Timbuktu

1. Page 21: This unlikeliest of fictions. To think of another life. A dog's. Dreaming of heavens. A beyond: Timbuktu.

2. In one of Willy's schizophrenic moments, while talking to Mr. Bones, Henry James and James Joyce are thrown in together with other "American know-how" that "keeps coming at you, and every minute there's new junk to push out the old junk."

3. Again, Willy: "I was reading a book. The Magic Mountain it was, written by Thomas Mann... I never finished the damned thing, by the way, it was so boring, but said Herr Mann was a muckety-muck, a hotshot in the Writers Hall of Fame, and I figured I should take a look."

4. And so that's what it meant to be human, Mr. Bones must have thought. To aspire for a certain literacy. To have a culture, and then to laugh at it, to think it unnecessary--waste even--in order to live life, a life, after all.

~ After Paul Auster's Timbuktu (1999)