"One day there is life [...] And then, suddenly, it happens there is death."
El libro consta de dos partes bien definidas. La primera resulta un relado a veces desgarrador en el que Auster hijo reconstruye la vida de su padre recientemente muerto. Se da cuenta de inmediato de que la persona que fue su padre es una imagen creada por él mismo que, posiblemente, nada tiene que ver con la persona que realmente fue. Intentar conocer al otro es misión imposible. Tiene la sensación de que cada vez que habla de la personalidad de su padre podría reconstruir a una persona diferente.
"This is the body of X, not this is X. The syntax is entirely different. Now we are talking about two things instead of one, implying that the man continues to exist, but only as an idea, a cluster of images and memories in the minds of other people."
Auster desarrolla la idea de que, tal y como hiciera su padre a lo largo de toda su vida, una persona puede ocultarse por completo al resto del mundo de modo que nunca nadie podrá decir que lo conoce:
"The principle was to say as little as possible. If people never learned the truth about him, then they couldn't turn around and use it against him later. The lie was a way of buying protection. What people saw when he appeared before them, then, was not really him, but a person he had invented, an artificial creature he could manipulate in order to manipulate others. He himself remained invisible, a pupeteer working the strings of his alter-ego from a dark, solitary place behind the curtain."
"The rampant, totally mystifying force of contradiction. [...] At times I have the feeling that I am writing about three or four different men, each one distinct, each one a contradiction of all the others. Fragments. Or the anecdote as a form of knowledge."
La segunda parte resulta al principio confusa. Imágenes diversas, pensamientos aparentemente desconexos pero entrelazados con historias anteriores. Rescata de nuevo la imagen de "The locked room": el espíritu humano como la imagen de uno mismo encerrado en una habitación y la cita de Pascal: "La infelicidad del hombre reside en que no es capaz de estarse quieto dentro de la habitación".
"Memory as a place, as a building, as a sequence of columns, cornices, porticoes. The body inside the mind, as if we were moving around in there, going from one place to the next, and the sound of our footsteps as we walk, moving from one place to the next.
'One must consequently employ a large number of places,' writes Cicero, 'which must be well lighted, clearly set out in order, spaced out at moderate intervals; and images which are active, sharply defined, unusual, and which have the power of speedily encountering and penetrating the psyche... For the places are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the speaking like the reading.'
[...] Memory as a room, as a body, as a skull, as a skull that encloses the room in which a body sits. As in the image: 'a man sat alone in his room'.
'The power of memory is prodigious', observed Saint Augustine. 'It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can it be part of it, if it is not contained in it?'
Auster recupera hábilmente la trilogía neoyorkina en su reflexión acerca de la memoria:
"Sometimes it seems as though we are not going anywhere as we walk through the city, that we are only looking for a way to pass the time, and that it is only our fatigue that tells us where and when we should stop. But just as one step will inevitably lead to the next step, so it is that one thought inevitably follows from the previous thought, [...] so that what we are really doing when we walk through the city is thinking, and thinking in such a way that our thoughts compose a journey, and this journey is no more or less than the steps we have taken, so that, in the end, we might safely say that we have been on a journey, and even if we do not leave our room, it has been a journey, and we might safely say that we have been somewhere, even if we don't know where it is.
En referencia a la casa de Emily Dickinson alude al modo en que la razón construye el tejido de la realidad:
"For if words are a way of being in the world, he thought, then even if there were no world to enter, the world was already there, in that room, which meant it was the room that was present in the poems and not the reverse.
[...] which is to say: who seeks solitude seeks silence; who does not speak is alone; is alone, even unto death."
Según este razonamiento:
"Every book, is an image of solitude. [...] A man sits alone in a room and writes. Whether the book speaks of loneliness or companionship, it is necessarily a product of solitude."
"For no word can be written without first having been seen, [...] Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present. If a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he must be thinking not of himself, but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the power of memory. It is a way of living one's life so that nothing is ever lost.
[...] the sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history -which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once."
La constante imagen de la habitación en la que uno se aísla trae el cuadro de Van Gogh, "La habitación":
"For the room is not a representation of solitude, it is the substance of solitude itself."
Freud y Las Mil y una Noches en las que Sherezade salva la vida contando historias a través de las que ejemplifica lo que está sucediendo a ella y al reino en que vive:
"It is the simpliest of truths: a life belongs only to the person who lives it; life itself will claim the living; to live is to let live."
"Language is not truth. It is the way we exist in the world. Playing with words is merely to examine the way the mind functions, to mirror a particle of the world as the mind perceives it. In the same way, the world is not just the sum of the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other."
0 comentarios:
Post a Comment