Austerlitz

As they walk along the Thames the following day, the narrator tells Austerlitz about a story he read in that morning’s newspaper about a man who, overcome with grief after his wife’s death, killed himself with a guillotine he meticulously constructed. Looking at the narrator with an alarmed facial expression, Austerlitz says he understands why the man was meticulous: to avoid the ignominy of a botched end to a miserable life.

The two men arrive at the Royal Observatory; as usual, Austerlitz takes photographs. He begins a monologue about time, the linear conception of which, he argues, is so artificial and arbitrary that all his life he’s refused to own any sort of clock. If, as Newton thought, time is a river, where does it originate and where does it empty? It seems human life is governed less by time than by weather, which is both unpredictable and cyclical: “an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity […and] evolves in no one knows what direction” (116). Austerlitz wonders whether he avoids clocks out of hope it’s possible to return to moments of the past—to regain lost time.

At dusk, the two men leave the observatory and cross Greenwich Park with a view of London.