The Invention of Solitude

The two friends sat next to a boy from Harlem, and A. remembers the pleasant ease of the conversa tion among the three of them during the course of the game.
    He returned to the Polo Grounds only once that season, and that was for a holiday doubleheader (Memorial Day: day of memory, day of the dead) against the Dodgers: more than fifty thousand people in the stands, resplendent sun, and an afternoon of crazy events on the field: a triple play, inside-the-park homeruns, double steals. He was with the same friend that day, and they sat in a re mote corner of the stadium, unlike the good seats they had man aged to sneak into for the earlier game. At one point they left their places to go to the hot dog stand, and there, just several rows down the concrete steps was the same boy they had met in April, this time sitting beside his mother. They all recognized each other and gave warm greetings, each amazed at the coincidence of meeting again. And make no mistake: the odds against this meeting were astro nomical. Like the two friends, A. and D., the boy now sitting with his mother had not been to another game since that wet day in April.
     
    Memory as a room, as a body, as a skull, as a skull that encloses the room in which a body sits. As in the image: “ a man sat alone in his room. ”
    “ The power of memory is prodigious, ” observed Saint Augus tine. “ It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can it be part of it, if it is not contained in it? ”

The Book of Memory. Book Three.
    It was in Paris, in 1965, that he first experienced the infinite possibilities of a limited space. Through a chance encounter with a stranger in a cafe, he was introduced to S. A. was just eighteen at the time, in the summer between high school and college, and he had never been to Paris before. These are his earliest memories of that city, where so much of his life would later be spent, and they are inescapably bound up with the idea of a room.
    Place Pinel in the thirteenth arrondissement, where S. lived, was a working class neighborhood, and even then one of the last vestiges of the old Paris—the Paris one still talks about but which is no longer there. S. lived in a space so small that at first it seemed to defy you, to resist being entered. The presence of one person crowded the room, two people choked it. It was impossible to move inside it without contracting your body to its smallest dimensions, without contracting your mind to some infinitely small point within itself. Only then could you begin to breathe, to feel the room expand, and to watch your mind explore the excessive, unfathomable reaches of that space. For there was an entire universe in that room, a miniature cosmology that contained all that is most vast, most distant, most unknowable. It was a shrine, hardly bigger than a body, in praise of all that exists beyond the body: the representation of one man ’ s inner world, even to the slightest detail. S. had literally managed to surround himself with the things that were inside him. The room he lived in was a dream space, and its walls were like the skin of some second body around him, as if his own body had been transformed into a mind, a breathing instrument of pure thought. This was the womb, the belly of the whale, the original site of the imagination. By placing himself in that darkness, S. had invented a way of dreaming with open eyes.
    A former student of Vincent D ’ Indy ’ s, S. had once been considered a highly promising young composer. For more than twenty years, however, none of his pieces had been performed in public. Naive in all things, but most especially in politics, he had made the mistake of allowing two of his larger orchestral works to be played in Paris during the war— Symphonie de Feu and Hom mage à Jules Verne, each requiring more than one hundred-thirty musicians. That was in 1943, and the Nazi occupation was still at full strength. When the war ended, people concluded that S. had been a collaborator, and although nothing could have been farther from the truth, he was blackballed by the French music world—by innuendo and silent consent, never by direct