The Invention of Solitude

sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one ’ s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history—which one both participates in and is a wit ness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance. If there is any reason for him to be in this room now, it is because there is something inside him hungering to see it all at once, to savor the chaos of it in all its raw and urgent simultaneity. And yet, the telling of it is necessarily slow, a delicate business of trying to remember what has already been remembered. The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any of this.
     
    Possible epigraph(s) for The Book of Memory.
    “ Thoughts come at random, and go at random. No device for holding on to them or for having them. A thought has escaped: I was trying to write it down: instead I write that it has escaped me. ” (Pascal)
    “ As I write down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my own weakn ess, which I am constantly for getting. This teaches me as much as my forgotten thought, for I strive only to know my own nothingness. ” (Pascal)
     

The Book of Memory. Book Ten.
    When he speaks of the room, he does not mean to neglect the windows that are sometimes present in the room. The room need not be an image of hermetic consciousness, and when a man or a woman stands or sits alone in a room there is more that happens there, he realizes, than the silence of thought, the silence of a body struggling to put its thoughts into words. Nor does he mean to imply that only suffering takes place within the four walls of con sciousness, as in the allusions made to Holderlin and Emily Dickin son previously. He thinks, for example, of Vermeer ’ s women, alone in their rooms, with the bright light of the real world pouring through a window, either open or closed, and the utter stillness of those solitudes, an almost heartbreaking evocation of the everyday and its domestic variables. He thinks, in particular, of a painting he saw on his trip to Amsterdam, Woman in Blue, which nearly immobilized him with contemplation in the Rijksmuseum. As one commentator has written: “ The letter, the map, the woman ’ s pregnancy, the empty chair, the open box, the unseen window—all are reminders or natural emblems of absence, of the unseen, of other minds, wills, times, and places, of past and future, of birth and perhaps of death—in general, of a world that extends beyond the edges of the frame, and of larger, wider horizons that encompass and impinge upon the scene suspended before our eyes. And yet it is the fullness and self-sufficiency of the present moment that Vermeer insists upon—with such conviction that its capacity to orient and contain is invested with metaphysical value. ”
    Even more than the objects mentioned in this list, it is the quality of the light coming through the unseen window to the viewer ’ s left that so warmly beckons him to turn his attention to the outside, to the world beyond the painting. A. stares hard at the woman ’ s face, and as time passes he almost begins to hear the voice inside the woman ’ s head as she reads the letter in her hands. She, so very pregnant, so tranquil in the im manence of motherhood, with the letter taken out of the box, no doubt being read for the hundredth time; and there, hanging on the wall to her right, a map of the world, which is the image of everything that exists outside the room: that light, pouring gently over her face and shining on her blue smock, the belly bulging with life, and its blueness bathed in luminosity, a light so pale it verges on whiteness. To follow with more of the same: Woman Pouring Milk, Woman Holding a Balance, Woman Putting on Pearls, Young Woman at a Window with a Pitcher, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. “ The fullness and