Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions, and in being bound to the planet turning on its own axis was no less arbitrary than would be, say, a calculation based on the growth of trees or the duration required for a piece of limestone to disintegrate, quite apart from the face that the solar day which we take as our guideline does not provide any precise measurement, so that in order to reckon time we have to devise an imaginary, average sun which has an invariable speed of movement and does not incline towards the equator in its orbit. If Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then were is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? ...
...
Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our own country as it used to be in the undiscovered continents overseas. The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut us off from the past and the future... I have never owned a clock of any kind...perhaps because I have always resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never understood, keeping myself apart from so called current events in the hope, and I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of ever-lasting misery and never-ending anguish.
In Austerlitz's stories it seems always to be twilight, there is dust in the air, a sense of unreality. So one ponders for a while when reading: " Only at Liverpool Street station, where he waited with me in McDonald's until my train left..." because it seems that neither of these characters could be seen in such a uniform, utilitarian place as McDonald's! even if they were casually remarking on the "glaring light".
It turns out that Austerlitz lives in Alderney Road, (near Queen Mary's University) in the Mile End. Naturally, when the narrator goes to visit him it is dusk. "This room too contained hardly any furniture; there were just the grey floorboards and the walls in which the light of the flickering blue flames was now cast in the gathering dusk. I can still hear the faint hiss of the gas, I remember that while Austerlitz was making tea in the kitchen I sat entranced by the reflection of the little fire....."
After he gives up teaching, which had been his profession for thirty years, Austerlitz intends to write his book. He has been collecting material about various aspects of architecture for many years, but when he comes to write the book, he can't do it.
Now and then a train of thought did succeed in emerging with wonderful clarity inside my head, but I knew even as it formed that I was in no position to record it, for as soon as I so much as picked up my pencil the endless possibilities of language, to which I could once safely abandon myself, became a conglomeration of the most inane phrases. There was not an expression in the sentence but it proved to be a miserable crutch, not a word but it sounded false and hollow. And in this dreadful state of mind I sat for hours..."And then this malaise spreads itself so that he can no longer read.
If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl any more, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge. The entire structure of language, the syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions and finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog. I could not even understand what I myself had written in the past - perhaps I could understand that least of all. All I could think was that such a sentence only appears to mean something, but in truth is at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us.Austerlitz is haunted by the past in Liverpool Street station.
Whenever I was in the station, said Austerlitz, I kept almost obsessively trying to imagine - through the ever-changing maze of walls - the location in that huge space of the rooms where the asylum inmates were confined, and I often wondered whether the pain and suffering accumulated on this site over the centuries had every really ebbed away, or whether they might not still, as I sometimes thought when I felt a cold breath of air on my forehead, be sensed as we pass through them on our way through the station halls and up and down the flights of steps.On this station Austerlitz has a vision which has the greatest significance for him, and this is the end of the first part of the book; for the rest of the book deals with his journey to find out his origins. This he has delayed for too long, for at this point he is soul-sick and he has to, needs to go to find some kind of healing.
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