Before I get to Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, I thought I’d share this bit of early Auster. Published in 1979 in a little volume of poetry called Facing the Music, this poem, might have been an out-take of a long-lost notebook of Samuel Beckett’s. Turns out that Auster is the editor of the recent Grove Centenary Edition (2006) of Samuel Beckett. Works out nicely for this month’s reading.
Like SB himself said, “more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it.”
In Memory of Myself (Paul Auster, 1979)
Simply to have stopped.
As if I could begin
where my voice has stopped, myself
the sound of a word
I cannot speak.
So much silence
to be brought to life
in this pensive flesh, the beating
drum of words
within, so many words
lost in the wide world
within me, and thereby to have known
that in spite of myself
I am here.
As if this were the world.
