W H I T E S P A C E S

1979
Something happens, and from the moment it begins to happen,
nothing can ever be the same again.

Something happens. Or else, something does not happen. A

body moves. Or else, it does not move. And if it moves, some­
thing begins to happen. And even if it does not move, something
begins to happen.

It comes from my voice. But that does not mean these words will
ever be what happens. It comes and goes. If I happen to be
speaking at this moment, it is only because I hope to find a way
of going along, of running parallel to everything else that is going
along, and so begin to find a way of filling the silence without
breaking it.

I ask whoever is listening to this voice to forget the words it is

speaking. It is important that no one listen too carefully. I want
these words to vanish, so to speak, into the silence they came
from, and for nothing to remain but a memory of their presence,
a token of the fact that they were once here and are here no
longer and that during their brief life they seemed not so much
to be saying any particular thing as to be the thing that was hap­
pening at the same time a certain body was moving in a certain
space, that they moved along with everything else that moved.

Something begins, and already it is no longer the beginning, but

something else, propelling us into the heart of the thing that is
happening. If we were suddenly to stop and ask ourselves,
"Where are we going?'', or "Where are we now?", we would be
lost, for at each moment we are no longer where we were, but
have left ourselves behind, irrevocably, in a past that has no
memory, a past endlessly obliterated by a motion that carries us
into the present.

W h i r e Spa c e s 1 5 5
It ..wi not do, then, to ask questions. For this is a landscape of
random impulse, of knowledge for its own sake-which is to say,
a knowledge that exists, that comes into being beyond any possi­
bility of putting it into words. And if just this once we were to
abandon ourselves to the supreme indifference of simply being
wherever we happen to be, then perhaps we would not be
deluding ourselves into thinking that we, too, had at last become
a part of it all.

To think of motion not merely as a function of the body but as an

extension of the mind. In the same way, to think of speech not as
an extension of the mind but as a function of the body. Sounds
emerge from the voice to enter the air and surround and bounce
off and enter the body that occupies that air, and though they can­
not be seen, these sounds are no less a gesture than a hand is when
outstretched in the air towards another hand, and in this gesture
can be read the entire alphabet of desire, the body's need to be
taken beyond itself, even as it dwells in the sphere of its own
motion.

On the surface, this motion seems to be random. But such ran­

domness does not, in itself, preclude a meaning. Or if meaning
is not quite the word for it, then say the drift, or a consistent
sense of what is happening, even as it changes, moment by
moment. To describe it in all its details is probably not impossi­
ble. But so many words would be needed, so many streams of
syllables, sentences, and subordinate clauses, that the words
would always lag behind what was happening, and long after all
motion had stopped and each of its witnesses had dispersed, the
voice describing that motion would still be speaking, alone,
heard by no one, deep into the silence and darkness of these four
walls. And yet something is happening, and in spite of myself I
want to be present inside the space of this moment, of these
moments, and to say something, even though it ..wi be forgotten,
that will fonn a part of this journey for the length of the time it
endures.

P A U L AUSTER / 5 6
In the realm of the naked eye nothing happens that does not
have its beginning and its end. And yet nowhere can we find the
place or the moment at which we can say, beyond a shadow of a
doubt, that this is where it begins, or this is where it ends. For
some of us, it has begun before the beginning, and for others of
us it will go on happening after the end. Where to find it? Don't
look. Either it is here or it is not here. And whoever tries to find
refuge in any one place, in any one moment, will never be where
he thinks he is. In other words, say your good-byes. It is never
too late. It is always too late.

To say the simplest thing possible. To go no farther than what­

ever it is I happen to find before me. To begin with this land­
scape, for example. Or even to note the things that are most
near, as if in the tiny world before my eyes I might find an image
of the life that exists beyond me, as if in a way I do not fully
understand each thing in my life were connected to every other
thing, which in tum connected me to the world at large, the end­
less world that looms up in the mind, as lethal and unlmowable
as desire itself.

