A writer named Daniel Quinn answers the wrong phone number at three in the morning and becomes a detective who never existed. He follows a father who locked his son in darkness for nine years trying to recover the language of God. He maps routes through Manhattan that spell TOWER OF BABEL. He fills a red notebook with observations that become unreadable. He watches until he forgets he’s watching. He dissolves into the architecture of surveillance until there’s no one left doing the surveilling.
This is Paul Auster’s City of Glass. A detective story that murders the detective. A novel about what happens when you become the role you’re playing. When observation replaces being. When the self turns out to be nothing but performances with no performer underneath.
We’re talking Baudrillard’s simulacra, Foucault’s panopticon, Lacan’s mirror stage. We’re talking dissociation, depersonalization, and the false self that collapses with nothing beneath it. We’re talking about the violence of becoming invisible in a city that only sees roles, functions, and data points.
This episode asks the questions that don’t have answers: What happens when identity is just borrowed scaffolding? What happens when the map becomes more real than the territory? What happens when there are no more pages in the red notebook?
Philosophy as existential horror. Psychology as detective story. The self as crime scene.
Your phone is ringing. Wrong number. You’re going to answer it anyway.
Welcome to the cartography of pain.
Much love, David x
