Politics & Power Quote by Paul Auster

Restlessness, in Auster's hands, isn’t romantic drift; it’s triage. The line keeps refusing the grand narrative Americans love to paste onto departure. He isn’t “an expatriate,” not staging a principled break with the homeland, not collecting cosmopolitan points. He just “needed some breathing room,” a phrase that makes leaving feel less like ambition than like survival. The insistence on “for awhile” does quiet but crucial work: it’s not exile, it’s a pause button.

The subtext is that America, at least for the young writer, can feel like a room with stale air: loud with expectation, crowded with identity, impatient with apprenticeship. Paris becomes less a destination than a pressure valve. Notice how methodical the justification sounds: translating French poetry, already having been there, liking it. Auster frames the move as almost procedural, as if he’s reassuring himself (and us) that this isn’t escapism. Yet the final clause undercuts the careful rationale: “and so I just went.” That “just” is the tell. It’s the moment when narrative collapses into impulse, when the writer admits that the best explanation for a life decision is often the simplest: the body moved before the mind could spin a philosophy.

Context matters: Auster’s work is famously preoccupied with chance, self-invention, and the thin line between choice and drift. Here, the origin story rejects melodrama and makes space for something more honest - the quiet, unglamorous need to step outside your own country’s weather to hear your own thoughts again.