Page 21: This unlikeliest of fictions. To think of another life. A dog’s. Dreaming of heavens. A beyond: Timbuktu.
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In one of Willy’s schizophrenic moments, while talking to Mr. Bones, Henry James and James Joyce are thrown in together with other “American know-how” that “keeps coming at you, and every minute there’s new junk to push out the old junk.”
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Again, Willy: “I was reading a book. The Magic Mountain it was, written by Thomas Mann… I never finished the damned thing, by the way, it was so boring, but said Herr Mann was a muckety-muck, a hotshot in the Writers Hall of Fame, and I figured I should take a look.”
*
And so that’s what it meant to be human, Mr. Bones must have thought. To aspire for a certain literacy. To have a culture, and then to laugh at it, to think it unnecessary–waste even–in order to live life, a life, no matter what, after all.
Filed under: 1001 Lists & Beyond Tagged: 1001 Books You Must Read, Paul Auster
