Paris

My friend says he's sure now it was Cioran he saw walking in Luxembourg Gardens in the early 1990's, though he wasn't sure when he first thought he saw him.

Would you go up to a man like Cioran--not that there was ever a man like him--and say, hello, I'm so and so and I've read some of your books? No, you wouldn't do something like that! It's far better being pretty sure you saw Cioran, an old man in a trench coat walking very slowly through the park, and becoming surer and surer that it was him as the years passed and you read more of his writing.

We both agreed we walked much more slowly when we walked in Paris, perhaps because we so often didn't know where we were going or how to get there if we did.

I told him how I once looked for Samuel Beckett's apartment, the one with the room that looked out onto the prison yard where he wrote some of his books.

I stopped in a bar, the library, a corner grocery store and asked. Nobody had heard of Beckett.

Everyone I asked acted as if I was asking about a living person named Samuel Beckett.

He's dead, I said, he doesn't live around here anymore but he did for years, a writer.

It was useless. No one knew Beckett, no one knew where he'd lived, and the more I asked the further away I was from ever finding his home, or so it seemed to me then and as it remains in my memory.

Maybe we've both gotten too accustomed to not knowing, I say to my friend who thought he'd seen Cioran in Paris. That we've both come to believe that not knowing is as great an achievement as knowing, and confers upon us the otherwise impossible to
achieve benefit of humility.

Yes, perhaps, but at this point in my life I can't imagine any other way of living.