1Les entrées qui suivent pourraient assurément donner lieu à un tourbillon infini ; nous nous en tenons aux noms et vocables utilisés par l’auteur.

2Plusieurs termes font l’objet de connotations opposées. La chaîne associative apparaît en lorsque la symbolique est celle de la gravité, en 2. lorsqu’elle est celle de la légèreté.

3 Auster
as « A », as « He », alter ego, origin, I, anonymous, absence, America.

4art
writing, memory, hunger, action, life.

5astronomy
sky, stars, clouds, Sun, Earth, Moon, cf. signs, tamper with the universe. – cosmic retribution, cf. debt, cf. shame.
plenum, cf. pattern.

6 Blue/Black
cf. mirror.

7baseball
geometry (diamond shape), consciousness, permanence, past, memory.

8becoming
oneself, identity, awareness, ≠ being, the-work-to-be-done-that-is-done-in-the-process-of-doing-it, Pinocchio, Collodi, cf. father.

9bellybulging
with life, womb, reborn. – darkness, death, silence. – whale, Pinocchio, Jonah.

10Belonging
center, family, past, memory, spiritual

11contact, ≠ orphans, loose, cf. coat.

12blending
harmony, nature, innocence, cf. indian. – dissolve, disappear.

13BS/SB
Boris Stepanovich, Solomon Barber, Benjamin Sachs, Saul Bellow, Samuel Beckett.

14 Cassandra
a woman’s voice, past-present-future, solitude, abyss, Lycophron, Hölderlin, du Bouchet, deutungslos.

15cave
writing, art. – womb, rebirth, Central Park, Utah. – tomb, solitude, death.

16chance
as chance/luck would have it, coincidence, randomness, arbitrary, contingent, flukes. – music, Bach, Couperin.

17chaos
Heraclitus, change, yo-yo, flux, mutability, whirl, hectic motions of molecules, collisions, explosions. – ≠ baseball, ≠ memory, ≠ pattern.

18China
Marco Polo, Fogg, Kitty. – desire, destination, promised land, Canaan. – emptiness, nothing, cf. Moon.

19city
New York, Brooklyn, Amsterdam, Chicago. – loop, canyons, labyrinth, concentric circles, cf. oo. – glass, ghost, disappearance, invisible, Bartleby, Rip Van Winkle, Wakefield. – prison, concentration camp, wall, rampart, ≠ open.

20coat
1. badge of identity, belonging, contact. – 2. impostor, inadequate, garish, disguise (Fogg, George Ugly Mouth, Solomon Barber, Pozzi).

21collapse
chaos, entropy, deadness of the language, sloppiness, indeterminate. – disintegration, cf. dwindle.

22comedy
the world at large. – theater, farce, drama, lie, masquerade, final curtain call. – prelude, prologue, story, synopsis. – grotesque, ridiculous, pretended, make-believe. – game, April 1, cf. hoax.

23connection
connectedness, Jabès, correspondences, confluence, conjunction, clusters, pattern, plenum, Leibniz, monad, Spinoza, unifying principle, ≠ chaos.

24 darkness
room, tomb, skull, death, solitude, ink, writing. – black hole, eclipse, void. – wordless, obscure language. – Sam Auster, Henry Dark, Effing, Murks. – ≠ radiance.

25debt
money, inheritance, father. – to pay the price, fall, cf. shame, cf. indian.

26deception
delusion, fake, illusion, false reading, cf signs. – self-deception. – sham, cf. shame.

27D Q
Daniel Quinn, Don Quixote, cf. double.

28discipline
Anna Blume, Isabel, Fogg, Julian Barber, Nashe, Sachs. – rigor, charts, regimen, drastic, control, self-denial, selflessness. – ≠ inertia, despondency, detachment, indifference, selfishness, self-pity, self-involvement, lost, lose grip, loose, disconnected (Quinn, Ferdinand, Effing, Nashe).

29double
William Wilson, Poe, twin, blood brothers, confused identities. – authorship, author self, pseudonimity, cf. mirror.

