Cassandra Lewis

Many writing programs boast of their ability to teach aspiring writers to “read like writers.” What they mean by this is: you’ll never enjoy anything you read ever again. Good writing programs focus on breaking everything down, deconstructing and analyzing everything to death-and beyond.

This is why I become ecstatic when I read a passage that moves me on an emotional and an intellectual level, levels that refuse to be broken down by that newly installed literary skeptic part of my brain.

My friend, Fabian, introduced me to Paul Auster’s writing when I lived in Brooklyn a few years ago. I read The New York Trilogy then and loved it. Just the other day, I picked it up again and guess what-I love the book even more now.

Here’s a passage from the first part of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, City of Glass:
To be inside that music, to be drawn into the circle of its repititions: perhaps that is a place where one could finally disappear.

But beggars and performers make up only a small part of the vagabond population. They are the aristocracy, the elite of the fallen. Far more numerous are those with nothing to do, with nowhere to go. Many are drunks-but that term does not do justice to the devestation they embody. Hulks of despair, clothed in rags, their faces bruised and bleeding, they shuffle through the streets as though in chains. Asleep in doorways, staggering insanely through traffic, collapsing on sidewalks-they seem to be everywhere the moment you look for them. Some will starve to death, others will die of exposure, still others will be beaten or burned or tortured.

For every soul lost in this particular hell, there are several others locked inside madness-unable to exit to the world that stands at the threshold of their bodies. Even though they seem to be there, they cannot be counted as present. The man, for example, who goes everywhere with a set of drumsticks, pounding the pavement with them in a reckless, nonsensical rhythm, stooped over awkwardly as he advances along the street, beating and beating away at the cement. Perhaps he thinks he is doing important work. Perhaps, if he did not do what he did, the city would fall apart. Perhaps the moon would spin out of its orbit and come crashing into the earth…

Now I understand why some writers type the work of their favorite authors.