Paul Auster

The New York Trilogy

Sarah Christine Gill

Who?" Humpty Dumpty. You know who I mean. The egg." 'As in "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall"?' Exactly." I don't understand.' Humpty Dumpty: the purest embodiment of the human con- dition. Listen carefully, sir. What is an egg? It is that which has not vet been born. A paradox, is it not? For how can Humpty Dumpty be alive if he has not been born? And yet, he is alive - make no mistake. We know that because he can speak. More than that, he is a philosopher of language. "When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean -neither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master- that's all.

CANNERY Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches, by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men, and he would have meant the same thing. 

He was busy removing the starfish from the wet sacks and arranging them on the cool concrete floor. The starfish were twisted and knotted up, for a starfish loves to hang on to something and for an hour these had found only each other, Doc arranged them in long lines and very slowly they straightened out until they lay in symmetrical stars on the concrete floor.

The New York Trilogy quotes

Join the club