The Invention of Solitude

travelled with her from place to place, seeking news of my son, till chance led me to this garden, where I found this merchant sitting weeping; and this is my story. ” The genie agrees that this is a marvelous story and remits to the old man a third part of the merchant ’ s blood.
    One after the other, the two remaining old men propose the same bargain to the genie and begin their stories in the same way. “ These two dogs are my elder brothers, ” says the second old man. “ This mule was my wife, ” says the third. These opening sentences contain the essence of the entire project. For what does it mean to look at something, a real object in the real world, an animal, for example, and say that it is something other than what it is? It is to say that each thing leads a double life, at once in the world and in our minds, and that to deny either one of these lives is to kill the thing in both its lives at once. In the stories of the three old men, two mirrors face each other, each one reflecting the light of the other. Both are enchantments, both the real and the imaginary, and each exists by virtue of the other. And it is, truly, a matter of life and death. The first old man has come to the garden in search of his son; the genie has come to the garden to slay his son ’ s unwitting killer. What the old man is telling him is that our sons are always invisible. It is the simplest of truths: a life belongs only to the person who lives it; life itself will claim the living; to live is to let live. And in the end, by means of these three stories, the merchant ’ s life is spared.
    This is how The Thousand and One Nights begins. At the end of the entire chronicle, after story after story after story, there is a spe cific result, and it carries with it all the unalterable gravity of a mira cle. Sherhzad has borne the king three sons. Again, the lesson is made clear. A voice that speaks, a woman ’ s voice that speaks, a voice that speaks stories of life and death, has the power to give life.
    “ ‘ May I then make bold to crave a boon of thy Majesty? ’
    “‘ Ask, O Sherhzad, ’ answered he, ‘ and it shall be given unto thee. ’
    “ Whereupon she cried to the nurses and the eunuchs, saying, ‘ Bring me my children. ’
    “ So they brought them to her in haste, and they were three male children, one walking, one crawling, and one sucking at the breast. She took them and, setting them before the king, kissed the ground and said, ‘ O King of the age, these are thy children and I crave that thou release me from the doom of death, for the sake of these infants. ”‘
    When the king hears these words, he begins to weep. He gathers the little children up into his arms and declares his love for Sherhzad.
    “ So they decorated the city in splendid fashion, never before was seen the like thereof, and the dr ums beat and the pipes sounded, whilst all the mimes and mountebanks and players plied their various arts and the King lavished on them gifts and largesse. Moreover he gave alms to the poor and needy and extended his bounty to all his subjects and the people of his realm. ”

    Mirror text.
    If the voice of a woman telling stories has the power to bring children into the world, it is also true that a child has the power to bring stories to life. It is said that a man would go mad if he could not dream at night. In the same way, if a child is not allowed to enter the imaginary, he will never come to grips with the real. A child ’ s need for stories is as fundamental as his need for food, and it manifests itself in the same way hunger does. Tell me a story, the child says. Tell me a story. Tell me a story, daddy, please. The father then sits down and tells a story to his son. Or else he lies down in the dark beside him, the two of them in the child ’ s bed, and begins to speak, as if there were nothing left in the world but his voice, telling a story in the dark to his son. Often it is a fairy tale, or a tale of adventure. Yet often it is no more than a simple leap into the imaginary. Once upon a time there was a little boy named Daniel, A. says to his son named Daniel, and these stories in which the boy himself is the hero are perhaps the most satisfying to him of all. In the same way, A. realizes, as he sits in his room writing The Book of Mem ory, he speaks of himself as another in order to tell the story of him self. He must make himself absent in order to find himself there. And so he says A., even