Talking to Strangers

by Paul Auster

  There is no law that requires New York City to give financial assistance to its museums. It does so because it feels a responsibility to support the cultural life of the city, because it feels that art has value. And once you get involved in art, you have to let the chips fall where they may. Otherwise—you’re not involved in art, you’re involved in politics.

  The beauty of art is that it’s free—and because it’s free, it’s unpredictable. Sometimes it shakes us up, sometimes it challenges us, sometimes it inspires us, sometimes it disgusts us. Why be disturbed by that? Do we have so little faith in our own ideas and beliefs that we think a work of art can destroy them? What I think is ugly, you might find beautiful. That’s good, isn’t it? As someone once said, that’s what makes the world go round, isn’t it?

  What grieves me about this controversy is that the thing that makes New York a great city—its spirit of tolerance, its openness to new ideas and different opinions—is the very thing that has come under attack. Mayor Giuliani should know better. He’s playing politics with art—and even if he doesn’t know much about art (and therefore knows what he doesn’t like)—his recent statements show that he doesn’t know much about politics either. This is a democracy, Mr. Mayor. Please remember that.

  October 1, 1999

  Reflections on a Cardboard Box

  It’s a cold and drizzly morning, eleven days before the end of the twentieth century. I am sitting in my house in Brooklyn, glad that I don’t have to go out into that bleak December weather. I can sit here as long as I like, and even if I do go out at some point later in the day, I know that I will be able to return. Within a matter of minutes I will be warm and dry again.

  I own this house. I bought it seven years ago by scraping together enough cash to cover one-fifth of the total price. The other 80 percent I borrowed from a bank. The bank has given me thirty years to pay off the loan, and every month I sit down and write them another check. After seven years, I have barely made a dent in the principal. The bank charges me for the service of holding the mortgage, and nearly every penny I have given them so far has gone toward reducing the interest I owe them. I don’t complain. I’m happy to be spending this extra money (more than twice the amount of the loan) because it gives me a chance to live in this house. And I like it here. Especially on a raw and ugly morning like this one, I can think of no other place in the world where I’d rather be.

  It costs me a lot of money to live here, but not as much as it would seem at first glance. When I pay my taxes in April, I’m allowed to deduct the entire amount I’ve spent on interest over the course of the year. It comes right off my income, no questions asked. The federal government does this for me, and I’m immensely grateful to them. Why shouldn’t I be? It saves me thousands of dollars every year.

  In other words, I accept welfare from the government. They have rigged things in such a way as to make it possible for a person like me to own a house. Everyone in the country agrees that this is a good idea, and not once have I heard of a congressman or a senator stepping forth to propose that this law be changed. In the past few years, welfare programs for the poor have been all but dismantled, but housing subsidies for the rich are still in place.

  The next time you see a man living in a cardboard box, remember this.

  The government encourages home ownership because it is good for business, good for the economy, good for public morale. It is also the universal dream, the American dream in its purest and most essential form. America measures itself as a civilization by this standard, and whenever we want to prove how successful we are, we begin by trotting out statistics which show that a greater percentage of our citizens own their own homes than anywhere else in the world. “Housing starts” is the key economic term, the bedrock indicator of our financial health. The more houses we build, the more money we will make, and the more money we make, the happier everyone will be.

  And yet, as everyone knows, there are millions of people in this country who will never own a house, who struggle every month just to come up with the rent. We also know that there are many others who fall behind with the rent and are forced out onto the streets. We call them the homeless, but what we are really talking about is people who have no money. As with everything else in America, it comes down to a question of money.

  A man does not live in a cardboard box because he wants to. He might be mentally deranged, he might be addicted to drugs, or he might be an alcoholic, but he is not in the box because he suffers from these problems. I have known dozens of madmen in my time, and many of them lived in beautiful houses. Show me the book in which it is written that an alcoholic is doomed to sleep on the sidewalk. He is just as likely to be driven around town by a chauffeur in a black hat. There is no cause and effect at work here. You live in a cardboard box because you can’t afford to live anywhere else.

  These are difficult days for the poor. We have entered a period of enormous prosperity, but as we rush down the highway of larger and larger profits, we forget that untold numbers of people are falling by the wayside. Wealth creates poverty. That is the secret equation of a free-market economy. We don’t like to talk about it, but as the rich get richer and find themselves with greater and greater amounts of money to spend, prices have been going up. No one has to be told what has happened to the New York real estate market in the past several years. Housing costs have soared beyond what anyone would have thought possible just a short time ago. Even I, proud homeowner that I am, would not be able to afford my own house if I had to buy it today. For many others, the increases have spelled the difference between having a place to live and not having a place to live. For some people, it has been the difference between life and death.

  Bad luck can hit any one of us at any time. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of the various things that could do us in. Every person lives with the idea of his own destruction, and even the happiest and most successful person has some dark corner in his brain where horror stories are continually played out. You imagine that your house burns down. You imagine that you lose your job. You imagine that someone who depends on you comes down with an illness, and the medical bills wipe out your savings. Or else you gamble away your savings on a bad investment or a bad roll of the dice. Most of us are only one disaster away from genuine hardship. A series of disasters can ruin us. There are men and women wandering the streets of New York who were once in positions of apparent safety. They have college degrees. They held responsible jobs and supported their families. Now they have fallen on hard times, and who are we to think that such things couldn’t happen to us?

