City of glass

He wanted to record things he had seen that day...
... before he forgot them.
Today, as never before: the tramps, shopping-bag ladies, drifters and drunks...
... the merely destitute to the wretchedly broken. They are everywhere.
Some beg with a semblance of pride: soon I will be back with the rest of you.
Other have given up hope.
Still others try to work for money.
Others have real talent.
The man improvised tiny variations, enclosed in his own universe.
It went on and on. The longer I listened, the harder I found it to leave.
To be inside that music: perhaps that is a place where one could finally disappear.
Far more numerous are those with nothing to do...
... hulks of despair, clothed in rags, faces bruised, bleeding.
They shuffle through the streets as though in chains.
They seem to be everywhere the moment you look for them.
There are others locked inside madness -
[TAKA TAKA TAKA T]
- unable to exit the world that stands at the threshold of their bodies.
[AKA TAKA TAKA TAK]
Perhaps if he stopped drumming, the city would fall apart.
There are those forever on the move, as if it mattered where they were.
Baudelaire: Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas.
"It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not."
Or, more bluntly: wherever I am not is the place where I am myself.


in City of glass, Paul Auster, Adaptation by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli