The Invention of Solitude

once, when a visitor was slow to leave his room, he showed him the door and said, with a finger raised in warning, “ I am the Lord God. ”
    In recent years, there has been renewed speculation about Holderlin ’ s life in that room. One man contends that Holderlin ’ s madness was feigned, and that in response to the stultifying political reaction that overwhelmed Germany following the French revolution, the poet withdrew from the world. He lived, so to speak, underground in the tower. According to this theory, all of the writings of Holderlin ’ s madness (1806-1843) were in fact composed in a secret, revolutionary code . There is even a play that ex pands upon this idea. In the final scene of that work, the young Marx pays Holderlin a visit in his tower. We are led to presume from this encounter that it was the old and dying poet who inspired Marx to write The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. If this were so, then Holderlin would not only have been the greatest German poet of the nineteenth century, but also a central figure in the history of political thought: the link between Hegel and Marx. For it is a documented fact that as young men Holderlin and Hegel were friends. They were students together at the seminary in Tubingen.
    Speculations of this sort, however, strike A. as tedious. He has no difficulty in accepting Holderlin ’ s presence in the room. He, would even go so far as to say that Holderlin could not have sur vived anywhere else. If not for Zimmer ’ s generosity and kindness, it is possible that Holderlin ’ s life would have ended prematurely. To withdraw into a room does not mean that one has been blinded. To be mad does not mean that one has been struck dumb. More than likely, it is the room that restored Holderlin to life, that gave him back whatever life it was left for him to live. As Jerome commented on the Book of Jonah, glossing the passage that tells of Jonah in the belly of the whale: “ You will note that where you would think should be the end of Jonah, there was his safety. ”
    “ The image of man has eyes, ” wrote Holderlin, during the first year of his life in that room, “ whereas the moon has light. King Oedipus has an eye too many perhaps. The sufferings of this man, they seem indescribable, unspeakable, inexpressible. If the drama represents something like this, that is why. But what comes over me as I think of you now? Like brooks the end of something sweeps me away, which expands like Asia. Of course, this affliction, Oedipus has it too. Of course, that is why. Did Hercules suffer too? In deed …. For to fight with God, like Hercules, that is an afflication. And immortality amidst the envy of this life, to share in that, is an affliction too. But this is also an affliction, when a man is covered with freckles, to be wholly covered with many a spot! The beautiful sun does that: for it rears up all things. It leads young men along their course with the allurements of its beams as though with roses. The afflictions that Oedipus bore seem like this, as when a poor man complains there is something he lacks. Son of Laios, poor stranger in Greece! Life is death, and death is a kind of life. ”
    The room. Counter-argument to the above. Or: reasons for be ing in the room.

The Book of Memory. Book Five.
    Two months after his father ’ s death (January 1979), A. ’ s mar riage collapsed. The problems had been brewing for some time, and at last the decision was made to separate. If it was one thing for him to accept this break-up, to be miserable about it and yet to un derstand that it was inevitable, it was quite another thing for him to swallow the consequences it entailed: to be separated from his son. The thought of it was intolerable to him.
    He moved into his room on Varick Street in early spring. For the next few months he shuttled between that room and the house in Dutchess County where he and his wife had been living for the past three years. During the week: solitude in the city; on the weekends: visits to the country, one hundred miles away, where he slept in what was now his former work room and played with his son, not yet two years old, and read to him from the treasured books of the period: Let ’ s Go Trucks, Caps for Sale, Mother Goose.
    Shortly after he moved into the Varick Street room, the six-year old Etan Patz disappeared from the streets of that same neighbor hood. Everywhere A. turned, there was a photograph of the boy (on