On Thursday L, D and I heard Paul Auster giving the Lewis Mumford Lecture at City College’s school of architecture. He called the lecture City of Words. It was in the college’s Great Hall, which has tall stained glass windows hexagoned in delicate greens and blues lined up along its walls. I couldn’t help stealing glances away from the stage to watch the dimming light fall through them: by the end of the lecture, at 7.30ish, it was extinguished.
Light and stained glass windows aside the lecture was good, of course. Auster was a tad lazy in that he didn’t write new words for it. Instead he read old ones in the form of short extracts from his books that captured city experiences. But hey, he is a writer not a speachifier, and the extracts he read merited resuscitation. There was a magical moment as a quiet bell started ringing outside while he read descriptions of homeless people from City of Glass, as if it was his homeless characters acknowledging their presence out on the streets. He read from Moon Palace which I found scarily unfamiliar. I knew K and I had both read it when we were in Madrid but I didn’t remember it at all (omigod how many words have tumbled into my head just to vanish like in quicksand, best not to be thought about…now I realize why EF from the age of six-ish kept little notebooks she jotted thoughts in every time she finished reading something). Yet the Moon Palace extract was also familiar, in that it echoed recent thoughts - like when the narrator/Marco Fogg says “you cannot live without establishing an equilibrium between the inner and outer.” That’s the beauty of literature, an echo chamber for experience.
The extract was from when Marco is living in Central Park. While there he realizes that “once you throw your life to the winds, you will discover things you had never known before, things that cannot be learned under any other circumstances. I was half-dead from hunger, but whenever something good happened to me, I did not attribute it to chance so much as to a special state of mind.”
Well I should be writing a big funding proposal instead of this, but my head is a little fuzzy after an 80s party at SK’s that spiralled into what will no doubt be one of the parties of the year, in the unpredictable and spontaneous way that parties sometimes do. The apartment was rammed with people in ridiculous costumes dancing away, shouting quirky conversations over the music, everyone oozing a love-everyone-mood induced by no more than wine and vodka. So much for recession-gloom…or maybe it was a collective finger-up at recession-gloom.
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