Paul Auster died in April 2024, but he lives on through his many books. And there are so many: "The New York Trilogy", "In the Country of Last Things", "Moon Palace", "The Music of Chance", "Leviathan", "Mr. Vertigo", "Timbuktu", "The Book of Illusions", "Oracle Night", "The Brooklyn Follies", "Travels in the Scriptorium", "Man in the Dark", "Invisible", "Sunset Park", "Day/Night", "Baumgartner" - and they're just the fiction books. My favourites are his memoirs and non-fiction writing: "The Invention of Solitude", "The Red Notebook", "Hand to Mouth", "Winter Journal", "Report from the Interior", "The Art of Hunger", - and the list goes on. I just list them here to remind myself of the many I haven't read yet, often because they are so difficult to buy.
He also made a name for himself as a filmmaker through his screenplays for "Smoke", "Blue in the Face" and "Lulu on the Bridge". Above is a full-length copy of "Smoke", which follows the lives of multiple characters, all of whom are connected via their patronage of a small Brooklyn tobacconist store managed by Augustus "Auggie" Wren.
Its beginning lies in Paul Auster's "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story" ...
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Auggie and I have know each other for close to eleven years now. He works behind the counter of a cigar store on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, and since it's the only store that carries the little Dutch cigars I like to smoke, I go there fairly often. For a long time, I didn't give much thought to Auggie Wren. He was the strange little man who wore a hooded blue sweatshirt and sold me cigars and magazines, the impish, wisecracking character who always had something funny to say about the weather or the Mets or the politicians in Washington, and that was the extent of it.
But then one day several years ago he happened to be looking through a magazine in the store, and he stumbled across a review of one of my books. He knew it was me because a photograph accompanied the review, and after that things changed between us. I was no longer just another customer to Auggie, I had become a distinguished person. Most people couldn't care less about books and writers, but it turned out that Auggie considered himself an artist. Now that he had cracked the secret of who I was, he embraced me as an ally, a confidant, a brother-in-arms. To tell the truth, I found it rather embarrassing. Then, almost inevitably, a moment came when he asked if I would be willing to look at his photographs. Given his enthusiasm and goodwill, there didn't seem to be any way I could turn him down.
God knows what I was expecting. At the very least, it wasn't what Auggie showed me the next day. In a small, windowless room at the back of the store, he opened a cardboard box and pulled out twelve identical black photo albums. This was his life's work, he said, and it didn't take him more than five minutes a day to do it. Every morning for the past twelve years, he had stood at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Clinton Street at precisely seven o'clock and had taken a single color photograph of precisely the same view. The project now ran to more than four thousand photographs. Each album represented a different year, and all the pictures were laid out in sequence, from January 1 to December 31, with the dates carefully recorded under each one.
As I flipped through the albums and began to study Auggie's work, I didn't know what to think. My first impression was that it was the oddest, most bewildering thing I had ever seen. All the pictures were the same. The whole project was a numbing onslaught of repetition, the same street and the same buildings over and over again, an unrelenting delirium of redundant images. I couldn't think of anything to say to Auggie, so I continued turning pages, nodding my head in feigned appreciation. Auggie himself seemed unperturbed, watching me with a broad smile on his face, but after I'd been at it for several minutes, he suddenly interrupted me and said, "You're going too fast. You'll never get it if you don't slow down."
He was right, of course. If you don't take the time to look, you'll never manage to see anything. I picked up another album and forced myself to go more deliberately. I paid closer attention to details, took note of shifts in the weather, watching for the changing angles of light as the seasons advanced. Eventually, I was able to detect subtle differences in the traffic flow, to anticipate the rythm of the different days (the commotion of workday mornings, the relative stillness of weekends, the contrast between Saturdays and Sundays). And then, little by little, I began to recognize the faces of the people in the background, the passersby on their way to work, the same people in the same spot every morning, living an instant of their lives in the field of Auggie's camera.
Once I got to know them, I began to study their postures, the way they carried themselves, from one morning to the next, trying to discover their moods from these surface indications, as if I could imagine stories for them, as if I could penetrate the invisible dramas locked inside their bodies. I picked up another album. I was no longer bored, no longer puzzled as I had been at first. Auggie was photographing time, I realized, both natural time and human time, and he was doing it by planting himself in one tiny corner of the world and willing it to be his own, by standing guard in the space he had chosing for himself. As he watched me pore over his work, Auggie continued to smile with pleasure. Then, almost as if he had been reading my thoughts, he began to recite a line from Shakespeare. "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," he muttered under his breath, "time creeps on its petty pace." I understood then that he knew exactly what he was doing.
That was more than two thousand pictures ago. Since that day, Auggie and I have discussed his work many times, but it was only last week that I learned how he acquired his camera and started taking pictures in the first place. That was the subject of the story he told me, and I'm still struggling to make sense of it."
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This is how Paul Auster's book "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story" begins. Of course, it's far too early for Christmas stories, even one as unique and charming as this one, which is the reason why I stop right here - the other reason is that I don't want to break copyright laws.
The reason I've copied here what is the introduction to a Christmas story is that the introduction is a story in itself. Auggie's "life's work" of standing every morning in the same spot at the same time and taking a photogaph of his "tiny corner of the world and willing it to be his own, by standing guard in the space he had chosing for himself" is the story of a man's attempt to make sense out of an otherwise mundane life.
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"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow"
By William Shakespeare
(from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth)
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
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Auggie Wren tries to make sense of his life by taken a single photograph every morning of precisely the same view from the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Clinton Street in New York. The whole project is a numbing onslaught of repetition, the same street and the same buildings over and over again, an unrelenting delirium of redundant images. But that's not how Auggie sees it, who is photographing time, both natural time and human time, and doing it by planting himself in one tiny corner of the world and willing it to be his own, by standing guard in the space he had chosing for himself. How do you make sense out of a mundane life with an unrelenting "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow"?
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