“He waited and waited. At two thirty, he finally gave up and went to sleep. He waited the next night, and the night after that as well. Just as he was about to abandon his scheme, realizing that he had been wrong in all his assumptions, the phone rang again. It was May nineteenth. He would remember that date because it was his parent's anniversary--or would have been, had his parents been alive--and his mother had once told him that he had been conceived of her wedding night. This fact had always appealed to him--being able to pinpoint the first moment of his existence--and over the years he had privately celebrated his birthday on that day. This time it was somewhat earlier than on the other two nights--not yet eleven o'clock--and as he reached for the phone he assumed it was someone else.
"Hello?" he said Again, there was a silence on the other end. Quinn knew at once that it was the stranger.
"Hello?" he said again. "What can I do for you?" "Yes," said the voice at last. The same mechanical whisper, the same desperate tone. "Yes. It is indeed now. Without delay." "What is needed?" "To speak. Right now. To speak right now. Yes." "And who do you want to speak to?" "Always the same man. Auster. The one who calls himself Paul Auster. This time Quinn did not hesitate. He knew what he was going to do, and now that the time had come, he did it. "Speaking," he said. "This is Paul Auster speaking."
in the city of glass by Paul Auster
These wondering inside our thoughts for hours and don’t find nothing, I call this silence. Quinn lives in this silence, pretending and yearning to be someone else. This inner search is then replaced by a new identity. He masks him self with different characters and because he is too much absorb with his own world he is out of the world.
I have the feeling that Quinn in “the city of glass” is an outsider. He lives in a state of mind. He is really involved with his own thoughts and speculations about others. Not with others.
How much does he get involve?
What is he really looking for?
And us, the readers:
Are we just sitting there like Humpty Dumpty, playing with words and never dare to fall …and if we don’t fall, how can we be human?
In the story "Through the looking glass" by Lewis Carrol, Humpty Dumpty never actually fall out of the wall, so he never breaks.
If humpty dumpty is a metaphor for human kind , and
If we all are sitting on a wall, what are we trying to restore? What was never broken?
Are we like Humpty, eggs, so not born yet?
His he alive? Yes, but not a living soul.
Being a living soul means being involve with, being a part of .In the bible sense, dust of the ground. I will explain with a quote from the Bible:
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” GENESIS
Being involved or a part of something it’s to make choices and be full aware of our responsibility and commitment with life, because we have a meaning.
To be a living soul is an active process. So when you say that advertising creative are Humpty Dumtpys sitting on the wall, I laugh and agree! Many of them are, you are right, because they forget to be complete human beings that have a soul that have a meaning for existing. And they put them selves in a position of outsiders looking in.
I’m writing about Humpty Dumtpy and “the city of glass” because I read an article that a friend wrote about the book “the city of glass” by Paul Auster. And he wanted to know what I thought about it, so I decided to tell here.
He lifts all these interesting questions related with some issues up bring by the book. For all of you that didn’t reed the book (you should), the fundamental questions raise by the book are: the fall of civilization, the loss of language, the isolation of the post modern human, and how people live divide by thin glass walls.
About the article and for the Portuguese people is from the magazine called Alice page 65. so if you are interested go and find it.
Well, I liked very much the article and he is really sarcastic to the advertising creative guys.
The fundamental question that he puts in the article is:
If is just creative that live in some kind of virtual existence that is about to become real but never achieves its potential? (I don’t know if he agrees with this translation, I did my best)
And I would say to him that I don’t think it is just them, and is something that I have notice in all kind of creative people; movie directors, writers...It’s a fashion or maybe a psychological mutation that human kind is experiencing, this mutation can be describe as a desire for emotional bond without giving your self completely .
People want to be loved and at the same time stay sited on the wall ... so what we have is a bunch of people in love with their own thoughts, sitting in tall buildings looking at their self reflection.
1 comment:
Yes, there's some sarcasm in the article, but the main idea was more about the frustrations wich people have to deal constantly concerning lost ideas, half-commitments, so-so relationships. We live by halfs, maybe that's way people always dream about living life to it's full.
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