City of Glass

Little Peter. Is it necessary for me to imagine it, or can I accept it on faith? The darkness. To, think of myself in that room, screaming. I am reluctant. Nor do I think I even want to understand it. To what end? This is not a story, after all. It is a fact, something happening in the world, and I am supposed to do a job, one little thing, and I have said yes to it. If all goes well, it should even be quite simple. I have not been hired to understand-merely to act. This is something new. To keep it in mind, at all costs.

And yet, what is it that Dupin says in Poe? "An identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent." But here it would apply to Stillman senior. Which is probably even worse.

As for Virginia, I am in a quandary. Not just the kiss, which might be explained by any number of reasons; not what Peter said about her, which is unimportant. Her marriage? Perhaps. The complete incongruity of it. Could it be that she's in it for the money? Or somehow working in collaboration with Stillman? That would change everything. But, at the same time, it makes no sense. For why would she have hired me? To have a witness to her apparent good intentions? Perhaps. But that seems too complicated. And yet: why do I feel she is not to be trusted?

Stiliman's face, again. Thinking for these past few minutes that I have seen it before. Perhaps years ago in the neighborhood-before the time of his arrest.

To remember what it feels like to wear other people's clothes. To begin with that, I think. Assuming I must. Back in the old days, eighteen, twenty years ago, when I had no money and friends would give me things to wear. J.'s old overcoat in college, for example. And the strange sense I would have of climbing into his skin. That is probably a start.

And then, most important of all: to remember who I am. To remember who I am supposed to be. I do not think this is a game. On the other hand, nothing is clear. For example: who are you? And if you think you know, why do you keep lying about it? I have no answer. All I can say is this: listen to me. My name is Paul Auster. That is not my real name.

6

QUINN spent the next morning at the Columbia library with Stillman's book. He arrived early, the first one there as the opened, and the silence of the marble halls comforted him, as though he had been allowed to enter some crypt of oblivion. After flashing his alumni card at the drowsing attendant behind the desk, he retrieved the book from the stacks, returned to the third floor, and then settled down in a green leather armchair in one of the smoking rooms. The bright May morning lurked outside like a temptation, a call to wander aimlessly in the air, but Qui

The Garden and the Tower: Early Visions of the New World was divided into two parts of approximately equal length, "The Myth of Paradise" and "The Myth of Babel." The first concentrated on the discoveries of the explorers, begi

There was, however, an opposite point of view. If some saw the Indians as living in prelapsarian i

The second part of the book began with a new examination of the fall. Relying heavily on Milton and his account in Paradise Lost-as representing the orthodox Puritan position-Stillman claimed that it was only after the fall that human life as we know it came into being. For if there was no evil in the Garden, neither was there any good. As Milton himself put it in the Areopagitica, "It was out of the rind of one apple tasted that good and evil leapt forth into the world, like two twins cleaving together." Stillman's gloss on this sentence was exceedingly thorough. Alert to the possibility of puns and wordplay throughout, he showed how the word "taste" was actually a reference to the Latin word "sapere," which means both "to taste" and "to know" and therefore contains a subliminal reference to the tree of knowledge: the source of the apple whose taste brought forth knowledge into the world, which is to say, good and evil. Stillman also dwelled on the paradox of the word "cleave," which means both "to join together" and "to break apart," thus embodying two equal and opposite significations, which in turn embodies a view of language that Stillman found to be present in all of Milton's work. In Paradise Lost, for example, each key word has two meanings-one before the fall and one after the fall. To illustrate his point, Stillman isolated several of those words-sinister, serpentine, delicious-and showed how their prelapsarian use was free of moral co

Later in the Book of Genesis there is another story about language. According to Stillman, the Tower of Babel episode was an exact recapitulation of what happened in the Garden-only expanded, made general in its significance for all mankind. The story takes on special meaning when its placement in the book is considered: chapter eleven of Genesis, verses one through nine. This is the very last incident of prehistory in the Bible. After that, the Old Testament is exclusively a chronicle of the Hebrews. In other words, the Tower of Babel stands as the last image before the true begi