Collected Prose

look at my old companion in a new way. I am still in the process of adjustment, but whenever I look at one of these paintings now (there are two of them hanging on my living room wall), I have trouble thinking of my typewriter as an it . Slowly but surely, the it has turned into a him .
    *

    We have been together for more than a quarter of a century now. Everywhere I have gone, the typewriter has gone with me. We have lived in Manhattan, in upstate New York, and in Brooklyn. We have traveled together to California and to Maine, to Minnesota and to Massachusetts, to Vermont and to France. In that time, I have written with hundreds of pencils and pens. I have owned several cars, several refrigerators, and have occupied several apartments and houses. I have worn out dozens of pairs of shoes, have given up on scores of sweaters and jackets, have lost or abandoned watches, alarm clocks, and umbrellas. Everything breaks, everything wears out, everything loses its purpose in the end, but the typewriter is still with me. It is the only object I own today that I owned twenty-six years ago. In another few months, it will have been with me for exactly half my life.
    *

    Battered and obsolete, a relic from an age that is quickly passing from memory, the damn thing has never given out on me. Even as I recall the nine thousand four hundred days we have spent together, it is sitting in front of me now, stuttering forth its old familiar music. We are in Connecticut for the weekend. It is summer, and the morning outside the window is hot and green and beautiful. The typewriter is on the kitchen table, and my hands are on the typewriter. Letter by letter, I have watched it write these words.

    July 2, 2000

NORTHERN LIGHTS

Pages for Kafka

    on the fiftieth anniversary of his death

    He wanders toward the promised land. That is to say: he moves from one place to another, and dreams continually of stopping. And because this desire to stop is what haunts him, is what counts most for him, he does not stop. He wanders. That is to say: without the slightest hope of ever going anywhere.
    He is never going anywhere. And yet he is always going. Invisible to himself, he gives himself up to the drift of his own body, as if he could follow the trail of what refuses to lead him. And by the blindness of the way he has chosen, against himself, in spite of himself, with its veerings, detours, and circlings back, his step, always one step in front of nowhere, invents the road he has taken. It is his road, and his alone. And yet on this road he is never free. For all he has left behind still anchors him to his starting place, makes him regret ever having taken the first step, robs him of all assurance in the rightness of departure. And the farther he travels from his starting place, the greater his doubt grows. His doubt goes with him, like breath, like his breathing between each step — fitful, oppressive — so that no true rhythm, no one pace, can be held. And the farther his doubt goes with him, the nearer he feels to the source of that doubt, so that in the end it is the sheer distance between him and what he has left behind that allows him to see what is behind him: what he is not and might have been. But this thought brings him neither solace nor hope. For the fact remains that he has left all this behind, and in all these things, now consigned to absence, to the longing born of absence, he might once have found himself, fulfilled himself, by following the one law given to him, to remain, and which he now transgresses, by leaving.
    All this conspires against him, so that at each moment, even as he continues on his way, he feels he must turn his eyes from the distance that lies before him, like a lure, to the movement of his feet, appearing and disappearing below him, to the road itself, its dust, the stones that clutter its way, the sound of his feet clattering upon them, and he obeys this feeling, as though it were a penance, and he, who would have married the distance before him, becomes, against himself, in spite of himself, the intimate of all that is near. Whatever he can touch, he lingers over, examines, describes with a patience that at each moment exhausts him, overwhelms him, so that even as he goes on, he calls this going into question, and questions each step he is about to take. He who lives for an encounter with the unseen becomes the instrument of the seen: he who would quarry the earth becomes the spokesman of its surfaces, the