The Invention of Solitude

takes place. As such, A. is more than willing to accept it as true. Unhomeness, therefore, as a memory of another, much earlier home of the mind. In the same way a dream will sometimes resist interpretation until a friend suggests a simple, almost obvious meaning, A. cannot prove Freud ’ s argument true or false, but it feels right to him, and he is more than willing to accept it. All the coincidences that seem to have been multiplying around him, then, are somehow connected with a memory of his childhood, as if by beginning to remember his childhood, the world were returning to a prior state of its being. This feels right to him. He is remembering his childhood, and it has appeared to him in the present in the form of these experiences. He is remembering his childhood, and it is writing itself out for him in the present. Perhaps that is what he means when he writes: “ meaning-lessness is the first principle. ” Perhaps that is what he means when he writes: “ He means what he says. ” Perhaps that is what he means. And perhaps it is not. There is no way to be sure of any of this.
     
    The invention of solitude. Or stories of life and death.
    The story begins with the end. Speak or die. And for as long as you go on speaking, you will not die. The story begins with death. King Shehriyar has been cuckolded: “ and they ceased not from kissing and clipping and clicketing and carousing. ” He retreats from the world, vowing never to succomb to feminine trickery again. Later, returning to his throne, he gratifies his physical desires by taking in women of the kingdom. Once satisfied, he orders their execution. “ And he ceased not to do this for three years, till the land was stripped of marriageab le girls, and all the women and mothers and fathers wept and cried out against the King, cursing him and complaining to the Creator of heaven and earth and calling for succor upon Him who heareth prayer and answereth those that cry to Him; and those that had daughters left fled with them, till at last there remained not a single girl in the city apt for marriage. ”
    At this point, Shehrzad, the vizier ’ s daughter, volunteers to go to the King. ( “ Her memory was stored with verses and stories and folklore and the sayings of Kings and sages, and she was wise, wit ty, prudent, and well-bred. ” ) Her desperate father tries to dissuade her from going to this sure death, but she is unperturbed. “ Marry me to this king, for either I will be the means of the deliverance of the daughters of the Muslims from slaughter, or I will die and perish as others have perished. ” She goes off to sleep with the king and puts her plan into action: ’ ‘ to tell… delightful stories to pass away the watches of our night…; it shall be the means of my deliverance and the ridding of the folk of this calamity, and by it I will turn the king from his custom. ”
    The king agrees to listen to her. She begins her story, and what she tells is a story about story telling, a story within which are sev eral stories, each one, in itself, about story-telling—by means of which a man is saved from death.
    Day begins to dawn, and mid-way through the first story-within- the-story, Shehrzad falls silent. “ This is nothing to what I will tell tomorrow night, ” she says, “ if the king let me live. ” And the king says to himself, “ By Allah, I will not kill her, till I hear the rest of the story. ” So it goes for three nights, each night ’ s story stopping before the end and spilling over into the beginning of the next night ’ s story, by which time the first cycle of stories has ended and a new one begun. Truly, it is a matter of life and death. On the first night, Shehrzad begins with The Merchant and the Genie. A man stops to eat his lunch in a garden (an oasis in the desert), throws away a date stone, and behold “ there started up before him a gigantic spirit, with a naked sword in his hand, who came up to him and said, ‘ Arise, that I may slay thee, even as thou hast slain my son. ’ ‘ How did I slay thy son? ’ asked the merchant, and the genie replied, ‘ When thou threwest away the date stone, it smote my son, who was passing at the time, on the breast, and he died forthright. ’”
    This is guilt out of innocence (echoing the fate of the marriageable girls in the kingdom), and at the same time the birth of enchantment—turning a thought into a thing, bringing the invisible to life. The merchant pleads his