Paul Auster 再び

花粉が終わらず、相変わらず苦しい季節が続いている。引き篭もりがちになる。ただ通り過ぎるのをじっと待っている。苛々してもしようがない。ポール・オースターでも読み直し、どこかに迷い込むのもよいかもしれない。

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from "Portrait of an Invisible Man"

The point is: his life was not centered around the place where he lived. His house was just one of many stopping places in a restless, unmoored existence, and this lack of center had the effect of turning him into a perpetual outsider, a tourist of his own life. You never had the feeling that he could be located.


It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never there.


The world was a distant place for him, I think, a place he was never truly able to enter, and out there in the distance, among all the sadows that flitted past him.


from "The Book of Memory"

Christmas Eve, 1979. His life no longer seemed to dwell in the present. Whenever he turned on his radio and listened to the news of the world, he would find himself imagining the words to be describing things that had happened long ago. Even as he stood in the present, he felt himself to be looking at it from the future, and this present-as-past was so antiquated that even the horrors of the day, which have filled him with outrage, seemed remote to him, as if the voice in the radio were reading from a chronicle of some lost civilization. Later, in a time of greater clarity, he would refer to this sensation as "nostalgia for the present."


It is a hermetic season, a long moment of inwardness. The outer world, tangible world of materials and bodies, has come to seem no more than an emanation of his mind. He feels himself sliding through events, hovering like a ghost aound his own presence, as if he were liveing somewhere to the side of himself － not really here, but not anywhere else either.


The room he lived in was a dream space, and its walls were like the skin of some second body around him, as if his own body had been transformed into a mind, a breathing instrument of pure thought. This was the womb, the belly of the whale, the original site of the imagination.


Yes, it is possible that we do not grow up, that even as we grow old, we remain in the children we always were. We remember ourselves as we were then, and we feel ourselves to be the same. We made ourselves into what we are now then, and we remain what we were, in spite of the years. We do not change for ourselves. Time makes us grow old, but we do not change.


The past, to repeat the words of Proust, is hidden in some material object. To wander about in the world, then, is also to wander about in ourselves. That is to say, the moment we step into the space of memory, we walk into the world.

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　　　　　　Paul Auster “Invention of Solitude” (Penguin Books, 1988) より