The Invention of Solitude

set out in order, spaced out at moderate intervals; and images which are active, sharply defined, unusual, and which have the power of speedily encountering and penetrating the psyche…. For the places are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the ar rangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the speaking like the reading. ”

    He returned from Paris ten days ago. He had gone there on a work visit, and it was the first time he had been abroad in more than five years. The business of travelling, of continual conversation, of too much drinking with old friends, of being away from his little son for so long, had finally worn him out. With a few days to spare at the end of his trip, he decided to go to Amsterdam, a city he had never been to before. He thought: the paintings. But once there, it was a thing he had not planned on doing that made the greatest impression on him. For no particular reason (idly looking through a guide book he found in his hotel room) he decided to go to Anne Frank ’ s house, which has been preserved as a museum. It was a Sunday morning, gray with rain, and the streets along the canal were deserted. He climbed the steep and narrow staircase inside the house and entered the secret annex. As he stood in Anne Frank ’ s room, the room in which the diary was written, now bare, with the faded pictures of Hollywood movie stars she had collected still pasted to the walls, he suddenly found himself crying. Not sobbing, as might happen in response to a deep inner pain, but crying without sound, the tears streaming down his cheeks, as if purely in re sponse to the world. It was at that moment, he later realized, that The Book of Memory began. As in the phrase: “ she wrote her diary in this room. ”
    From the window of that room, facing out on the backyard, you can see the rear windows of a house in which Descartes once lived. There are children ’ s swings in the yard now, toys scattered in the grass, pretty little flowers. As he looked out the window that day, he wondered if the children those toys belonged to had any idea of what had happened thirty-five years earlier in the spot where he was standing. And if they did, what it would be like to grow up in the shadow of Anne Frank ’ s room.
    To repeat Pascal: “ All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room. ” At roughly the same time these words entered the Pensees, Descartes wrote to a friend in France from his room in that house in Amsterdam. “ Is there any country, ” he asked with exuberance, “ in which one can enjoy freedom as enormously as one does here? ” Everything, in some sense, can be read as a gloss on everything else. To imagine Anne Frank, for example, had she lived on after the war, reading Descartes ’ Meditations as a university student in Amsterdam. To imagine a solitude so crushing, so unconsolable, that one stops breathing for hundreds of years.
     
    He notes, with a certain fascination, that Anne Frank ’ s birthday is the same as his son ’ s. June twelfth. Under the sign of Gemini. An image of the twins. A world in which everything is double, in which the same thing always happens twice.
    Memory: the space in which a thing happens for the second time.

 

The Book of Memory. Book Two.
    Israel Lichtenstein ’ s Last Testament. Warsaw; July 31, 1942.
    “ With zeal and zest I threw mys elf into the work to help assem ble archive materials. I was entrusted to be the custodian. I hid the material. Besides me, no one knew. I confided only in my friend Hersh Wasser, my supervisor It is well hidden. P lease God that it be preserved. That will be the finest and best we achieved in the present gruesome time …. I know that we will not endure. To sur vive and remain alive after such horrible murders and massacres is impossible. Therefore I write this testament of mine. Perhaps I am not worthy of being remembered, but just for my grit in working with the Society Oneg Shabbat and for being the most endangered because I hid the entire material. It would be a small thing to give my own head. I risk the head of my dear wife Gele Seckstein and my treasure, my little daughter, Margalit I don ’ t want any grati tude, any monument, any praise. I want only a remembrance, so that my family, brother and sister abroad, may know what has become of my remains …. I want my wife to be remembered. Gele Seckstein, artist,