You remember Auggie Wren who lives in Brooklyn and runs a tobacconist shop on the corner of Third Street and Seventh Avenue? Every day he takes his Canon 35mm SLR camera out into the street at 8.00 am and takes a shot of the same street corner, his corner, day after day.
"They’re all the same, but each one is different from every other one. You’ve got your bright mornings; your fog mornings; you’ve got your summer light and your autumn light; you’ve got your weekdays and your weekends; you’ve got your people in overcoats and galoshes and you’ve got your people in t-shirts and shorts. Sometimes same people, sometimes different ones. Sometimes different ones become the same, and the same ones disappear. The earth revolves around the sun and every day the light from the sun hits the earth from a different angle."
People walking to work. The 7-Eleven truck making a morning delivery. The old guy walking his dog. And there, more than once, is Paul’s late wife, Ellen. Alive, lithe, and now dead. What is the meaning of Auggie’s odyssey? Why take the same picture every day? Auster does not give us a direct answer, at least not by way of straightforward exposition.
However, the clues are all there in the screenplay. While Auggie seems to record the same scene day after day, never varying his routine, it is not in fact always the same. The cityscape Auggie frames in his lens is subject to constant change: variations in weather and light and the constant, ever-changing stream of humanity passing by.
The city, just like the lives of the people who inhabit it, has a veneer of permanence: on Auggie’s corner the days, seasons, years come and go with tedious repetition. But look a little closer and we see that the city is in the throes of constant, dynamic change and we, Auster implies, are an integral part of that ever-changing city.
We are all in the process of dying, whatever journey we choose to take through life, or whatever course is determined for us, each of us is marching forward towards our inevitable demise. So it is with cities, even as New York City grows it decays, its demise is built into the steel and concrete of its very bones. All cities rise and fall, the apparent solidity of Manhattan is but a flickering candle destined to be snuffed out in the maw of entropy.
Instinctively, perhaps, Auggie realises this and so presses ahead with his photographic project with no specific aim or intended destination. It will only be brought to a conclusion, we infer, when his own life reaches the end of its final reel.
It's time for me to do my Auggie Wren stuff and take a shot of my "corner". "It's my corner, after all. To me it's just one little part of the world but things take place there too, just like everywhere else."
Some mornings I feel like Auggie Wren.
(Read Paul Auster's book here or listen to it here)
