10. Auster

Jeopardy: 1 day after my Colloq

In this city of lonely people, perhaps we are more connected than we realize. I am officially lost within our city of glass… Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which I first read either in AP English Lit or the year before in American Voices Honors (either way I went to a pretty cool high school), has always been a comfort to me. I have always had a knack for noticing all of the likely worthless connections between movies, books, and the world around me. My overworking observing mind was great while I was preparing for my Colloquium (actual text message: “I’m overwhelmed by intertextualities”), but generally, it’s more just a burden. Auster’s strange, frustrating, postmodern with a dash of surrealism, detective novel does not give many people a warm, fuzzy feeling. And I’m not saying that’s what I get out of it, but it certainly makes me feel like I’m not the only one thinking these types of thoughts – always connecting the invisible dots.

Auster as GraphicI had a hard time deciding what to blog about for Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Originally, I thought about doing an entry on walking New York and the flaneur, but it seems several people beat me to that idea, and I didn’t want to get repetitive. Instead, I decided to do a Google search about the book and see what interesting information I could find.

I learned that in 1994 Auster’s City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel by David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik, who worked as lead illustrator. I was able to read a few sample pages of the graphic novel via Google Books, and I couldn’t help but notice how appropriate it seemed that Auster’s bizarre, surrealist story works as an illustrated text.

According to Wikipedia, “The original printing was received very well, and the work was chosen as one of the 100 Most Important Comics of the Century.” The noir aspect of the novel (especially with the stylized detective-like nature) lends itself to the graphic genre, and creating a sense of place of a city like New York in the novel bodes well with the black and white ink drawings. Form follows function very well.

Art Spiegelman, who introduces the text, says that the interplay between words and pictures in the graphic novel are particularly interesting. Instead of using the traditional “word balloons” found in other comics, dialogue is depicted in ink wells, storm drains, and cave paintings. Spiegelman (according to Wikipedia) “was particularly impressed with this section of the book, noting how well it translates Auster’s descrpitions of Stillman’s speech patterns.” I’ve yet to read the actual graphic novel myself, but I’d like to see what the introduction of images adds to Auster’s text overall.

            Paul Auster’s “City of Glass” is like walking into a mystery story on acid, while already half-baked on pot. His random wanderings throughout New York City makes one as spun out and free associated as the character in the story. The identity of the reader becomes as altered as the identities encountered throughout the story. The breakdown of language launches the reader into a strange universe of detection in which neither the reader nor the character in the story know exactly what is happening. My main beef with this story is the fact that it tries to make sense by not making sense, and in trying to make sense of nonsense I came out with nothing solid. It’s the type of book that doesn’t give you anything and forces you to try and makes sense of a mystery with only half of the facts. I understand the style of writing and I appreciate the approach Paul Auster is taking, but this style ends up trying to be to postmodern. I mean I’m already living in the postmodern world so I don’t need an author to show me a postmodern story, I want him to tell me a postmodern story. The reader alone should be able to figure out whether its postmodern or not, and the random juggling of facts and ideas that have no premise in the story really got under my skin.

            Now leaving “City of Glass” behind what I thought that the movies Paul Auster created told and didn’t show what its like to live life in the postmodern puzzle that is the timeframe we live in today. These movies also did a great job of taking tid bits of random peoples experiences living in New York City and applied them to a grander theme, and a more universal feeling. I really connected with the guys just babbling about random shit while smoking cigars in a dank cigar shop in the middle of Brooklyn. I found truth and meaning in these seemingly meaningless conversations and I think they painted a clear picture of existence in a certain place at a certain time in history. I also found it fascinating that as they were creating one movie they just decided to simultaneously create another movie with the same characters, yet just slightly altered. This to me is an authentic expression of what it means to be human and what life is truly like in this megalopolis of a city. Even a few minutes of these movies enabled me to envision what Paul Auster was trying to accomplish, and the film form of expression captured the “city of glass” way more than the actual book did. I feel that Paul Auster has quite an interesting perspective on reality that just about anyone can relate to, but for me the movies accomplished more than the book did.

Peter Pan, Annie LeibovitzPaul Auster provides a lyrical narrative of the human perception of space in City of Glass. Through David Quinn’s experiences, he illustrates how the human perception continuing alters with time in phases. In doing so, it is as if he has taken the developmental phases of Tuan and put them into narrative form.

