Never Any End to Paris Read Online Free PDF

millimeter, your ‘home’: to belong completely in your village, knowing you’re a true inhabitant of the Cévennes, or of Poitou.
    Or else to own only the clothes you stand up in, to keep nothing, to live in hotels and change them frequently, and change towns, and change countries; to speak and read any one of four or five languages; to feel at home nowhere, but at ease almost everywhere.”
    I enjoyed myself hugely yesterday when I again met those lines of Perec’s, which I summarized on a sheet of paper like this: “In short, going out with one’s grandchildren to pick blackberries along the narrow paths of the nationalists, or traveling and losing countries, losing them all traveling in the lit-up trains of the nocturnal world, being forever a foreigner.”

15
     
    I do think irony is a powerful device for de-activating reality. But what happens when we see something we’ve seen, for example, in a photograph, and suddenly we see it
in real life
? Is it possible to be ironic about reality, to disbelieve it, when we are seeing something that’s
real
?
    Perec in
Species of Spaces
: “Seeing something in real life that for a long time was just an image in an old dictionary: a geyser, a waterfall, the bay of Naples, the place where Gavrilo Princip was standing when he shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sofia, the Duchess of Hohenberg, on the corner of Franz Josef Street and Appel Quay, in Sarajevo, across from the Simie Brothers’ Tavern, on June 28, 1914, at a quarter past eleven.”
    Ironic or not, the questions I now ask myself are these: Does reality really exist? Can you really see something
in real life
? In terms of reality, I share Proust’s opinion, who said that unfortunately our sad, fragmented, far-sighted eyes can perhaps allow us to measure distances, but they don’t give us directions: the infinite
field of possibilities
stretches out, and if by chance reality appeared before us it would be so far removed from possibility that, in a sudden faint, we would collide with this wall that suddenly appeared and fall down stunned.
    What do we see, then, when we think we are seeing something
in real life
? I would say that, when this happens, when it looks like we are faced with reality, we are more than permitted to be ironic about it, even if only to ward off the possible chance appearance of what is really real and the wall that would leave us knocked out, without any irony at all.
    I can think of lots of occasions when it could be said that I
saw
something
in real life
, visions I later wondered whether I should treat ironically — in essence a way of admitting I believed in this truth — commenting, for example, on the luck I’d had in not really having seen this reality, since I would have been knocked unconscious; or else I could do without irony entirely and take very seriously what I’d just
seen in real life
, then try and move towards an irony without words, that is, make use of a silence of profound stupor,
reinvent
irony.
    One night I dreamed I went down in history as the man who reinvented irony. I lived in a book that was a huge cemetery where, on most of the tombstones, the names of the different kinds of irony had worn away.

16
     
    “I saw eternity the other night,” wrote Henry Vaughan in a daring line. Whether he saw it or not, I hereby send the poet my utmost respect. This line of his appears indisputable, mainly because, as Celan would say, nobody bears witness for the witness. The syntactic crack of the whip recalls the unforgettable ending of the movie
Blade Runner
when the character who’s about to die begins his poetic sermon with the tremulous, moving and very true
“I’ve seen . . .”
    I’ve seen
in real life
the study in the house in Coyoacán, Mexico, where Trotsky was killed. I’d seen it before in the cinema. The movie Joseph Losey made about Trotsky’s assassination was filmed on location, as the scene was still intact thirty years after the