Uit de leeszaal (13)

‘During the war, M.’s father had hidden from the Nazis for several months in a Paris chambre de bonne. Eventually, he managed to escape, made his way to America, and began a new life. Years passed, more than twenty years. M. had been born, had grown up, and was now going off to study in Paris. Once there, he spent several difficult weeks looking for a place to live. Just when he was about to give up in despair, he found a small chambre de bonne. Immediately upon moving in, he wrote a letter to his father to tell hem the good news. A week or so later he received a reply: your adress, wrote M.’s father, that is the same building I hid out in during the war. He then went on to describe the details of the room. It turned out to be the same room his son had rented.

It begins, therefore, with this room. And then it begins with that room. And beyond that there is the father, there is the son, and there is the war. To speak of fear, and to remember that the man who hid in that little room was a Jew. To note as well: that the city was Paris, a place A. had just returned from (December fifteenth), and that for a whole year he once lived in a Paris chambre the bonne – where he wrote his first book of poems, and where his own father, on his only trip to Europe, once came to see him. To remember his father’s death. And beyond that, to understand – this most important of all – that M’s story has no meaning.
Nevertheless, this is where it begins. The first word appears only at a moment when nothing can be explained anymore, at some instant of experience that defies all sense. To be reduced to saying nothing. Or else, to say to himself: this is what haunts me. And then to realize, almost in the same breath, that this is what he haunts.

He lays out a blank sheet of paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. Possible epigraph for The Book of Memory.
Then he opens a book by Wallace Stevens (Opus Posthumous) and copies out the following sentence.
“In the presence of extraordinary reality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.”‘
[Paul Auster, The invention of solitude, p. 80-81]