To put it another way. It is sometimes necessary not to name the

thing we are talking about. The invisible God of the Hebrews, for
example, had an unpronounceable name, and each of the ninety­
nine names tradition ascribes to this God was in fact nothing
more than a way of aclmowledging that-which-cannot-be-spoken,
that-which-cannot-be-seen, and that-which-cannot-be-under­
stood. But even on a less exalted plane, in the realm of the visible
itself, we often hold back from divulging the thing we are talking
about. Consider the word "it." "It" is raining, we say, or how is
"it" going? We feel we !mow what we are saying, and what we
mean to say is that it, the word "it," stands for something that
need not be said, or something that cannot be said. But if the
thing we say is something that eludes us, something we do not
understand, how can we persist in saying that we understand
what we are saying? And yet it goes without saying that we do.

Wh i t e Spaces 1 5 7
The "it," for example, in the preceding sentence, "it goes without
saying," is in fact nothing less than whatever it is that propels us
into the act of speech itself. And if it, the word "it," is what con­
tinually recurs in any effort to define it, then it must be accepted
as the given, the precondition of the saying of it. It has been said,
for example, that words falsify the thing they attempt to say, but
even to say "they falsify" is to admit that "they falsify" is true, thus
betraying an implicit faith in the power of words to say what they
mean to say. And yet, when we speak, we often do not mean to say
anything, as in the present case, in which I find these words falling
from my mouth and vanishing into the silence they came from. In
other words, it says itself, and our mouths are merely the instru­
ments of the saying of it. How does it happen? But never do we
ask what "it" happens to be. We know, even if we cannot put it into
words. And the feeling that remains within us, the discretion of a
knowledge so fully in tune with the world, has no need of whatever
it is that might fall from our mouths. Our hearts know what is in
them, even if our mouths remain silent. And the world will know
what it is, even when nothing remains in our hearts.

A man sets out on a journey to a place he has never been before.

Another man comes back. A man comes to a place that has no
name, that has no landmarks to tell him where he is. Another
man decides to come back. A man writes letters from nowhere,
from the white space that has opened up in his mind. The letters
are never received. The letters are never sent. Another man sets
out on a journey in search of the first man. This second man
becomes more and more like the first man, until he, too, is swal­
lowed up by the whiteness. A third man sets out on a journey
with no hope of ever getting anywhere. He wanders. He contin­
ues to wander. For as long as he remains in the realm of the
naked eye, he continues to wander.

I remain in the room in which I am writing this. I put one foot in

front of the other. I put one word in front of the other, and for each
step I take I add another word, as if for each word to be spoken there

P A U L A U S T E R 1 58
were another space to be crossed, a distance to be filled by my body
as it moves through this space. It is a journey through space, even if
I get nowhere, even if I end up in the same place I started. It is a
journey through space, as if into many cities and out of them, as if
across deserts, as if to the edge of some imaginary ocean, where each
thought drowns in the relentless waves of the real.

I put one foot in front of the other, and then I put the other foot
in front of the first, which has now become the other and which
will again become the first. I walk within these four walls, and for
as long as I am here I can go anywhere I like. I can go from one
end of the room to the other and touch any of the four walls, or
even all the walls, one after the other, exactly as I like. If the
spirit moves me, I can stand in the center of the room. If the spirit
moves me in another direction, I can stand in any one of the four
comers. Sometimes I touch one of the four comers and in this way
bring myself into contact with two walls at the same time. Now and
then I let my eyes roam up to the ceiling, and when I am particu­
larly exhausted by my efforts there is always the floor to welcome
my body. The light, streaming through the windows, never casts the
same shadow twice, and at any given moment I feel myself on the
brink of discovering some terrible, unimagined truth. These are
moments of great happiness for me.

Somewhere, as if unseen, and yet closer to us than we realize

(down the street, for example, or in the next neighborhood),
someone is being born. Somewhere else, a car is speeding along
an empty highway in the middle of the night. In that same night,
a man is hammering a nail into a board. We lmow nothing about
any of this. A seed stirs invisibly in the earth, and we lmow noth­
ing about it. Flowers wilt, buildings go up, children cry. And yet,
for all that, we lmow nothing.

