“If you don’t take the time to look, you’ll never manage to see anything.”
When one thinks of a Christmas story, one probably thinks first of one of Dickens’ Christmas ghost stories or a holiday romance. Paul Auster’s "Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story," on the other hand, does not fit into any of the usual Christmas story molds. It is about a seemingly ordinary Brooklyn shopkeeper named Auggie Wren, who is unusual in being watchful and fully present, ready for the extraordinary to break through the ordinary and for the unexpected gift.
The story of Christmas is far more extraordinary than anything you’d see on the Hallmark channel. It is about being ready for the wholly unexpected: the birth of the Messiah, born to a poor couple, laid in a manger in Bethlehem. Mary, although surprised, when the angel Gabriel announced that she would bear a son, was ready; Joseph was ready to abandon his plans to divorce his pregnant betrothed when instructed by an angel; the shepherds were ready to believe the angels who announced Christ’s birth; and the magi were ready to believe that this poor child was the King of the Jews. Each was ready for the unexpected.
Like Mary and Joseph, Auggie Wren seems to be an unexceptional man of modest means, not even the owner of the shop he keeps. The narrator comments, “For a long time I didn’t give much thought to Auggie Wren. He was a strange little man who wore a hooded blue sweatshirt and sold me cigars and magazines.”
The story’s pivotal moment takes place when Auggie prevails upon the narrator to look at his art project, which the narrator has no interest in seeing. Auggie presents him with a dozen albums, each with 365 photos of the intersection in front of his shop, taken every morning, year after year. As the narrator pages through the albums, he feels confirmed in his supposition that there would be nothing exceptional to see: “All the pictures were the same. The whole project was a numbing onslaught of repetition, the same street and the same buildings over again, an unrelenting delirium of redundant images.”
As the narrator flips the pages, Auggie arrests him, saying, “You’re going too fast. You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down.” When the narrator does slow down, his view shifts:
Auggie was photographing time, I realized, both natural time and human time, and he was doing it by planting himself in one tiny corner of the world and willing it to be his own, by standing guard in the space he had chosen for himself.
The narrator is pulled up short when he realizes the meaning of Auggie’s project; the narrator himself—about whom we learn only that he is a busy author who moves in Manhattan circles where prestige matters and time is pressing—needs this lesson. As the story’s narrator realizes, “If you don’t take the time to look, you’ll never manage to see anything.” Auggie is fully present every day, ready to appreciate the ordinary and take note of what stands out as unexpected or extraordinary.
That readiness to receive the unexpected shows on the Christmas Day of the story’s title. One Christmas morning, Auggie embarks on an unlikely errand: to return a wallet to a thief who dropped his wallet while running away with items shoplifted from Auggie’s store. With the address from the thief’s license, Auggie finds the apartment in a Brooklyn housing project, even though “everything looks the same in that place.” However, the person who answers his knock is not the thief but his grandmother, Granny Ethel. Granny Ethel is blind and mistakes Auggie for her grandson.
Rather than set her right or turn away, Auggie, without thinking it through, plays along with being Granny Ethel’s grandson and they enjoy a happy Christmas together. At the end of the day, Auggie purloins a camera that the thief has stashed in his blind grandmother’s apartment, stealing from the man who would have stolen from him. Of course, that is the camera that turns out to be wellspring of purpose for him in his project of taking a photo in front of his store, every day, at the same time. Auggie acts without thinking, both to play along with Granny Ethel to give her a happy Christmas and to take the camera for himself. He is ready to embrace the unexpected, and this seems like a good quality even when it leads him to do something seemingly wrong, such as stealing.
“Auggie Wren,” as it turns out, is a pseudonym the narrator gives the shopkeeper. The narrator does not tell us why he chose this name for Auggie, but, after reading the story, we can guess. “Wren” points to his apparent ordinariness, wrens being a common bird that one sees without taking any special notice, just as the narrator did not take notice of Auggie Wren. “Auggie” points to what is special about him: “augen” is the German word for “eyes” and the root of our English word, “eyes.” Auggie is an observer, someone who sees carefully, noticing the mysterious and unexpected. Throughout the story, there are references to eyes, seeing, sightedness, and blindness.
"Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story" was published on Christmas 1990 in the New York Times. This story gave rise to Paul Auster’s first screenwriting credits: filmmaker Wayne Wang and Auster collaborated on the movies SMOKE (1995) and Blue in the Face (also 1995), with Auggie Wren a main character in both. Auster died earlier this year, at the age of 77.
The call of Christmas is to be ready for the unlooked mystery and gift of the divine. May you have a happy Christmas, and be ready for the unexpected.