Auster notes how the phases of perception reappear to us later in life. For instance he mentions how Quinn occasionally feels as if his deceased child is still at his side: ‘Every once in a while, he would suddenly feel what it had been like to hold the three-year-old boy in his arms…It was a physical sensation, an imprint of the past that had been left in his body, and he had no control over it.’ (11) According to Auster, the perceptional phases leave an emotional imprint on our muscle memory.

With Peter, the development of his perception was interrupted at the age of three because his father locked him in a dark room for nine years. By keeping him away from human contact, Peter’s father hoped that he would emerge with God’s language, a language that was drastically different than the human language. So in those nine years, he remained a three year old, developing his own understanding of reality. It wasn’t until he was discovered that his perceptional development of the ‘normal’ world was restarted. But by then it was too late, his prime development years were gone. After a period of treatments to recondition him to the outside world, Peter is able to communicate with people, but only roughly. He still has his own understanding of reality that he is unable to explain to everyone else. His three year old self is still prevalent, ‘The little boy who can never grow up’ (34). And because he developed an understanding of the world so drastically different than everyone else, he and his father believe he lives closer to God.

Once Peter was conditioned enough to be released, the doctors said to him: ‘You can go now, there’s nothing more we can do for you. Peter Stillman, you are a human being (30).’ This passage reiterates the theme of innocence. This theme is used repeatedly in literature, particularly childhood classics such as J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

In the opening passage of Peter Pan, Barrie illustrates the patterns found in a child’s mind: ‘Catch [a doctor] trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it…and these are probably roads in the island; for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with…coral reefs, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes…and caves...and princes. It would be an easy map if that were all; but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers…’ He continues discussing the Neverland saying, ‘On these magic shores children at play are for ever breaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.’

As the story progresses, we understand the overarching theme is the issues of growing up into adulthood. Barrie reiterates this over and over again, ‘You see, Wendy when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And so there ought to be one fairy for every boy and girl…but children know such a lot now, they soon don’t believe in fairies.’ Here, Barrie explains how innocence was brought into the world at the beginning, and how our persistence for knowledge and lack of faith cause it to diminish. Innocence to Barrie is like the God language to Auster. It is in our innocence, our childhood that we are closest to God. As we condition ourselves to human knowledge and perception, we move further away from God.

As previously mentioned, Quinn had an emotional imprint of his son eternally with him. Likewise, Barrie explains how we continue to have an imprint of innocence on into adulthood: ‘At first Mrs. Darling did not know, but after thinking back into her childhood she just remembered a Peter Pan who was said to live with the fairies…She had believed in him at the time, but now that she was married and full of sense she quite doubted whether there was any such person.’ Even though Mrs. Darling’s memory of innocence is buried deep within, it is still there.

Similarly, Auster discusses the imprint of innocence in his passage on Dumpty: ‘Humpty Dumpty: the purest embodiment of the human condition. Listen carefully, sir. What is an egg? It is that which has not yet been born. For men are eggs…We exist but we have not yet achieved the form that is our destiny. We are pure potential, an example of the not-yet arrived. For man is a fallen creature—we know that from Genesis. Humpty Dumpty is also a fallen creature. He falls from his wall, and no one can put him back together again…But that is what we must all now strive to do. It is our duty as human beings: to put the egg back together again. For each of us, sir, is Humpty Dumpty. And to help him is to help ourselves. (128)’

According to Barrie and Auster, the innocence is in each of us. It is up to us to allow it to reemerge and run free.

Traces of New York: 4/1/06-3/31/07 By Neil FreemanI honestly put off posting about City of Glass because I could not think of how to write about the book in relationship to concepts of place. The plot, riveting in its own way, captivated me so much that it took me awhile to sort out my thoughts about space, place, and City of Glass. I was immediately attracted to the “pursuit” of Stillman, and the meticulous tracking of his path around the Upper West Side. I contemplated writing up a walking tour of that area for my post, following one of the letter shapes scrawled in the pages of the book. I also toyed with the idea of following Quinn’s route from the Upper West Side, all the way downtown, and up again before retreating to the alley by Peter Stillman’s residence on 69th Street. When I began thinking about the route, I found myself wondering if it in fact formed some sort of pattern of letters that would reveal some fundamental truth about the book’s relationship to the city.

It doesn’t.

