After visiting Stockholm yesterday, all day today was spent at the work table. Had Ira not reminded me late this evening, I might have forgotten to shoot the Photo of the Day. Quickly, I took the following photo, which gives a glimpse of my work environment. The book open on the stand is Paul Auster's Leviathan. The highlighted words from the novel are from the quote below.
After David was born, the situation only grew worse. Money became my single, overriding obsession, and for the next year I lived in a state of continual panic. With Delia no longer able to contribute much in the way of work, our income fell at the precise moment our expenses began to go up. I took the responsibilities of fatherhood seriously, and the thought of not being able to provide for my wife and on filled me with shame. -- Paul Auster, Leviathan
The narrator of the passage is Peter Aaron, a writer, and an author surrogate, perhaps, for Paul Auster, who has written extensively on living 'hand to mouth.' Hear me now and believe me later: I can empathize.
If one wants to read the author's biography into the novel - something that, having cut my chops on my Barthes and Foucault, I am generally reluctant to do, than parallels might be drawn between Delia and the writer Lydia Davis, Auster's first wife.
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