30drift
adrift, floating, irresponsible, loose, slipping, inertia, despondency.

31dwindle
disintegrate, disappear, vanish, dissolve, subside, shrink, fade, run out, exhausted, used up, into thin air. – money, inheritance, food, body, notebook, voice, memory, space, time. – obliterate, cancel out, erase, strip, bare, cf. white.

32 failure
deadness of the language, Blanchot. – mistake, lost chances, fuck-up, useless, doomed. – impenetrability, Sphinxlike, riddle, cf. signs.

33fall
Effing, Barber, Sachs – divine sentence, cosmic retribution, expiation, cf. debt. – ≠ Adam, innocence, prelapsarian. – law of gravity ≠ love.

34father
the curse of the absent father, invisible man. – father/son : Sam Auster/Paul Auster, Paul Auster/Daniel, Rembrandt/Titus, Raleigh/wat, Mallarmé/Anatole, Aeneas/Anchises, Pinocchio/Gepetto, Quinn/dead son, Effing/Baiber, Barber/Fogg, Fogg/aborted child, Sam Farr/lost child, absent fàther/Willie, absent father/Nashe, absent fàther/Pozzi.

35fragment
1. memory, anecdote, knowledge. – 2. flotsam, waste, garbage, bits of junk, muck, dust, scraps, clump, mote, scavenging. – archipelagoes of matter, cipher of it-ness, cf. signs.

36 geometry
1. abstraction, elegance, symmetry, pattern, art, hunger, discipline. – 2. surge, association, chain of contact, organism, expansion. – cf. baseball, cf. memory.

37ghost
figment, illusion, ghost language, ghost-writing. – Americans writers, Whitman, Thoreau, Alcott, Beecher, Dickens, Lincoln, Hawthorne. — brains, guts, chamber pot.

38gravity
guilt, postlapsarian, godforsaken, cf. fall. – game, life, risk, freedom, cf. play. – ≠ love, negate the law of gravity.

39 hoax

40April 1, prank, joke, pun, charade, conundrum, riddle, enigma, make-believe. – game, cf. discipline. – cf. comedy.

41 indian
origin, idyll, harmony, blending, prelapsarian, innocence, Moonlight. – Pontiac, spoliation, Wounded Knee, Custer’s Last Stand. – Jewish, Japs.

42 labyrinth
1. associations, memory, gloss, Amsterdam. – 2. maze, canyons, confusion, lost, dissolve, New York, Utah.

43language
1. complex organism, monadology, the way we exist in the world. – cf. voice, cf. memory. – 2. Tower of Babel, signs, hieroglyphs, A. Gordon Pym, deutungslos, ghost, deadness of the language, wordless things and thingless words. – mobility, play, gratuitous, Typee, the sheer falsity of my assertion.

44last
hold off death, hold on, stretch out the time, schedules (Quinn, Anna Blume, Efffing, Fogg), cf. discipline, cf. dwindle.

45Leviathan
Moby Dick, Melville, America, the Statue of Liberty. – Thoreau, disobedience, militant refusai (Fogg, Sachs), cf. loose, cf. shame.

46locked / in
locked room, skull, conscience, memory, inwardness, city, prison, wall, southward, oblivion. – Van Gogh.
≠ open, out.

47loose
loose part in the national machine, misfit, outsider, tourist. – disconnecting, donating, throwing away, stripped, ≠ belonging.

48 memory
present : room, body, skull, solitude, inwardness, darkness. – past : Cicero, Fludd, Lull, Bruno, death, Memorial Day, archeology. – present/past : simultaneous, at once, nostalgia for the present, unhomeness, mankind, permanence, Pascal, Leibniz, Proust, Blanchot, Kierkegaard, Babel of tongues buzzing. – writing, manuscript, script, Jewish, speaking, cf. voice. – cf. baseball.

49miniature

50pocket of life, natural cave, Central Park, Utah, reborn. – scale-model, replica, ships, bottles, lilliputian, cf. dwindle. – cities of salt, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, A-bomb, cf. shame.