All my ruminations on routes lead me to think about different visual interpretations of places, specifically in the field of mapping. The MTA has a particularly distorted view of New York City, as depicted in the skewed subway map. Obviously, maps are subject to some form of distortion, but I wonder: what information does one prioritize on a map and why? Clearly the MTA just wants to fit every station along every line on one page without regard to topographical accuracy. But what other ways can we envision New York as a navigable place?

Neil Freeman is an artist and urban planner whose website, Fake Is The New Real, offers alternative interpretations of cities, and even countries, as places. I was first introduced to the site through its page on Subways At Scale, a presentation of major subway lines in cities around the world on the same scale. The results make for some intriguing line drawings, but also offer some kind of navigable map. Those familiar with the cities whose subway lines are depicted on the site can discern in some way or another where different areas of the cities are. In the New York subway drawing, you can tell where Manhattan is, where Central Park is, and even where Staten Island is, without any designated markers. In another exhibit, Freeman depicts Skyscrapers In Order, for the cities of New York, Chicago, and Boston. Again, they are line drawings of skyscrapers taller than 100 meters, drawn in height order over the same plain. The visual effect is a bit frenetic, but it reminded me of Quinn’s realization that Stillman was spelling the TOWER OF BABEL on his walks. Questioning our own visual orientation in space definitely complicates our notion of “a sense of place.”
Skyscrapers In Order: New York: By Neil Freeman

In another clever exercise, Freeman depicts Connected Places, by connecting all the identically named places in the United States with a line. (Buy a print, for a mere $300!) The result could pass as a clear map of the Lower 48.
Connected Places: By Neil Freeman

If I was really on top of my game, I would draw out the route of Quinn’s ambling journey across Manhattan and post the image here. I will aim to accomplish that by the end of the semester.

Principia Discordia, p.00054

In the beginning of City of Glass, the pained protagonist Quinn lives modestly and alone, having lost his family and having retreated from his friends. He has little impact on the world, especially as compared to his earlier aspirations as a poet; his only even marginally significant impact is through the mystery novels he writes, and even those are published with a tightly-guarded pseudonym and feature Max Work, a protagonist so antithetical to his own being that one could imagine him as negating Quinn's person through overcompensation. The pop-science notion of matter and antimatter would seem applicable to a scenario in which Quinn and his creation meet, annihilating each other with a handshake.

Physically, Quinn occupies only a small apartment and a variety of semi-random meandering routes that he walks through New York City. He moves to move, experiencing the environment abstractly, just as J.B. Jackson's "Hot-Rodder" did on the open road. (205) New York City is notorious for its density and variety, and it is the combination of these qualities that cause the landscape to change so rapidly for the pedestrian (especially at a New York pace) that makes it impossible for Quinn "to dwell on any one thing for very long." (8) Compared to the open countryside that one drives through, the dense city environment is so noisy (for all of the senses) that one need only travel through it at a walking pace to reduce it to an undifferentiated blur, to the drowning-out and disorienting formlessness of white noise.

JBJ notes that when motoring, "to the perceptive individual, there can be an almost mystical quality to the experience; his identity seems for the moment to be transmuted." (205) When this is combined with the active quality of movement (for the motorist, this is rather more abstract than for the pedestrian, as the actual motion is mediated by the car) and "the shifting focus of a moving, abstract world", one can perceive a perhaps coincidental connection to the walking meditation famously practiced by Theravada Buddhists. (205) The way Quinn experiences New York City exemplifies a perverse use of whatJBJ identified as transmutation of identity, a furthering of his escape from the world, into nowhere. To be nowhere is the only thing Quinn desires. (9) His walks take him beyond the mundane nowhere-ness of merely being unknown to the world: for Quinn, escaping the Hegelian notion that self-consciousness exists only for another—only in being acknowledged—is not enough to be "nowhere"; for having escaped the recognition of others, Quinn seeks also to escape his sense of place. He still has an apartment, still has a (superficial) relationship with the man at the lunch counter, mediated by baseball and theMets , and by virtue of even the narrow limits of his hermitage he can still see that he occupies space: just as a point is defined by its coordinates on a Cartesian grid, Quinn perceives his environment defining and affirming his self, and despairs.

It is Quinn's desire to annihilate the self that drives him to annihilate his environment in his walking, and is perhaps even an encouraging factor in his self-destructive pursuit of a haphazard mystery, burying his own identity under those that he knows are not his own, those of the mystery novel detective in general, and specifically those of Max Work, Paul Auster , and (to an extent) the elder Stillman. Just before Quinn decides to pursue his "fate" by pressing on with the hopeless case, he writes in his journal, considering a clarinetist: "To be inside that music, to be drawn into the circle of its repetitions: perhaps that is a place where one could finally disappear." (167) He completes his entry with Baudelaire, and his interpretations: "It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world." (168) He subsequently abandons the little that he had before, even the rudimentary senses of place and time of his old life, to lose himself entirely in a stake-out in an alley for an event that never comes.  As everything falls away from Quinn during the stake-out—his money, his few contacts, his apartment, his purpose for staking out—Quinn disappears, almost. He manages, somehow, to survive in the alley while never alerting anyone to his presence: "It was as though he had melted into the walls of the city." (178) He even escapes the narrative of the novel itself, leaving the narrator to speculate as to his actions and methods and the time spent on the stake-out. Like the starlight that Quinn contemplates, wondering if the star "was still there, or if it had not burned out long ago," Quinn becomes himself a speculative figure, aSchrödinger's cat, but instead of being suspended between life and death, he is suspended between existence and nonexistence. (180) Quinn's only traces during this time are the waste that he leaves in the alley, and though one might derive a presence were they to consider the waste, if the only record Quinn leaves is one that nobody is going to read, then like a star whose light does not reach Earth, he remains undiscovered, effectively nonexistent.

Quinn, however, still feels a need "to record certain facts", and the notebook bearing his initials continues to be filled. (165) Even after he does not recognize his reflection, afterAuster tells him of the elder Stillman's suicide, after he loses his own apartment, after he re-enters the younger Stillman's abandoned apartment and begins to gradually fall into the state that was the younger Stillman's childhood—alone, naked, in the dark, fed with a tray from a mysterious hand (whose? Perhaps it was the wrong Stillman that died, perhaps the other had merely been biding his time after all, preparing for a new experiment—but who can say?)—Quinn continues to write, moving gradually from the specifics pertaining to the case, to himself and to Stillman, and ultimately entirely losing interest in himself, feeling "that his words had been severed from him, that they were now a part of the world at large, as real and specific as a stone, or a lake, or a flower." (200) Finally Quinn disappears. Even what he writes is no longer authored by himself, no longer a trace of his own existence, but instead existing only for itself, as itself. The words have become things unto themselves, and Quinn has discovered Adam's language.

The novel's final pages leave us with Quinn's ultimate disappearance, his vanishing without a trace, save the notebook. This disappearance is discovered by the novel's narrator, who only now appears for the first time in the story. The narrator tells us that he wrote the story by interpreting the red notebook Quinn left behind. There are many passages throughout the book, however, that could not have been gleaned from the notebook, such as the numerous dreams that Quinn supposedly always forgets. A potential hint towards the Quinn's disappearance and the narrator's appearance lies in the transformation Quinn experiences in his writing: "It [the case] had been a bridge to another place in his life, and now that he had crossed it, its meaning had been lost." (200) What the narrator describes here is not only the disappearance of Quinn (i.e., his identity), but also a transformation into something else, something whose words are indistinguishable from form. The most substantial hint, however, lies in the character Paul Auster's bizarre theory about the authorship of Cervantes' Don Quixote: that Don Quixote himself is the author. Don Quixote, not mad after all, orchestrated what Quinn calls "an elaborate hoax" because, according to Auster, "he wanted to test the gullibility of his fellow men. . . . to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement? The answer is obvious, isn't it? To any extent." (154)

Once we suspect that Quinn and the narrator are one and the same, playing a hoax on Paul Auster and ourselves, "clues" come out of the woodwork. The most obvious, if only because it is mentioned repeatedly, is that Quinn's initials, D.Q., are the same as Don Quixote's, but others include Quinn's wondering at "why Don Quixote had not simply wanted to write books like the ones he loved—instead of living out their adventures", when he himself has lived out the adventures in the books he loved to read—his being mysteries. Another is when Quinn confronts the woman in what was once his apartment: when she acknowledges that a writer used to live there, he blurts out "That's me! . . . I'm the writer!"—the end of her response, read in this context, is quite funny: "I've never seen a bigger mess in all my life." (190) This, and other "clues" that could be taken to support this view, are like the "letters" Quinn himself sees Stillman creating with his meandering walks: they may not be clues at all, just as the letters may not have been letters at all, appearing to us as such only because we want them to. Indeed, Quinn wonders if the letters are merely "a hoax he had perpetrated on himself." (113)

Of course, despite the potential hoax within the context of the novel's narrative, we must remember that it is only within this context, and that the novel's author remains Paul Auster, just as the potential hoax in Don Quixote still does not deny Cervantes' authorship. What it does imply, however, is that within the context of the novel, Quinn's disappearance and transformation is disappearance as a character and transformation into narrator—for within the confines of the novel, the narrator's words are equivalent to form: they are the entire "world at large", in Quinn's own words, "real and specific". (200) Quinn the character cannot know the answer to his final statement, "What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?", but the narrator steps into the narrative immediately afterward, continuing from a self-aware first-person perspective. A late and telling "clue" to the relationship between author, narrator, text, and reader lies in the narrator's first reference to himself, in which he mentions his return from Africa. Cid Hamete Benengeli, Cervantes' fictional storyteller, was a Moor. In Auster's conception of Don Quixote, Cid Hamete Banengeli is a fiction dreamed up by the central character, Don Quixote himself, who takes on his role of narrator. This whole construct, however, is created by Cervantes, the author—according to the interpretation of Paul Auster, the reader. It is the reader who connects the dots, it is the reader who links the clues together, it is the reader who invents the mystery, and it is the reader who solves it.

Dolores ParkThe pace and energy of New York embeds itself in our daily lives. When Daniel Quinn is following Stillman Sr. he had trouble keeping pace with the old man: “He was used to walking briskly, and all this starting and stopping and shuffling began to be a strain, as though the rhythm of his body was being disrupted. He was the hare in pursuit of the tortoise, and again and again he had to remind himself to hold back” (71). Though Quinn is quite familiar with both the City itself and wandering its streets and avenues aimlessly, the pace throws off his sense of place and he is suddenly unaccustomed to the task at hand. “The feel of a place is registered in one’s muscles and bones. A sailor has a recognizable style of walking because his posture is adapted to the plunging deck of a boat in high sea” (Tuan 184). Like the sailor, Quinn’s sense of New York is fast-paced; the physical movements of his body reflect this sense of place.

Quinn’s physical reaction to pace implies an innate sense of place that he denies (whether consciously or not) in the opening paragraphs of the novel. “New York was in inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well… On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere” (4). It seems that, even in a trance-like state, the City’s energy influences the way that Quinn behaves; otherwise, it would not be such a challenge for Quinn to adapt to Stillman Sr.’s pace.

My own routines and habits in this City reflect the energy that New York represents for me; but, like Quinn, I am more attune to these changes when I am removed from my comfortable environment and my behavior is out of synch with another situation or place.

I find myself riding my bicycle faster and more aggressively than necessary when in San Francisco, for example. I’m accustomed to vehicular traffic barreling down the avenues. Without bike lanes (and sometimes even with them—6th Avenue comes to mind), my only hope to avoid the dreaded door zone is to take a lane and try to keep up with traffic. In SF, however, my riding style is unnecessary—rude even—and I struggle to adjust to the new place.

In other aspects, however, the Californian in me cannot adjust to New York’s frenetic lifestyle. Like Quinn, when he finally stops following Stillman Sr. and realizes that he can no longer sustain his previous pace, whenever I return from the west coast, I’m always shocked that I can manage to live here. Transitioning from entire days spent eating burritos, reading books and drinking beer in Dolores Park to a city where lazy days are seen as “unproductive” or, worse, “boring,” forces me to change my habits in accord with the location I’m in. When in Rome…

The flâneur's arcade

In the city, we walk. We don't have cars to drive in, and public transportation isn't always reliable. We walk because it is often faster and easier than other modes of transportation. We walk because we things are close enough. We walk because we like to be outside, even if there aren't pastoral fields or forests surrounding us. Sometimes we're walking in a straight line, A to B without detours or distraction, and sometimes we're strolling, leisurely, maybe with a destination in mind but no timeframe and no set route to get there. This kind of walking evokes the French term flâneur (from the verb flâner-- to stroll), a term developed and used by Charles Baudelaire to describe "a person who walks the city in order to experience it." Flâneurs are not in a rush. They are walking to absorb the essence and aesthetic of a city. They participate in the actions of a city, and may interact with other people in their space, but flâneurs are also removed: they observe the city, remaining somewhat detached at all times. Quinn, in City of Glass, is not a flâneur. He is certainly a walker, and the distance he covers on foot through New York City is impressive. While trailing the elder Stillman, Quinn loops through block after block of Manhattan, in an eerie letter-shaping pattern. Later, after losing Stillman, Quinn embarks on his longest jaunt, from the Upper West Side all the way to the Financial District and back again. He does not have a destination, per se, nor a route, which in some ways resembles the actions of a flâneur. But on this walk, Quinn is not observing the city or the people in it. He is not interested in the aesthetic or the essence of Manhattan as a place; he is instead in the grips of a mental breakdown. He does take the time to pause and write an account of the city's "tramps, down-and-outs, shopping-bag ladies, drifters and drunks," but says nothing of the city itself or anyone who isn't a societally marginalized figure. In the end of his diary entry, Quinn actually quotes Baudelaire: "Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas. In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not" (from Baudelaire's poem "Anywhere Out of the World") (168). While Quinn's use of the quote in his own text is important in the context of his mental state, so too is Auster's (the "real" one, the author) invoking of the man who coined the phrase flâneur. Even though Quinn may not embody the character of a flâneur, he is still rooted in the tradition of those who walk.

