Anne

"From the window in that room, facing out the backyard, you can see the rear windows of a house where Descartes once lived. There are children's swings in the yard now, toys scattered in the grass, pretty little flowers. As he looked out the window that day, he wondered if the children those toys belonged to had any idea of what happened fifty years earlier in the spot where he was standing. And if they did, what would it be like to grow up in the shadow of her room?
To repeat Pascal: "All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room." At roughly the same time these words entered the Pensées, Descartes wrote to a friend in France from his room in that house in Amsterdam: "Is there any country," he asked with exuberance, "in which one can enjoy freedom as enormously as one does here?" Everything, in some sense, can be read as a gloss on everything else. To imagine her, for example, had she lived on after the war, reading Descartes' Meditations as a university student in Amsterdam. To imagine a solitude so crushing, so unconsolable, that one stops breathing for hundreds of years.

Paul Auster: Collected Prose