Paul Auster, "The Book of Illusions"

It was a fierce, breathtaking image, and I kept thinking about it for long after I had closed the book and put it on the shelf. Marie-Antoinette's severed head, unearthed from a pit of human remains. In three short sentences, Chateaubriand travels twenty-six years. He goes from flesh to bone, from piquant life to anonymous death, and in the chasm between them lies the experience of an entire generation, the unspoken years of terror, brutality, and madness. I was stunned by the passage, moved by it in a way that no words had moved me in a year and a half. Then, just three days after my accidental encounter with those sentences, I received Alex's letter asking me to translate the book. Was it a coincidence? Of course it was, but at the time I felt as though I had willed it to happen- as though Alex's letter had somehow completed a thought I was unable to finish myself. In the past, I had never been one to believe mystical claptrap of that sort. But when you live as I was living then, all shut up inside yourself and not bothering to look at anything around you, your perspective begins to change. For the fact was that Alex's letter was dated Monday the ninth, and I had received it on Thursday the twelfth, three days later. Which meant that when he was in New York writing to me about the book, I had been in Vermont holding the book in my hands. I don't want to insist on the importance of the connection, but I couldn't help reading it as a sign. It was as if I had asked for something without knowing it, and then suddenly my wish had been granted.