Literature as False Doors

Of the thousands of answers I’ve given myself—during painful, feverish nights or nightmare-filled days, while I’m teaching and the students are writing an essay, or in a shoe store, icy bus stations, or waiting outside a doctor’s office—to the question of why I never became a writer, one answer seems truer than any other in its paradoxicality and ambiguity. I have read all the books, and I have never known a single author. I have heard all the voices, with schizophrenic clarity, but no real voice has ever spoken to me. I have wandered through thousands of rooms of the museum of literature, charmed at first by the art with which a door was painted on every wall, in trompe l’oeil, meticulously matching each splinter of wood with a pointed shadow, each coating of paint with a feeling of fragility and transparence that made you admire the artists of illusion more than you’ve ever admired anything, but in the end, after hundreds of kilometers of corridors of false doors, with the ever-stronger smell of oil paints and thinners in the stale air, the route ceases to be a contemplative stroll and becomes first a state of disquiet, then a breathless panic. Each door fools you and disappoints you, and the more completely you are fooled, the more it hurts. They are wonderfully painted, but they do not open. Literature is a hermetically sealed museum, a museum of illusionary doors, of artists worrying over the nuance of beige and the most expressive imitation of a knocker, hinge, or doorknob, the velvety black of the keyhole. All it takes is for you to close your eyes and run your fingers over the continuous, unending wall to understand that nowhere in the house of literature are there any openings or fissures. But, seduced by the grandeur of the doors loaded with basreliefs and cabalistic symbols, or by the humility of a peasant’s kitchen door, one that has a pork bladder stretched in place of a window, you don’t feel like closing your eyes, on the contrary, you’d prefer a thousand eyes for the thousand false exits arranged before you. Like sex, like drugs, like all the manipulations of our minds that attempt to break out of the skull, literature is a machine for producing first beatitude, then disappointment. After you’ve read tens of thousands of books, you can’t help but ask yourself: while I was doing that, where did my life go? You’ve gulped down the lives of others, which always lack a dimension in comparison to the world in which you exist, however amazing their tours of artistic force may be. You have seen colors of others and felt the bitterness and sweetness and potential and exasperation of other consciousnesses, to the point that they have eclipsed your own sensations and pushed them into the shadows. If only you could pass into the tactile space of beings other than you—but again and again, you were only rolled between the fingertips of literature. Unceasingly, in a thousand voices, it promised you escape, while it robbed you of even the frozen crust of reality that you once had.

–Solenoid, Mircea Cărtărescu