Free The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster Page A

anything else, it probably kept me from going insane.
    In late April, I wrote to Smits and asked him to extend my leave of absence through the fall semester. I was still undecided about my long-range plans, I said, but unless things changed dramatically for me in the next few months, I was probably finished with teaching—if not for good, then at least for a long while. I hoped he would forgive me. It wasn’t that I had lost interest. I just wasn’t sure if my legs would hold me when I stood up and tried to talk in front of students.
    I was slowly getting used to being without Helen and the boys, but that didn’t mean I had made any progress. I didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t know what I wanted, and until I found a way to live with other people again, I would continue to be something only half human. All through the writing of the book, I intentionally put off thinking about the future. A sensible plan would have been to stay in New York, to buy some furniture for the apartment I had rented and begin a new life there, but when the moment came for me to take the next step, I decided against it and returned to Vermont. I was in the last throes of revising the manuscript then, getting ready to type up the final draft and submit the book for publication, when it suddenly occurred to me that New York was the book, and once the book was over I should leave New York and go somewhere else. Vermont was probably the worst choice I could have made, but it was familiar ground to me, and I knew that if I went back there I would be close to Helen again, that I would be able to breathe the same air we had breathed together when she was still alive. There was comfort in that thought. I couldn’t go back to the old house in Hampton, but there were other houses in other towns, and as long as I remained in the general area, I could carry on with my crazed, solitary life without having to turn my back on the past. I wasn’t ready to let go yet. It had been only a year and a half, and I wanted my grief to continue. All I needed was another project to work on, another ocean to drown myself in.
    I wound up buying a place in the town of West T——, about twenty-five miles south of Hampton. It was a ridiculous little house, a kind of prefab ski chalet with wall-to-wall carpeting and an electric fireplace, but its ugliness was so extreme that it verged on the beautiful. It had no charm or character, no lovingly wrought details to delude one into thinking it could ever become a home. It was a hospital for the living dead, a way station for the mentally afflicted, and to inhabit those blank, depersonalized interiors was to understand that the world was an illusion that had to be reinvented every day. For all the flaws in its design, however, the dimensions of the house struck me as ideal. They weren’t so large that you felt lost in them, and they weren’t so small that you felt hemmed in. There was a kitchen with skylights in the ceiling; a sunken living room with a picture window and two empty walls high enough to accommodate shelves for my books; a loggia overlooking the living room; and three identically proportioned bedrooms: one for sleeping, one for working, and one for storing the things I no longer had the heart to look at but couldn’t bring myself to throw away. It was the right size and shape for a man who meant to live alone, and it had the further advantage of complete isolation. Situated halfway up a mountain and surrounded by thick stands of birch, spruce, and maple trees, it was accessible only by dirt road. If I didn’t want to see anyone, I didn’t have to. More important, no one would have to see me.
    I moved in just after the first of the year, 1987, and for the next six weeks I devoted myself to practical matters: building bookcases, installing a wood-burning stove, selling my car and replacing it with a four-wheel-drive pickup truck. The mountain was treacherous when it snowed, and since it snowed nearly all