Winter Journal by Paul Auster Page A

dreams had stopped.
    8. 601 West 115th Street; Manhattan. Another oddly shaped two-room apartment just off Broadway, but in a far more solid building than the last one, with the further advantage of having a true kitchen, which stood between the larger room and the smaller room and was big enough (barely) to squeeze in a runty, drop-leaf table. Age 20 to 22. Your first solo apartment, continuously dark because of its location onthe second floor, but otherwise adequate, comfortable, sufficient to your needs of the moment. You spent your junior and senior years there, which were the wild years at Columbia, the years of demonstrations and sit-ins, of student strikes and police raids, of campus riots, expulsions, and paddy wagons carting off hundreds to jail. You diligently slogged through your course work, contributed film and book reviews to the student paper, wrote poems and translated poems, completed several chapters of a novel you eventually abandoned, but in 1968 you also participated in the weeklong sit-ins that led to your being thrown into a paddy wagon and driven downtown to a holding cell in the Tombs. As mentioned before, you had long since given up fighting, and you weren’t about to tangle with the police when they smashed in the door of the room in Mathematics Hall where you and several other students were waiting to be arrested, but neither were you going to cooperate and walk out of there on your own two feet. You let your body grow limp—the classic strategy of passive resistance developed in the South during the civil rights movement—thinking the cops would carry you out of there without any fuss, but the members of the Tactical Patrol Force were angry that night, the campus they had invaded was turning into a bloody battleground, and they had no interest in your nonviolent, highly principled approach to the matter. They kicked you and pulled you by the hair, and when you still refused to climb to your feet, one of them stomped on your hand with the heel of his boot—a direct hit, which left your knuckles swollen and throbbing for days afterward. In the next morning’sedition of the Daily News , there was a photograph of you being dragged off to the paddy wagon. The caption read Stubborn Boy , and no doubt that was exactly what you were at that moment of your life: a stubborn, uncooperative boy.
    9. 262 West 107th Street; Manhattan. Yet another two-room apartment with a sit-down kitchen, but not oddly shaped as the others had been, a large room and a somewhat smaller room, but the small room was nevertheless ample, nothing like the coffin-sized spaces of the previous two. The top floor of a nine-story building between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, which meant more light than in any of the other New York apartments, but a shoddier building than the last one, with sluggish, haphazard maintenance by the cheerful super, a stout, barrel-chested man named Arthur. Age 22 to a couple of weeks past your 24th birthday, a year and a half in all. You lived there with your girlfriend, the first time either one of you had attempted cohabitation with a member of the opposite sex. The first year, your girlfriend was finishing her B.A. at Barnard and you were a graduate student in the Columbia doctoral program in comparative literature, but you were only biding your time, you knew from the start that you would last no longer than one year, but the university had given you a fellowship and a stipend, so you worked on your M.A. thesis, which turned into a sixty-page essay called “The Art of Hunger” (which examined works by Hamsun, Kafka, Céline, and Beckett), consulted from time to time with your thesis advisor, Edward Said, attended a number of mandatory seminars, skipped your lecture classes,and went on writing your own fiction and poetry, some of which was beginning to be published in little magazines. When the year was over, you dropped out of the program as planned, quit student life forever, and went off to work