51mirror
text, plenum, monad, cf. B, cf. double, cf. watching.

52Moon
1. origin, Blume / bloom, past, Ooma, Numa, Blakelock, Moonlight, cf. indian. – 2. destination, Fogg, Cyrano, Verne, Apollo, future, China.

53 name
fragility, truncated, misnomer, flies off in many directions, ≠ badge of identity, cf. coat, cf. deception.

54number
lucky seven, magic, formula, mathematical. – nine circles, nine planets, nine innings, nine lives. – three, literary number, life, death, Jonah, Pinocchio, Central Park.

55 o / oo
Marco, Polo, Polo Shirt, Polo Grounds, Jerko, Dumbo, Orlando, Alonzo, Chicago. – loop, moon, room, Ohio, Brooklyn, Woodstock, Ooma, Solomon. – 1. death, tomb, doom, a great hole of nothingness, grave, Four Corners, nowhere, gravity, slowly lost its form, disappear. – 2. gathering zero, center, moon, baloon, beginning, reborn, womb, nine, love, a circle large enough to contain the world.

56open / out

57West, Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, Raleigh, open country, pioneer, discovery, Powell. – westward, car, escape, mobility, speed, weightlessness. – new, reborn, Pacific, moon, China. – ≠ city. – out of orbit, fly off, moon, drift, floating, weightlessness, wandering, cf. loose. – (walk) out on, irresponsible, freedom, solitude, ≠ belonging. – ≠ in.

58 pattern
order, plenum, separateness, ≠ chaos.

59play
game, cards, dice, poker, Blackjack, Solitaire, geometry, toy. – bet, life, risk, cf. debt, cf. shame. – Freud, cf. language.

60 radiance
transparent words, luminous, whole, fundamental truth. – Moon, youth. – Vermeer, ≠ Van Gogh, locked in, darkness.

61room
Zimmer, Hölderlin, Anne Frank, Cassandra, Dickinson, Van Gogh. – 1. cell, cave, hermetic, inwardness, skull, irreducible, solipsistic self, city, wall, cf. solitude. – 2. memory, entire universe, expand, unfathomable, miniature cosmology.

62 separate
1. irreducible, alien, internai exile, inwardness, Fanshawe. – 2. sharp clarity, distinct, defined, geometric simplicity, ≠ entropy.

63shame
guilt, sin, fault, blame, cf. indian. – retribution, punishment, sentence, the letter of the law. – purge, purify, penance, amend, redemption, remorse, mercy, saint, religious, fanatical, miracle, salvation, forgiveness, cf. debt. – godless, god-forsaken, unforgivable.

64shipwreck
Jonah, Pinocchio, Cassandra, Lord Royston. – shipwreck of the singular, George Oppen, silence, death, ≠ voice.

65signs
message, code, oracle, augury, omen, ambiguous signais. – names, numbers. record, decipher, crack, measure, investigate, interpret. – nominalism, numbers, magic, paranoia, false reading, false-hood. – Quinn, Stillman, Fogg, Charlie Bacon. – cf. failure, cf. deception.

66solitude
1. inwardness, room, tomb, womb, death, cf. room, cf. darkness, cf. separate 1. – 2. Thoreau, retreat, invention, writing, radiance, memory, connection.

67 voice
speak or die, manuscript, memorial, memory, testament, Israel Lichtenstein. a woman’s voice : Billie Holliday, Marina Tsvetayeva, Nadejda Mandelstam, Emily Dickinson, Anne Frank, Anna Blume, Shehrzad, cf. Cassandra.

68 watching
perception, Berkeley, interpreting, cf. change, cf. signs. – eye, I, private eye, cf. double, cf. mirror. – watching and being watched, speculate, looking glass. – father, identity, visible, responsibility, Kierkegaard, Pinocchio, cf. becoming.

69weightlessness
cf. open, out.

70white
1. Utah, boneyard of oblivion, cemetery, hole. – 2. glare, blankness, snow, chaos, disappear, Bartleby, nowhere.