Paul Auster, "Why write?"

Li este artigo há muito tempo, solto pela internet. Às vezes lembrava da amiga alemã grávida, mas tinha preguiça de procurar para reler. Agora encontrei o texto no Google Books. The red notebook: true stories, p. 61.

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Paul Auster, Life and Letters, “WHY WRITE?,” The New Yorker, December 25, 1995, p. 86.


ABSTRACT: LIFE AND LETTERS relating five real-life anecdotes:

1. A German friend told of watching an Audrey Hepburn movie, "The Nun's Story,O a 1950's Hollywood drama. She had settled in to watch but was interrupted when she went into labor; at the end of her second pregnancy, she turned on the television and by coincidence watched the end of the same movie starting at the exact moment she had left off.

2. Writer caught his young daughter as she tumbled down the stairs.

3. When writer was 14, he attended a summer camp, got lost in the woods with a group of people; a thunderstorm came and the boy directly ahead of him was somehow struck by lightning and died.

4. Writer received a letter from a woman who lives in Brussels that told the story of a man who was captured by the Nazis in 1940 and kept in a prison camp. Years after the war, his son fell in love with the daughter of a guard.

5. Writer, age 8, attended a baseball game where he saw Willie Mays after the end, already in his street clothes. Writer asked him for an autograph, but neither he, his parents, his parents friends, nor Mays had a pencil. Writer grew very upset, and after that always had a pencil. If nothing else, the years have taught writer this: if there's a pencil in your pocket, there's a good chance that one day you'll feel tempted to start using it. As I like to tell my children, that's how I became a writer.