Free Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) by Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee

“I am not at liberty to divulge that.”
    In the end they stamped my passport and let me in. What it was all about I still don’t know. Perhaps I was just an elderly Caucasian randomly pulled out of the arrivals line to prove it is not only young men “of Middle Eastern appearance” who get harassed.
    “I am not at liberty to tell you what is wrong.” It can’t be much fun having to parrot such gobbledygook. But who would want to work for a service where you earn promotion not for the number of people you let through but for the number you turn back?
    But I was going to write about first impressions, not about immigration officials and their discontents. I was going to give you my first impressions of America after a long absence. Yet what strikes me now is how banal those first impressions were, and more generally how little of interest I have to say about foreign places, despite a lifetime of traveling.
    France, for instance: even after having wound my way around most of France on a bicycle, I can’t claim to have anything to say about the country that is fresh, new, worth saying. England, where I lived for years, or America, where I lived even longer, ditto. To say nothing about South Africa, where I was formed and spent most of my working life, or Australia, where I have lived for the past seven years. Memories, plenty of memories. Images, some of them quite vivid. But all of them trapped in their particularity, not generalizable. My experiences seem to remain my experiences alone, not relevant to other people.
    I seem to be afflicted with a peculiar kind of blindness. It’s not that I am incurious. On the contrary, everywhere I go my eyes are wide open, I am on the alert for signs. But the signs I pick up seem to have no general meaning. And the generalizability of the particular is the essence of realism, is it not? I have in mind realism as a way of seeing the world and recording it in such a way that particulars, though captured in all their uniqueness, seem yet to have meaning, to belong to a coherent system.
    What does a phenomenon like this mean: a more or less intelligent person like myself living in an age of easy travel, who as he nears the end of his life must recognize that his manifold experience of the visible world adds up to nothing worth retelling, that he might as well have spent his life in a library?
    Or is it perhaps that I have been picking up the wrong sort of signs—that the only signs I see, because of my idiosyncratic blindness, are signs that tell me that life is the same everywhere in the world, rather than signs of the distinctiveness of every tiny part of creation?
    If the born travel writer is preternaturally alert to signs of difference, am I the born anti–travel writer, alert only to signs of the same?
    The whole business puzzles me. I say to myself, You have just come back from a visit to the United States, what were your impressions? And again and again, blocking out every other image, comes a memory of a young man in nondescript clothing riding a battered old bicycle, nonchalantly, in the wrong direction, against the traffic, in a Manhattan street. What does it mean, this solitary, overriding image? Why, when I say to myself Give your impressions or Summon up your images , is this the only image that comes back? Is there some absurd faculty inside me trying to tell me the young man riding the wrong way says something about America in 2009?
    I travel but don’t write travel books. Nor do you; or perhaps you do, but publish them under a pseudonym: Peter Westermann, Nicole Brebis. Do you have first impressions that you trust? I don’t trust mine in the slightest.
Yours ever,
John

August 24, 2009
    Dear Paul,
    I have been thinking about names, about their fittingness or unfittingness. I would guess that names interest you too, if only because of having to find good, “right” names for your imaginary persons. Neither of us seems to go in for calling characters A or B or Pim