"Children have a tendency either to depreciate or to exalt their parents, and to a good son his father is always the best of fathers, quite apart from any objective reason there may be for admiring him." (Proust)
I realize now that I must have been a bad son. Or if not precisely bad, then at least a disappointment, a source of confusion and sadness...
...
The Rampant, totally mystifying force of contradiction. I understand now that each fact is nullified by the next fact, that each thought engenders an equal and opposite thought. Impossible to say anything without reservation: he was good, or he was bad; he was this, or he was that. All of them are true. 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 others. Fragments. Or the anecdote as a form of knowledge.
Yes.
...
For the past two weeks, these lines from Maurice Blanchot echoing in my head: "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. To work my way back into life, and then, finally, to return to death.
Or else: the vanity of trying to say anything about anyone.
Paul Auster
The Invention of Solitude, 'Portrait of an Invisible Man'
Faber and Faber, 1982: London
ISBN 9780571154142
