I arrived late to Paul Auster, but I did so thanks to that book that has the most beautiful title in the world, The Invention of Solitude. A book that begins like this: “One day there is life. For example, a man in excellent health, not even old, without any previous illness. Everything is as it was, as it always will be. He spends day after day, minding his own business and dreaming of the life that lies ahead of him. And then, suddenly, death appears.” In recent times, since the news of Auster's cancer became known, I often returned to these lines and wished that they were not premonitory, that I did not have to return to them to write an article – this one, for example – that began like this, certifying the death of that author who gave me so many clues about the most beautiful job in the world, writing.
The Invention of Solitude was the first book of his that I read. Later, for years, I fantasized about the idea of meeting Auster to tell him, although the cliché overwhelms and embarrasses me, that his stories changed my life. Just as stumbling upon Cathedral, Raymond Carver's story, made me seriously rethink what it meant to see, it was in a scene from the film Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang and whose script Auster signed, that I understood the abysmal difference that exists between seeing and look. The plot of Smoke revolves around a humble Brooklyn tobacco shop whose owner, Auggie Wren, is played by actor Harvey Keitel. Every day at the same time Auggie takes out his camera, places it on a tripod, and points it at the opposite corner of the street intersection to take a photo. He has done it for twelve years, so that he has more than 4,000 photos and, already arranged in albums, he decides to show them to a friend. At first, he turns the pages slowly. However, he soon becomes exasperated. They are all the same, he complains, to which Auggie – and here the magic is done – replies: “You will never understand if you don't slow down.” And it is that stopping, going slower, that makes astonishment possible and, therefore, that is where writing arises.
But the reasons behind writing often seem opaque to us. Not so much Auster who, in Why Write, included in Experiments with Truth, lists some situations with no apparent connection between them - except that they are based on chance, on the inexplicable - that try to point in that direction. In one of those situations he recalls an anecdote from his own life. At fourteen, Auster left for summer camp. One day, while hiking with his classmates, an electrical storm broke out in the middle of the forest and the monitors asked the children to run and take shelter in a clearing. To do this they had to crawl in single file under a barbed wire fence. Just as the boy in front of Auster was bending down, lightning struck the wire and he died instantly. Not realizing that he was dead, Auster carried him as best he could to the clearing and tried in vain to wake him up. But nothing could be done now. It was then, faced with the certainty that it could have been him, when he became aware of the randomness and chance of existence. From that moment on, becoming an expert in the language of chance and coincidence, he did not wake up a day without thanking that force that sews with invisible thread everything that we try to give meaning.
Perhaps the reasons for writing cannot be coded, but I know that if I had fulfilled that old wish of meeting Paul Auster I would have had to tell him that the impulse that moves me when it comes to writing comes from that nondescript corner of Brookyln where apparently nothing happens. Or, perhaps, the beauty of the most beautiful title in the world. Or that that impulse, that desire, lurks hidden in the mystery that allows us to escape the lightning. There is an unintelligible order of life and writing means going after it. For that, thank you so many times, Paul Auster.
Laura Ferrero is a writer. Her last published work is the novel Los astronautas (Alfaguara, 2023)
