September 2011
15 posts
Paul Auster
Listen carefully.
About twenty-five years ago, a young man went skiing alone in the Alps.
There was an avalanche, the snow swallowed him up, and his body was never recovered.
The end?
No, not the end. The beginning.
His son was just a little boy at the time, but the years passed,
and when he grew up, he became a skier, too.
One day last winter, he went out by himself for a run down the mountain. He gets halfway to the bottom and then stops to eat his lunch next to a big rock.
Just as he’s unwrapping his cheese sandwich, he looks down and sees a body, right
there at his feet, frozen in the ice….
He bends down to take a closer look, and suddenly he feels that he’s looking into a mirror,
that he’s looking at himself.
There he is - dead – and the body is perfectly intact, frozen in a block of ice
- like someone preserved in suspended animation.
He gets down on all fours, looks right into the dead man’s face, and realizes that he’s
looking at his father.
And the strange thing is that the father is younger than the son is now.
The boy has become a man,
and it turns out that he’s older than his own father.
