A Plea for Eros

isolated bits of experience remembered for reasons that are often difficult to articulate; and because they have no greater narrative in which they can be framed, they float. At the same time, they may have more purity than later memories, for that very reason. When dailiness enters memory, repetition fixes places in the mind, but it also burdens them with a wealth of experience that is often difficult to untangle. For example, I remember Longfellow School, where I attended grade school, very well. I can see its hallways and connect one to another. I can even see the bathroom outside my third-grade class. I remember it as gray. It may have been gray, but it could be that I colored it in memory. I have given the interior of that building a single color that is also emotional: gray. Although I was always excited to begin school in the fall (a season separated from the spring before by years of summer), and although I loved walking out to the school bus with my three sisters, all of us wearing the identical new dresses my mother had sewn for us, my memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, brings on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don’t know. I never would have said I didn’t like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don’t alter my memory of that place. There’s something unpleasant about saying that a gut response can be a lie, but I think it’s possible. Unlike the intricacy of the physical world, feelings are generally more crude than language—guilt, shame, being hurt by another person feel remarkably alike in the body. Reason tells me that my early experiences in that school were a complex mixture of pain, pleasure, and boredom, but whenever I drive past it or think about it, the building itself is wrapped in gloom.
    Many years later, I had a similar experience but in reverse. From 1978 through 1986, I was a graduate student at Columbia, but by 1981 I had met my future husband and moved first to SoHo, in downtown Manhattan, and then to Brooklyn. It is true that those first couple of years, when I was living near Columbia, I was very poor. It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I don’t even wish now that I had had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant
no.
After I left that neighborhood, however, I rarely returned to it. I saw my dissertation adviser three times in three years and then defended on a clear spring day in 1986. After that, I disappeared for good. Several years later, I returned, because my husband, Paul Auster, had been asked to give a talk at the Maison Française. Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn’t happy here. Then, after the reading, we walked past Butler Library. It was dark, but the light inside illuminated the windows. Students were reading and working, and those lit windows gave me a wonderful, weightless feeling. I understood for the first time how happy I had been there—in the library. Butler is a good library, one of the best. It has some handsome rooms, but its stacks are inhospitable and dark. One spring while I was a student, all the women were given whistles before they entered the stacks, because an exhibitionist had been prowling the badly lit corridors, and we were told to pucker up and blow if there was any trouble. Again, I don’t fully understand my emotional response to that library or trust it. It was the site of a series of intellectual revelations that were crucial to me, not just as a student but as a human being. I read Sigmund Freud in that library and Émile Ben-veniste and Roman Jakobson and Mikhail Bakhtin and was forever changed by them, but I also sweated out bad papers and was bored and troubled and irritated there. My mind wandered from the work at hand and strayed to food or clothes I couldn’t afford or to the attractive arms and shoulders of some young man sitting at the far end of the table. So what does it mean that the sight of Butler Library turned me into a quivering heap of sentimental mush? It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified—that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure,