22/100, Thinking about Paul Auster

and how are we to live our lives.

In the wake of Paul Auster’s death, his wife, Siri Hustvedt, posted a deceptively simple sentence from Josef Joubert, that Auster had quoted to her not long before he died: one must die lovable (if one can).

Like all the best sentences, it’s far denser than it appears. One must die lovable (if one can). There it is again, the must and the if.

Life conspires to render us unlovable. We encounter situations that bring our worst traits to light, these traits embed themselves. It is hard, to go towards the light as Carolyn Forche’s Lightkeeper exhorts: You taught me to live like this. That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as that dread from which it comes. Go towards the light always, be without ships.

The first time I read this, I couldn’t breathe. Happiness from dread. Going towards the light demands first, darkness. Perhaps remaining lovable is the same thing. It is not a given. It is the moving towards the light, not once, but always. And for yourself, without ships. An individual, singular pursuit. To not become bitter or brittle or embattled.

Only seven words and yet, it’s a big sentence .

Years ago, I was similarly struck by the epigraph at the front of Grace Paley’s Collected Stories. It is perhaps one of the strangest epigraphs, and because of this, it seems wrong to quote it in part, instead, here it is in full. I keep it on my phone for the days I need to remember the question at the end:

It seems right to dedicate this collection to my friend Sybil Claiborne, my colleague in the Writing and Mother Trade. I visited her fifth-floor apartment on Barrow Street one day in 1957. There before my very eyes were her two husbands disappointed by the eggs. After that we talked and talked for nearly forty years. Then she died. Three days before that, she said slowly, with the delicacy of an unsatisfied person with only a dozen words left, Grace, the real question is - how are we to live our lives?

And although the first time I read this my eye was first drawn to the two husbands and the eggs, for the last decade, I’ve kept thinking of the real question: how are we to live our lives.

I think some of it is a matter of attention. Larkin calls this to mind in Days: What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us. To stay awake. To remain in that day, to run neither ahead nor behind.

I sometimes miss having a spiritual practice. I sometimes fear I am a very basic person, easily pleased by the dew on the grass or the steam from the stovetop kettle, always taking the long way round; I sometimes think perhaps this is my answer to the both the question and the challenge: how to live life and remain lovable is to pay attention to it, remaining alert to the possibility of it all. While at the same time, entertaining the idea you might not be all that lovable at all. That too.

When it is my turn to die, I would like to be this wise. I would like also to remain unsatisfied, like Grace Paley’s friend, to not, might suggest a feeling of having exhausted the possibility of it all when really everything is limitless.