Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

M. The common factor of both ideas is the question of the meaning of symbols for human beings. Paul Auster is heard reading from his books Hand to Mouth and The Red Notebook either as straight recitation integrated with other sounds as if in a radio play or passed through an electronically realized string resonator so that the low tones interact with those of a string ensemble.

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3 1947) is an American author whose writing blends absurdism existentialism crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy (1987) Moon Palace (1989) The Music of Chance (1990) The Book of Illusions (2002) and The Brooklyn Follies (2005).