  For the past several months, a terrible debate has been poisoning the air of New York about what to do with them. What we should be talking about is what to do with ourselves. It is our city, after all, and what happens to them also happens to us. The poor are not monsters because they have no money. They are people who need help, and it doesn’t help any of us to punish them for being poor. The new rules proposed by the current administration are not just cruel in my opinion, they don’t make any sense. If you sleep on the street now, you will be arrested. If you go to a shelter, you will have to work for your bed. If you don’t work, you will be thrown back onto the street—and there you will be arrested again. If you are a parent, and you don’t comply with the work regulations, your children will be taken from you. The people who defend these ideas all profess to be devout, God-fearing men and women. They should know that every religion in the world insists on the importance of charity—not just as something to be encouraged, but as an obligation, as an essential part of one’s relationship to God. Why has no one bothered to tell these people that they are hypocrites?

  Meanwhile, it is getting later. Several hours have gone by since I sat down at my desk and began writing these words. I haven’t stirred in all that time. The heat is rattling in the pipes, and the room is warm. Outside, the sky is dark, and the wind is lashing the rain against the side of the house. I have no answers, no advice to give, no sug
gestions. All I ask is that you think about the weather. And then, if you can, that you imagine yourself inside a cardboard box, doing your best to stay warm. On a day like today, for example, eleven days before the end of the twentieth century, out in the cold and the clamor of the New York streets.

  December 20, 1999

  Random Notes—September 11, 2001—4:00 PM

  Our fourteen-year-old daughter started high school today. For the first time in her life, she rode on the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan—alone.

  She will not be coming home tonight. The subways are no longer running in New York, and my wife and I have arranged for her to stay with friends on the Upper West Side.

  Less than an hour after she passed under the World Trade Center, the Twin Towers crumbled to the ground.

  From the top floor of our house, we can see the smoke filling the sky of the city. The wind is blowing toward Brooklyn today, and the smells of the fire have settled into every room of the house. A terrible, stinging odor: flaming plastic, electric wire, building materials, incinerated bodies.

  My wife’s sister, who lives in TriBeCa, just ten blocks north of what was once the World Trade Center, called to tell us about the screams she heard after the first tower collapsed. Friends of hers, who live on John Street, even closer to the site of the catastrophe, were evacuated by police after the door of their building was blown in by the impact. They walked north through the rubble and debris—which, they told her, contained human body parts.

  After watching the news on television all morning, my wife and I went out for a walk in the neighborhood. Many people were wearing handkerchiefs over their faces. Some wore painters’ masks. I stopped and talked to the man who cuts my hair, who was standing in front of his empty barbershop with an anguished look on his face. A few hours earlier, he said, the woman who owns the antique shop next door had been on the phone with her son-in-law—who had been trapped in his office on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. Less than an hour after she spoke to him, the tower collapsed.

  All day, as I have watched the horrific images on the television screen and looked at the smoke through the window, I have been thinking about my friend, the high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who walked between the towers of the World Trade Center in August 1974, just after construction of the buildings was completed. A small man dancing on a wire more than five hundred yards off the ground—an act of indelible beauty.

  Today, that same spot has been turned into a place of death. It frightens me to contemplate how many people have been killed.

  We all knew this could happen. We have been talking about the possibility for years, but now that the tragedy has struck, it’s far worse than anyone ever imagined. The last foreign attack on American soil occurred in 1812. We have no precedent for what has happened today, and the consequences of this assault will no doubt be terrible. More violence, more death, more pain for everyone.

  And so the twenty-first century finally begins.

  September 11, 2001

  Underground

  Riding the subway at a busy time of day—morning rush hour, evening rush hour—and having the good luck to find a seat. Counting the number of newspapers not written in English, scanning the titles of books and watching people read (the mystery of it, the impossibility of entering another person’s mind), listening in on conversations, sneaking a look at the baseball scores over someone’s shoulder.

  The thin men with their briefcases, the voluminous women with their Bibles and devotional pamphlets, the high school kids with their forty-pound textbooks. Trashy novels, comic books, Melville and Tolstoy, How to Attain Inner Peace.

  Looking across the aisle at one’s fellow passengers and studying their faces. Marveling at the variety of skin tones and features, floored by the singularity of each person’s nose, each person’s chin, exulting in the infinite shufflings of the human deck.

  The panhandlers with their out-of-tune songs and tales of woe; the fractious harangues of born-again proselytizers; the deaf-mutes politely placing sign-language alphabet cards in your lap; the silent men who scuttle through the car selling umbrellas, tablecloths, and cheap wind-up toys.

  The noise of the train, the speed of the train. The incomprehensible static that pours through the loudspeaker at each stop. The lurches, the sudden losses of balance, the impact of strangers crashing into one another. The delicate, altogether civilized art of minding one’s own business.