It happens, and as it continues to happen, we forget where we

were when we began. Later, when we have traveled from this
moment as far as we have traveled from the beginning, we will

Wh i t � Spaces 1 5 9
forget where we are now. Eventually, we will all go home, and if
there are those among us who do not have a home, it is certain,
nevertheless, that they will leave this place to go wherever it is
they must. If nothing else, life has taught us all this one thing:
whoever is here now will not be here later.

I dedicate these words to the things in life I do not understand,

to each thing passing away before my eyes. I dedicate these
words to the impossibility of finding a word equal to the silence
inside me.

In the beginning, I wanted to speak of arms and legs, of jumping

up and down, of bodies tumbling and spinning, of enormous
journeys through space, of cities, of deserts, of mountain ranges
stretching farther than the eye can see. Little by little, however,
as these words began to impose themselves on me, the things I
wanted to do seemed finally to be of no importance. Reluctantly,
I abandoned all my witty stories, all my adventures of far-away
places, and began, slowly and painfully, to empty my mind. Now
emptiness is all that remains: a space, no matter how small, in
which whatever is happening can be allowed to happen.

And no matter how small, each and every possibility remains. Even
a motion reduced to an apparent absence of motion. A motion, for
example, as minimal as breathing itself, the motion the body makes
when inhaling and exhaling air. In a book I once read by Peter
Freuchen, the famous Arctic explorer describes being trapped by
a blizzard in northern Greenland. Alone, his supplies dwindling, he
decided to build an igloo and wait out the storm. Many days
passed. Mraid, above all, that he would be attacked by wolves-for
he heard them prowling hungrily on the roof of his igloo--he
would periodically step outside and sing at the top of his lungs in
order to frighten them away. But the wind was blowing fiercely,
and no matter how hard he sang, the only thing he could hear was
the wind. If this was a serious problem, however, the problem of
the igloo itself was much greater. For Freuchen began to notice

PAUL AUSTER 1 60
that the walls of his little shelter were gradually closing in on him.
Because of the particular weather conditions outside, his breath
was literally freezing to the walls, and with each breath the walls
became that much thicker, the igloo became that much smaller,
lllltll eventually there was almost no room left for his body. It is
surely a frightening thing, to imagine breathing yourself into a cof­
fin of ice, and to my mind considerably more compelling than, say,
The Pit and the Pendulum by Poe. For in this case it is the man
himself who is the agent of his own destruction, and further, the
instrument of that destruction is the very thing he needs to keep
himself alive. For surely a man cannot live if he does not breathe.
But at the same time, he will not live if he does breathe. Curiously,
I do not remember how Freuchen managed to escape his predica­
ment. But needless to say, he did escape. The title of the book, if I
recall, is Arctic Adventure. It has been out of print for many years.

Nothing happens. And still, it is not nothing. To invoke things

that have never happened is noble, but how much sweeter to
remain in the realm of the naked eye.

It comes down to this: that everything should count, that every­

thing should be a part of it, even the things I do not or cannot
understand. The desire, for example, to destroy everything I have
written so far. Not from any revulsion at the inadequacy of these
words (although that remains a distinct possibility), but rather
from the need to remind myself, at each moment, that things do
not have to happen this way, that there is always another way, nei­
ther better nor worse, in which things might take shape. I realize
in the end that I am probably powerless to affect the outcome of
even the least thing that happens, but nevertheless, and in spite
of myself, as if in an act of blind faith, I want to assume full
responsibility. And therefore this desire, this overwhelming need,
to take these papers and scatter them across the room. Or else, to
go on. Or else, to begin again. Or else, to go on, as if each
moment were the beginning, as if each word were the beginning
of another silence, another word more silent than the last.

Whir e Spaces 1 6 1
A few scraps of paper. A last cigarette before turning in. The snow
falling endlessly in the winter night. To remain in the realm of the
naked eye, as happy as I am at this moment. And if this is too
much to ask, then to be granted the memory of it, a way of return­
ing to it in the darlmess of the night that will surely engulf me
again. Never to be anywhere but here. And the immense journey
through space that continues. Everywhere, as if each place were
here. And the snow falling endlessly in the winter night.