Portrait of an Invisible Man

Book: The Invention of Solitude

Story: Portrait of an Invisible Man (truncated version)

Author: Paul Auster

“…here it holds good that only he who works gets the bread, only he who was in anguish finds repose, only he who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved, only he who draws the knife get Issac….. He who will not work must take note of what is written about the maidens of Israel, For he gives birth to the wind, but he who is wiling to work gives birth to his own father.” (Kierkegaard)

 

Death takes a man’s body away from him. In life, a man and his body are synonymous; in death, there is the man and there is his body. We say, “This is the body of X” as if this body, which had once been the man himself, not something that represented him or belonged to him, but the very man called X, were suddenly of no importance. When a man walks into a room and you shake hands with him, you do not feel that you are shaking hands with his hand, or shaking hands with his body, you ar shaking hands with him. Death changes that. 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. As for the body, it is no more than flesh and bones, a heap of pure matter.

……

Most of these pictures did not tell me anything new, but they helped to fill in gaps, confirm impressions, offer proof where non had existed before. ……  For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than this surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required.

.…..

 His capacity for evasion was almost limitless. Because the domain of the other was unreal to him, his incursions into that domain were made with a part of himself he considered to be equally unreal, another self he had trained as an actor to represent him in the empty comedy of the world-at-large. This surrogate self was essentially a tease, a hyperactive child, a fabricator of tall tales, It could not take anything seriously.  

Because nothing mattered, He gave himself the freedom to do anything he wanted (sneaking into tennis clubs, pretending to be a restaurant critics in order to get a free meal), and the charm he exercised to make his conquests was precisely what made these conquests meaningless. With the vanity of a woman he hid the truth about his age, made up stories about his business dealings, talked about himself only obliquely – in the third person, as if about an acquaintance of his (“There’s a friend of mine who has this problem; what do you think he should do about it?...) Whenever a situation became too tight for him, whenever he felt pushed to be verge of having to reveal himself, he would wriggle out of it by telling a lie. Eventually, the lie came automatically and was indulged in for its own sake.  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 manipulated in order to manipulate others. He himself remained invisible, a puppeteer working the strings of his alter-ego from a dark, solitary place behind the curtain.

Solitary,  but not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was,  praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.

Talking to him was a trying experience. Either he would be absent, as he usually was, or he would assault you with a brittle jocularity, which was merely another form of absence. It was like trying to make yourself understood by a senile old man. You talked, and there would be no response, or a response that was inappropriate, showing that he hadn’t been following the drift of your words.  In recent years, whenever I spoke to him on the phone I would find myself saying more than I normally do, becoming aggressively talkative, chatting always in a futile attempt to hold his attention, to provoke a response. Afterwards, I would invariably feel foolish for having tried so hard.

He did not smoke, he did not drink. No hunger for sensual pleasures, no thirst for intellectual pleasures. Books bored him, and it was the rare movie or play that did not put him to sleep. ……

Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree. It is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known.  A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who say s nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, where all is hermetic an evasive, one can do no more than observe, But whether on can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely.

I do not wan to presume anything.

He never talked about himself, never seemed to know there was anything he could talk about. I was as though his inner life eluded even him.

He could not talk about it, and therefore he passed over it in silence.

If there is nothing, then, but silence, is it not presumptuous of me to speak? And yet: if there had been anything more than silence, would I have felt the need to speak in the first place?

My choice ar limited. I can remain silent, or else I can speak of things that cannot be verified. At the very least, I want to put down the facts. To offer them as straightforwardly as possible, and let them say whatever they have to say. But even the facts do not always tell the truth.

He was so implacably neutral on the surface, his behaviour was so flatly predictable, that everything he did came as a surprise. One could not believe there was such a man – who lacked feeling, who wanted so little of others. And if there was not such a man, that means there was another man, a man hidden inside the man who was not there, and the trick of it, then is to find him. On the condition that he is there to be found.

  To recognize, right from the start, that the essence of this project is failure.

No matter how negligent his care of it might have seemed from the outside, he believed in his system. Like a mad inventor protecting the secret of his perpetual motion machine, he would suffer no one to tamper with it.

……

Anger of this sort rarely came out of him – only when he felt himself cornered, impinged upon, crushed by the presences of others. Money questions sometimes triggered it off. Or else some minor detail: the shades of his house, a broken plate, a little nothing at all.

Nevertheless, this anger was inside him – I believe constantly. Like the house that was well ordered and yet falling apart from within, the man himself was calm, almost supernatural in his imperturbability, and yet prey to a roiling, unstoppable force of fury within.  All his life he strove to avoid a confrontation with his force,  nurturing a kind of automatic behaviour that would allow him the necessity of looking into himself when decisions had to be made; the cliché was always quick to come to his lips instead of words he had gone out and looked for.  All this tended to flatten him out as a personality. But at the same time, it was also what saved him, the thing that allowed him to live. To the extent that he was able to live.

Slowly, I am coming to understand the absurdity of the task I have set for myself. I have a sense of trying to go somewhere, as if I know what I wanted to say, but the farther I go the more certain I am that the path towards my object does not exist. I have to invent the road with each step, and this means that I can never be sure of where I am.  A feeling of moving around in circles, of perpetual back-tracking, of going off in many directions at once.  And even if I do manage to make some progress, I am not at all convinced that it will take me to where I think I am going. Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land.

He dreamed all his life of becoming a millionaire, of being the richest man in the world. It was not so much the money itself he wanted, but what it represented: not merely success in the eyes of the world, but a way of making himself untouchable.  Having money means more than being able to buy things: it means that the world need never affect you.  Money in the sense of protection, then, not pleasure.

He loved clever little tricks, pride himself on his ability to outsmart the world at its own game…….Permanent solutions never interested him. He went on patching and patching, a little piece here, a little piece there, never allowing his boat to sink, but never giving it a chance to float either.

The occasional flash of generosity. At those rare times when the world was not a threat to him, his motive for living seemed to be kindness. ……A patience that bordered on the superhuman. He was the only person I have ever known who could teach someone to drive without getting angry or crumpling in a fit of nerves. You could be careening straight towards a lamp post, and still he would not get excited.

Impenetrable, and because of that, at times almost serene.

……

One thing must be understood: I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it.”

To begin with death. The work my way back to life, and then finally, to return to death.

Or else: the vanity of trying to say anything about anyone.

……

At first I thought It would be a comfort to hold on to these things, that they would remind me of him and make me think of him as I went about my life. But Objects, it seems, are no more than objects. …….Btu all this is no more than an illusion of intimacy. I have already appropriated these things. He has vanished from them, has becomes invisible again. And sooner or later they will break down, fall apart, and have to be thrown away. I doubt that it will even seem to matter.