One of the most intriguing relationships developed in the narrative of City of Glass is that between the characters' mental states and their interactions with their environments.
For example, Peter Stillman Jr. was locked in a dark room for a long period in his early life, meaning that he had little interaction with or understanding of physical spaces. This is reflected in his mental development - he has difficulty learning how to speak and requires a lifetime of therapy.
Peter Stillman Sr. has a history of unconventional practices, both in his scholarship and in the raising of his son. He is undoubtedly a smart man, but perhaps started losing sanity after the death of his wife. When he is freed from prison, he starts walking in the paths of the shapes of the letters to spell out the name of one of his obsessions. This behavior, coupled with the conversations that he has with Daniel Quinn (in which he goes on odd tangents and exhibits his poor memory), build an idea of his character in the reader's mind. Auster couples the character's mental state with his outward behavior to build a singular personality. It makes sense that a deranged one-time professor would use his walks through a certain block radius to spell out that which occupies his mind while collecting urban detritus in a bag along the way. The way he interacts with the physical environment around him is directly tied to the mental processes occurring inside his mind.
Finally, Daniel Quinn wants to be alone. Early in the book, when he goes on walks, places meld into one and he feels like he is nowhere. The way he processes the stimuli around him is tied to his thoughts and desires. He wants to be alone, so he ignores everything, and feels like he is walking in a void. Later, when Quinn starts living in the alleyway, his relationship to his environment changes. He becomes super focused on the Stillman apartment, and is consumed by his thoughts about the case. During this period, nothing else matters to him except the bare basics of sleeping and eating, which get reduced to a minimum. Everything in his mind is focused on the case, and his physical behavior towards the outside world reflects this.
The characters in the novels may illustrate extreme examples, but I believe that the characteristics of our mental processes definitely affect the way in which we act towards and are influenced by the places and spaces around us.

Just walkWhen Auster, very early in his book, discusses the feeling of walking through New York City, I immediately said to myself, "Yup, he's got it." There are very few cities as open to foot travel as New York is, and as any New Yorker will tell you, there is no better way to see and experience New York than by walking neighborhood to neighborhood. New York, for all its scale and density, is really made up of the ever-changing details and walking New York gives you a chance to feel those details. At the same time, by focusing on such a small scale of New York, by looking at the individual bricks, graffiti, and windows of New York streets, one loses a sense of where one is. This, to me, is how I understand Auster's description of being "lost." While I may be able to locate myself with my mental map of NYC, the lack of direction allows us to get swallowed up and embraced by New York's wild swings of emotion and aesthetic. While Auster describes New York as the "nowhere" that Quinn had built around himself, he does not mean the place does not exist. Instead, I see it as a decentralization of place. When we get lost in New York and its minute details, we need not have a sense of our own place. New York swallows us whole, and the density of experience and stimulation around us make it unnecessary to say I am one place as opposed to another. We are in New York, totally unspecified, and more a state of mind that a physical location. That is what I see as the nowhere of New York. It may sound scary to a tourist, but there is nothing as intoxicating as New York's energy. It is truly like a drug in the way that it can alter you sense of the here and now. As well, I can overdose on New York's energy and need to escape, but no more than a week away I find myself yearning for it once again. Just walking the streets gives one that feeling. The irresistible energy, movement, and life. Sometimes we fight it, on our way from point A to point B, but other times, when we are open to it, we allow ourselves to get lost much like Quinn. In those moments where we wander without direction, we learn the most about New York and ourselves.