Report from the Interior by Auster Paul

Author:Auster, Paul [Auster, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2013-11-18T23:00:00+00:00

TIME CAPSULE

You thought you had left no traces. All the stories and poems you wrote in your boyhood and adolescence have vanished, no more than a few photographs exist of you from your early childhood to your mid-thirties, nearly everything you did and said and thought when you were young has been forgotten, and even if there are many things that you remember, there are more, a thousand times more, that you do not. The letter written to you by Otto Graham when you were turning eight has disappeared. The postcard sent to you by Stan Musial has disappeared. The baseball trophy given to you when you were ten has disappeared. No drawings, no examples of your early handwriting, no class pictures from grade school, no report cards, no summer-camp pictures, no home movies, no team pictures, no letters from friends, parents, or relatives. For a person born in the mid-twentieth century, the era of the inexpensive camera, the postwar boom days when every middle-class American family was gripped by shutterbug fever, your life is the least documented of anyone you have ever known. How could so much have been lost? From the age of five to seventeen, you lived in just two houses with your family, and most of this childhood material was still intact, but after your parents divorced, there were no more fixed addresses. From the age of eighteen until you were in your early thirties, you moved often and traveled light, parking yourself in twelve different places for six months or longer, not to mention innumerable other places for shorter periods of two weeks to four months, and because you were unsettled and often cramped in those places, you left all relics from your past with your mother, your chronically restless mother, who lived with her second husband in half a dozen New Jersey apartments and houses from the mid-sixties to the early seventies, and then, after relocating to southern California, moved every eighteen months in a perpetual buy-sell frenzy for the next decade and a half, purchasing condominiums in order to fix them up and sell at a robust profit (her interior decorating skills were impressive), and with all those comings and goings, all those cartons packed and unpacked over the years, things were inevitably ignored or forgotten, and bit by bit nearly every trace of your early existence was wiped out. You wish now that you had kept a diary, a continuous record of your thoughts, your movements through the world, your conversations with others, your response to books, films, and paintings, your comments on people met and places seen, but you never developed the habit of writing about yourself. You tried to start a journal when you were eighteen, but you stopped after just two days, feeling uncomfortable, self-conscious, confused about the purpose of the undertaking. Until then, you had always considered the act of writing to be a gesture that moved from the inside to the outside, a reaching out toward an other.

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