  And then, never for any apparent reason, the lights go out, the fans stop whirring, and everyone sits in silence, waiting for the train to start moving again. Never a word from anyone. Rarely even a sigh. My fellow New Yorkers sit in the dark, waiting with the patience of angels.

  October 11, 2001

  NYC = USA

  Every day for a year, I read stories. The stories were short, true, and personal, and they were sent to me by men and women from all over America. On the first Saturday of every month, I would gather up some of my favorite ones and read them aloud on NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered. We called the program the National Story Project, and in that year (October 1999 to October 2000) I received over four thousand submissions. They were written by country people and city people, by old people and young people, by people from all walks of life: farmers and priests, housewives and ex-soldiers, businessmen and doctors, postmen and meter readers, a restorer of player pianos, a trolley-bus driver, and several inmates at state correctional facilities.

  Early on, I noticed a distinct and surprising trend. The only city that anyone ever wanted to talk about was New York. Not just New Yorkers, but people from every part of the country, some of whom had lived here in the past and regretted having moved away, some of whom had visited only once. In nearly every one of their stories, New York wasn’t simply the backdrop for the events that were told, it was the subject of the story itself. Crazy New York, inspiring New York, fractious New York, ugly New York, beautiful New York, impossible New York—New York as the ultimate human spectacle of our time. America has had a tortured, even antagonistic relationship with our city over the years, but to an astonishing number of people from Michigan, Maine, and Nebraska, the five boroughs are a living embodiment of what the United States is all about: diversity, tolerance, and equality under the law. Alone among American cities, New York is more than just a place or an agglomeration of people. It is also an idea.

  I believe that idea took hold in us when Emma Lazarus’s poem was affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Bartholdi’s gigantic effigy was originally intended as a monument to the principles of international republicanism, but “The New Colossus” reinvented the statue’s purpose, turning Liberty into a welcoming mother, a symbol of hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world. New York has continued to represent the spirit of that message, and even today, 116 years after the unveiling of the statue, we still define ourselves as a city of immigrants. With 40 percent of our current population born in foreign countries, we are a cross-section of the entire world. It is a densely crowded ethnic hodgepodge, and the potential for chaos is enormous. No one would contend that we are not bedeviled by a multitude of problems, but when you think of what ethnic differences have done to cities like Sarajevo, Belfast, and Jerusalem, New York stands out as a shining example of civic peace and order.

  The murderous attacks on the World Trade Center last September were rightly construed as an assault against the United States. New Yorkers felt that way, too, but it was our city that was bombed, and even as we wrestled to understand the hateful fanaticism that could lead to the deaths of three thousand innocent people, we experienced that day as a family tragedy. Most of us went into a state of intense mourning, and we dragged ourselves around in the days and months that followed engulfed by a sense of communal grief. It was that close to all of us, and I doubt there is a single New Yorker who doesn’t know someone or someone who knows someone else who didn’t lose at least one friend or relative in the attack. Compute the numbers, and the results are staggeri
ng. Three thousand people in addition to their immediate families, their extended families, their friends, their neighbors, and their coworkers, and suddenly you’re in the millions.

  Last September 11 was one of the worst days in American history, but the dreadful cataclysm that occurred that morning was also an occasion for deep reflection, a time for all of us to stop and examine who we were and what we believed in. As it happened, I spent a good deal of time on the road last fall, cohosting events with Jacki Lyden of NPR in connection with the release of the National Story Project anthology, I Thought My Father Was God. We traveled from Boston to San Francisco and points in between, and in each city contributors to the book read their stories in public to large and attentive audiences. I talked to scores of people on those trips, perhaps hundreds of people, and nearly every one of them told me the same thing. In the aftermath of September 11, they were reassessing the values of our country, trying to figure out what separated us from the people who had attacked us. Almost without exception, the single word they used was democracy. That is the bedrock creed of American life: a belief in the dignity of the individual, a tolerant embrace of our cultural and religious differences. No matter how often we fail to live up to those ideals, that is America at its best—the very principles that are a constant, daily reality in New York.

  It has been a year now. When the Bush administration launched its War on Terrorism by invading Afghanistan, we in New York were still busy counting our dead. We watched in horror as the smoking ruins of the towers were gradually cleared; we attended funerals with empty coffins; we wept. Even now, as the international situation turns ever more perilous, we are largely preoccupied with the debate over how to build a fitting memorial to the victims of the attack, trying to solve the problem of how to reconstruct that devastated area of our city. No one is sorry that the Taliban regime has been ousted from power, but when I talk to my fellow New Yorkers these days, I hear little but disappointment in what our government has been up to. Only a small minority of New Yorkers voted for George W. Bush, and most of us tend to look at his policies with suspicion. He simply isn’t democratic enough for us. He and his cabinet have not encouraged open debate of the issues facing the country. With talk of an imminent invasion of Iraq now circulating in the press, increasing numbers of New Yorkers are becoming apprehensive. From the vantage point of Ground Zero, it looks like a global catastrophe in the making.