Yesterday I finished reading Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude which contains “Portrait of an Invisible Man” which is a memoir about his father written during the time that Auster was clearing our his father’s house after his death.
I was struck by a brief passage, near the end:
Three days before he died, my father had bought a new car. He had driven it once, maybe twice, and when I returned to his house after the funeral, I saw it sitting in the garage, already defunct, like some huge, stillborn creature. Later that same day i went off to the garage for a moment to be by myself. I sat down behind the wheel of his car, inhaling the strange factory newness of it. The odometer read sixty-seven miles. That also happened to have been my father’s age: sixty-seven years.
I was thinking about that passage this morning, making my tea. Auster’s book The Red Notebook is somewhat of a treatise on such coincidences, the strange intersections of fate that punctuate every aspect of our lives.
These kinds of things happen to Auster a lot, if we take him at his word. It’s not that Auster is somehow more attuned to those things than the rest of us, that he is more equipped to see them. It just seems that there are more of them in his life.
Making my tea, I was thinking to myself how, for the most part, I don’t see those kinds of coincidences in my life. And it’s not because I don’t look for them. I walk around most days with my ear to the ground, listening for whatever is rumbling beneath . . . but there’s nothing there. At least, nothing like that.
I made my tea and came in to listen to The Writer’s Almanac, just as I do most mornings. Today, for the day before Valentine’s Day, Keillor read Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”:
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the
youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapp’d power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
I’d forgotten the line about “But at my back I always hear…” and it gave me a bit of a chill because of how it echoes through Eliot’s The Waste Land: “But at my back in a cold blast / I hear the rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.”
Last night, I couldn’t find anything to catch my interest and would have rented The Third Man for about the thousandth time but I asked the guy behind the counter to recommend something.
“What are you looking for?” He asked.
“I have no idea. Something very good, but overlooked. Something that I haven’t seen.”
Without hesitation, he said “Try 25th Hour. I watched it last night.”
“With Edward Norton?
“Yeah.”
“Is it good?”
“I thought it was great.”
I found it on the shelf and came home.
This morning, I’m making tea and thinking about Paul Auster and coincidence with Marvell and Eliot rattling around in there somewhere. I wanted to write today but I also thought I might drink my tea and watch a little bit of the movie. Edward Norton’s somewhat of the template for the villain in what I’ve been writing, so I rationalized to myself that it wasn’t lazy to waste time watching a movie with him in it when I should be writing.
It’s a good movie. Norton is, as always, excellent. About ten minutes in, there’s a scene set in a preparatory school. It starts with a young girl (played by Anna Paquin) reading a poem.
The poem is Marvell’s “To a Coy Mistress” — which some people might take as some sort of sign.
[Addendum: I added this a few minutes after the original post above.]
I make another cup of tea, write this post, and sit down to watch a little bit more of the movie.
A few scenes later, the girl is arguing with her teacher (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) about a grade she received on a paper. “I write better than anyone else in the class,” she says to him.
“Forget about them. You’re not competing with them.” He tells her.
At that moment, the power in my apartment kicks out and the television goes dark.
Again, some people might take this sort of thing as a sign.
Time to write…