The Invention of Solitude

Nothing is taken for granted in this passage, and therefore everything is reduced to absurdity. Tol stoy makes fun of what he sees simply by describing it. “ In the second act there were cardboard monuments on the stage, and a round hole in the backdrop representing a moon. Shades had been put over the footlights and deep notes were played on the horns and contrabass as a number of people appeared from both sides of the stage wearing black cloaks and flourishing what looked like daggers. Then some other men ran onto the stage and began dragging away the maiden who had been in white and was now in pale blue. They did not take her away at once, but spent a long time singing with her, until at last they dragged her off, and behind the scenes something metallic was struck three times, and everyone knelt down and sang a prayer. All these actions were repeatedly inter rupted by the enthusiastic shouts of the audience. ”
    There is also the equal and opposite temptation to look at the world as though it were an extension of the imaginary. This, too, has sometimes happened to A., but he is loathe to accept it as a valid solution. Like everyone else, he craves a meaning. Like every one else, his life is so fragmented that each time he sees a connection between two fragments he is tempted to look for a meaning in that connection. The connection exists. But to give it a meaning, to look beyond the bare fact of its existence, would be to build an imagi nary world inside the real world, and he knows it would not stand. At his bravest moments, he embraces meaninglessness as the first principle, and then he understands that his obligation is to see what is in front of him (even though it is also inside him) and to say what he sees. He is in his room on Varick Street. His life has no meaning. The book he is writing has no meaning. There is the world, and the things one encounters in the world, and to speak of them is to be in the world. A key breaks off in a lock, and something has happened. That is to say, a key has broken off in a lock. The same piano seems to exist in two different places. A young man, twenty years later, winds up living in the same room where his father faced the horror of solitude. A man encounters his old love on a street in a foreign city. It means only what it is. Nothing more, nothing less. Then he writes: to enter this room is to vanish in a place where past and pre sent meet. And then he writes: as in the phrase: “ he wrote The Book of Memory in this room. ”
     
    The invention of solitude.
    He wants to say. That is to say, he means. As in the French, “ vouloir dire, ” which means, literally, to want to say, but which means, in fact, to mean. He means to say what he wants. He wants to say what he means. He says what he wants to mean. He means what he says.
     
    Vienna, 1919.
    No meaning, yes. But it would be impossible to say that we are not haunted. Freud has described such experiences as “ uncanny, ” or unheimlich —the opposite of heimlich, which means “ familiar, ” “ native, ” “ belonging to the home. ” The implication, therefore, is that we are thrust out from the protective shell of our habitual per ceptions, as though we were suddenly outside ourselves, adrift in a world we do not understand. By definition, we are lost in that world. We cannot even hope to find our way in it.
    Freud argues that each stage of our development co-exists with all the others. Even as adults, we have buried within us a memory of the way we perceived the world as children. And not simply a memory of it: the structure itself is intact. Freud connects the experience of the uncanny with a revival of the ego-centric, animistic world-view of childhood. “ It would seem as though each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to that animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has traversed it without certain traces of it which can be re-activated, and that everything which now strikes us as ‘ uncanny ’ fulfills the condition of stirring those vestiges of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression. ” He concludes: “ An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. ”
    None of this, of course, is an explanation. At best it serves to describe the process, to point out the terrain on which it