul Auster the word-slinger. And by the year 2021, those words had me awake and inspired and a long way away from the mire of thoughtlessness that the time period trapped me in. Great writing makes you feel like you’re nowhere and everywhere. Like you’re hovering off the ground and maybe expanding your own fucked-up brain, because the writer is allowing you to look inside of it.
In his wacky, self-referential, memory-mystery, Travels in the Scriptorium, Auster’s protagonist asks: “Would it not be better to learn the truth once and for all instead of living in a place of perpetual uncertainty?” Before later in the book, remarking, “The paradox is that we, the figments of another mind, will outlive the mind that made us, for once we are thrown into the world, we continue to exist forever, and our stories go on being told, even after we are dead.”
That’s Auster. Asking for a human truth but realizing that truth is only what you make of it. And what you make of it is usually a collection of stories postulated by a collection of significant people around you, who let loose your memory onto the world through their eyes – long before and long after you are gone.
He was a one-of-a-kind writer. The kind of writer who has the luxury of his stories outliving him until we inevitably fall into whatever shadow-future he predicted in Country of Last Things.
But until then, I’ll just be thankful that someone was able to wake me up. Because regardless of the man himself’s passing, when you read Paul Auster, you are awake and you are fucking living.