The Invention of Solitude

confrontation. The only sign that any of his colleagues still remembered him was the annual Christmas card he received from Nadia Boulanger.
    A stammerer, a child-man with a weakness for red wine, he was so lacking in guile, so ignorant of the world ’ s malice, that he could not even begin to defend himself against his anonymous accusers. He simply withdrew, hiding behind a mask of eccentricity. He appointed himself an Orthodox priest (he was Russian), grew a long beard, dressed in a black cassock, and changed his name to the Ab baye de la Tour du Calame , all the while continuing—fitfully, be tween bouts of stupor—with the work of his life: a piece for three orchestras and four choruses that would take twelve days to perform. In his misery, in the totally abject conditions of his life, he would turn to A. and observe, stuttering helplessly, his gray eyes gleaming, “ Everything is miraculous. There has never been an age more wonderful than this one. ”
    The sun did not penetrate his room on the Place Pinel. He had covered his window with heavy black cloth, and what little light there was came from a few strategically placed and faintly glowing lamps. The room was hardly bigger than a second class train com partment, and it had more or less the same shape: narrow, high- ceilinged, with a single window at the far end. S. had cluttered this tiny place with a multitude of objects, the debris of an entire life time: books, photographs, manuscripts, private totems  — every thing that was of any significance to him. Shelves, densely packed with this accumulation, climbed up to the ceiling along each wall, each one sagging, tipping slightly inward, as if the slightest distur bance would loosen the structure and send the whole mass of things falling in on him. S. lived, worked, ate, and slept in his bed. Im mediately to the left of him, fit snugly into the wall, was a set of small, cubbied shelves, which seemed to hold all he needed to get through the day: pens, pencils, ink, music paper, cigarette holder, radio, penknife, bottles of wine, bread, books, magnifying glass. To his right was a metal stand with a tray fastened to the top of it, which he could swing in and out, over the bed and away from it, and which he used as both his work table and his eating table. This was life as Crusoe would have lived it: shipwreck in the heart of the city. For there was nothing S. had not thought of. In his penury, he had managed to provide for himself more efficiently than many millionaires do. The evidence notwithstanding, he was a realist, even in his eccentricity. He had examined himself thoroughly enough to know what was necessary for his own survival, and he accepted these quirks as the conditions of his life. There was nothing in his attitude that was either faint-hearted or pious, nothing to suggest a hermit ’ s renunciation. He embraced his condition with passion and joyful enthusiasm, and as A. looks back on it now, he realizes that he has never known anyone who laughed so hard and so often.
    The giant composition, on which S. had spent the last fifteen years, was nowhere near completion. S. referred to it as his “ work in progress, ” consciously echoing Joyce, whom he greatly ad mired, or else as the Dodecalogue, which he would describe as the- work-to-be-done-that-is-done-in-the-process-of-doing-it. It was unlikely that he ever imagined he would finish the piece. He seemed to accept the inevitability of his failure almost as a theological premise, and what for another man might have led to an impasse of despair was for him a source of boundless, quixotic hope. At some anterior moment, perhaps at his very darkest moment, he had made the equation between his life and his work, and now he was no longer able to distinguish between the two. Every idea fed into his work; the idea of his work gave purpose to his life. To have con ceived of something within the realm of possibility—a work that could have been finished, and therefore detached from himself— would have vitiated the enterprise. The point was to fall short, but to do so only in attempting the most outlandish thing he could conjure for himself. The end result, paradoxically, was humility, a way of gaging his own insignificance in relation to God. For only in the mind of God were such dreams as S. ’ s possible. But by dreaming in the way he did, S. had found a way of participating in all that was beyond him, of drawing himself several inches closer to