A Perpetual Outsider, A Tourist Of His Own Life

It happened that green and crazy summer It was a summer when for long time she´d not been a member She belonged to no club, and she was a member of nothing in the world, And she was afraid.
- Jarvis Cocker
Big Julie.

...It was a life that suited him, and I can see why he went back to it after his marriage broke up. For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying in the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than this surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself -and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths. When the door is open, there is never any problem: you can always escape. You can avoid unwanted confrontations, either with yourself or with another, simply by walking away. His capacity for evation was almost limitless. Because the domain of others was unreal to him, his incursions into that domain were made with a part of himself he considered to be equally unreal, another self he had trained as an actor to represent him in the empty comedy of the world at large. This surrogate self was essentially a tease, a hyperactive child, a fabricator of tall tales. It could not take anything seriously. ...Because nothing mattered, he gave himself the freedom to do anything he wanted, and the charm he exercised to make his conquests was precisely what made these conquests meaningless. Whenever a situation became too tight for him, whenever he felt pushed to the verge of having to reveal himself, he would wriggle out of it by telling a lie. Eventually, the lie came automatically and was indulged in for it´s own sake. The principle was to say as little as possibly. If people never learned the truth about him, then they couldn´t turn around and use it against him later. The lie was a way of buying protection. What people saw when he appeared before them, then, was not really him, but a person he had invented, an artificial creature he could manipulate in order to manipulate others. He himself remained invisible, a puppeteer working the strings of his alter ego form a dark, solitary place behind the curtain. (...) He had managed to elude them all. Talking to him was a trying experience. Either he would be absent, as he usually was, or he would assault you with a brittle jocularity, which was merely another form of abscence. (...) A man without appetites. You felt that nothing could ever intrude on him, that he had no need of anything the world had to offer... Solitary, but not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself seen by anyone else.

- Paul Auster.
The Invention of Solitude

La vida es maravillosa. La vida es una fiesta.