“One day I had a story published with my name on it, but it wasn’t me.”
“I don’t get you.”
Hitchcock’s face was pale and sweating.
“I can only say that I looked at the page with my name under the title. By Joseph Hitchcock. But it was some other man. There was no way to prove - actually prove, really prove - that that man was me. The story was familiar - I knew I had written it - but the name on the paper still was not me. It was a symbol, a name. It was alien. And then I realized that even if I did become successful at writing, it would never mean a thing to me, because I couldn’t identify myself with that name. It would be soot and ashes. So I didn’t write anymore. I was never sure, anyway, that the stories I had in my desk a few days later were mine, though I remembered typing them. There was always that gap of proof. That gap of proof, for it is not an action. Only actions are important. And pieces of paper were remains of actions done and over and now unseen. The proof of doing was over and done. Nothing but memory remained, and I didn’t trust my memory. Could I actually prove I’d written these stories? No. Not really. Not unless someone sits in the room while you type, and then maybe you’re doing it from memory. And once a thing is accomplished there is no proof, only memory. So then I began to find gaps between everything. I doubted I was married or had a child or ever had a job in my life. I doubted that I had been born in Illinois and had a drunken father and swinish mother. I couldn’t prove anything. Oh yes, people could say, ‘You are thus and so and such and such,’ but that was nothing.”
“You should get your mind off stuff like that,” said Clemens.
“I can’t. All the gaps and spaces. And that’s how I got to thinking about the stars. I thought how I’d like to be in a rocket ship in space, in nothing, in nothing, and going into nothing, with just a thin something, a thin eggshell of metal holding me, going on away from all the something the gaps in them that couldn’t prove themselves. I knew then that the only happiness for me was space.”
-Ray Bradbury (The Illustrated Man)
