the eyes of others

You can't see yourself. 

You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, 

but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings,

 whether strangers or friends or the most intimate beloveds, 

your own face is invisible to you. 

 

You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, 

shoulders and torso, but only from the front, 

nothing of the back except the backs of your legs 

if you twist them into the right position,

 but not your face, never your face, and in the end -

 at least as far as others are concerned - your face is who you are,

 the essential fact of your identity. Passports do not contain pictures

 of hands and feet. Even you, who have lived inside your body

 for sixty-four years now, would probably be unable to recognize

 your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to speak of your ear,

 or your elbow, or one of your eyes in close-up. 

 

All so familiar to you in the context of the whole,

 but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. 

We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are,

 it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

~  Paul Auster

 

 

they fade away too

Words tend to last a bit longer than things, 

but eventually they fade too,

 along with the pictures they once evoked.

 Entire categories of objects disappear - flowerpots, for example,

 or cigarette filters, or rubber bands - and for a time

 you will be able to recognize those words,

 even if you cannot recall what they mean.

 But then, little by little, the words become only sounds,

 a random collection of glottals and fricatives, 

a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing

 just collapses into gibberish.

Paul Auster

from In the Country of Last Things

with thanks to whiskey river 

a walk

Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, 
and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, 
by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think,
 and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace,
 a salutary emptiness within… By wandering aimlessly, 
all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. 
On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. 
And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.

~ Paul Auster

from A Piece of Monologue