Baumgartner

To live is to feel pain, he told himself, and to live in fear of pain is to refuse to live.” Excerpt From: Paul Auster. “Baumgartner.

the story turns out to be so astounding and so powerful that your jaw drops open and you feel that it has changed or enhanced or deepened your understanding of the world, does it matter if the story is true or not?

stopping to look at him sprawled out on the mattress, my brilliant, long-legged man with the rumpled hair and remarkable eyes, my comrade, my fuck-buddy, my wisecracking, true-blue companion for the long road ahead, and because I hated to leave him without saying good-bye, I would mist up the air above his body with half a dozen small blasts of my lily-of-the-valley eau de cologne so that a part of me would still be there with him when he opened his eyes.

I have become old, but because the days have passed so quickly, most of me still feels young,

Where are we? Where? Why, we’re here, of course, where we always are—each one of us locked in his or her here from the moment we’re born until the day we die.

Life is dangerous, Marion, and anything can happen to us at any moment. You know that, I know that, everyone knows that - and if they don't, well, they haven't ben paying attention, and if you don't pay attention, you're not fully alive.

And that is all I will ever ask of you, my newborn son, in the first hours of your long journey toward becoming a man who can think and act and take part in the world—only this and nothing else: to fight the good fight.

And so the conversation ends. Judith has turned him down, but at the same time she has offered him a little crumb, which is supposed to make him feel grateful, which he supposes he is, and yet, after settling for so little after hoping for so much, he understands that he has been reduced to the status of a mendicant, knocking on the back door of the palace and begging the royal scullery maid for some leftover scraps from the queen’s plate.

at some point in the coming years, the two books should be combined and reconfigured into a large, one-volume collected poems—a monument of singing pages that will overwhelm the silence of Anna’s grave.

why that tiny imp of a man is grinning at me from across the street with a microscopic red something in his buttonhole gleaming like a lit match in the dark.

No, that must not be allowed to happen, and when the end comes, at least may he be granted the dignity for his heart to stop while he is pushing out the one last sentence of his own, preferably the final words of a loud fuck-you adressed to the power-hungry madmen who rule the world.

She could have been there all along, he felt, but for some unknown, unarticulated reason, she had never lifted a finger to put her poems into circulation. It was the thing that had baffled him most about her, for in all other ways Anna was a person who stood up for herself and fought hard for what she believed in, and she knew damned well that her poems were good. Doubts, yes, despairing moments, yes, but what writer or artist doesn’t live in that shifting territory between confidence and self-contempt? The proof was in the fact that she had always shared her poems with him, not because he ever asked her but because she wanted to, either reading them out loud or handing him small sheafs of six or seven at once, and again and again he had responded to her new work by saying it was time to get off her ass and start publishing them, which was invariably followed by a diffident shrug from Anna, who sometimes added “You’re right” or “One of these days” or “We’ll see”, depending on her mood.

Las personas mueren. Mueren jóvenes, mueren viejas y mueren a los cincuenta y ocho. La echo de menos, eso es todo. Era la única persona a la que he querido, y ahora tengo que encontrar el modo de seguir viviendo sin ella.

La vida es peligrosa, Marion, y en cualquier momento nos puede pasar cualquier cosa. Eso lo sabes tú, lo sé yo, lo sabe todo el mundo, y quien no lo sepa, bueno, entonces es que no ha estado atento, y quien no pone atención no lleva una vida plena.