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Definition of power trip

Examples of power trip in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'power trip.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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“Power trip.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/power%20trip. Accessed 1 May. 2024.

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What Is a Power Trip? Exploring the Psychology, Signs, and Impact of Going on a Power Trip

By Happy Sharer

Introduction

The term “power trip” has become increasingly popular in recent years. But what exactly is a power trip? In its simplest form, a power trip is when someone seeks to gain control over others by using their power or authority. This can manifest itself in different ways, such as through manipulation, bullying, or intimidation. It’s important to understand what a power trip is and the potential consequences it can have on relationships and mental health.

Exploring the Psychology Behind Power Trips

When it comes to understanding the motivations behind power trips, there are a few psychological factors at play. According to Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, “Power trips are rooted in insecurity, narcissism, and a need to feel powerful and in control.” 1 People who go on power trips may be trying to compensate for a sense of inadequacy or to make up for a lack of self-esteem. They may also be driven by a need to prove themselves or to be seen as superior.

Another factor that may contribute to power trips is an individual’s ego. Ego can cause people to overestimate their capabilities and underestimate the capabilities of others. This can lead them to take on more than they can handle and to act in a controlling manner. As psychologist Dr. Gail Saltz explains, “People who are prone to power trips often have a sense of entitlement, which means they believe they should get what they want without having to work for it.” 2 This can lead to unrealistic expectations and a lack of empathy for those around them.

Examining Common Examples of Power Trips

Power trips can occur in many different contexts, but some of the most common examples are in the workplace, social settings, and family relationships. In the workplace, a power trip might involve a supervisor or manager who uses their position to manipulate or intimidate others. This could include setting unreasonable demands or expectations, micromanaging employees, or withholding praise or recognition. In social settings, a power trip could involve someone who tries to dominate conversations or make decisions for the group without considering other people’s opinions. In family relationships, a power trip might involve a parent who attempts to control their children’s behavior or choices.

Recognizing the Signs of a Power Trip

It’s important to be able to recognize the signs of a power trip so you can address the issue before it escalates. Some common signs to watch out for include:

• Controlling behavior: A person on a power trip may attempt to control or dictate the behavior of those around them.
• Aggressive or demanding language: They may use aggressive language or demand things from others.
• Unreasonable expectations: They may set unrealistic expectations or make unreasonable demands.

Discussing the Impact of Power Trips on Relationships

Power trips can have a profound impact on relationships, both personal and professional. People who go on power trips tend to create tension and conflict, which can strain relationships and lead to feelings of resentment. Additionally, power trips can damage self-esteem and lead to feelings of worthlessness. Research shows that power trips can even have long-term effects on mental health, such as depression and anxiety. 3 It’s important to recognize the impact power trips can have and take steps to address the issue.

Exploring Ways to Avoid Going on a Power Trip

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to avoid going on a power trip. The first step is to understand your own motivations. Ask yourself why you want to exert control over others and consider whether there are healthier ways to meet your needs. It’s also important to practice empathy and compromise. Make sure to listen to the perspectives of others and be open to making concessions. Finally, it’s important to set clear boundaries. Let people know what you expect from them and don’t be afraid to say no if something doesn’t feel right.

In conclusion, it’s important to be aware of what a power trip is and the potential consequences it can have on relationships and mental health. Power trips are often driven by insecurity and ego and can manifest themselves in different ways. Recognizing the signs of a power trip is key to avoiding it and setting clear boundaries can help you maintain healthy relationships. By understanding the psychology behind power trips and taking steps to avoid them, you can ensure that you don’t fall into the trap of trying to control others.

1 Durvasula, R. (2019, October 23). What is a Power Trip? Verywell Mind. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-power-trip-4157783

2 Saltz, G. (2018, December 21). 8 Signs Someone Is on a Power Trip. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/201812/8-signs-someone-is-power-trip

3 Rudolph, K. D., & Hammen, C. (2002). Interpersonal stress and depression: Tests of transactional and diathesis-stress models. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111(4), 602–614. doi: 10.1037/0021-843X.111.4.

(Note: Is this article not meeting your expectations? Do you have knowledge or insights to share? Unlock new opportunities and expand your reach by joining our authors team. Click Registration to join us and share your expertise with our readers.)

Hi, I'm Happy Sharer and I love sharing interesting and useful knowledge with others. I have a passion for learning and enjoy explaining complex concepts in a simple way.

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Definition of power trip noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

• on a power trip He's been on a power trip ever since he got promoted.

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Power Trip by J. Cole (featuring Miguel )

Songfacts®:

• This is the first single by American rapper J. Cole, from his second studio album Born Sinner . The love anthem finds Cole reflecting on a teenage crush and when the now successful Roc Nation rapper returns to his hometown, he finds he is still attracted to the doe-eyed girl. The song was released to Urban contemporary radio on February 19, 2013.
• Cole raps two verses, as well as co-handling hook duties on the cut with R&B singer Miguel. The rapper also self-produced the song. "I get excited about that; it's an opportunity to change things," he told MTV News. "It's almost like the first time I heard ' Cry Me a River ,' Justin Timberlake. The minute that came on ... It hit you a certain kinda way. That was the exciting part."
• It was the song's original sound that persuaded Cole to choose it to lead Born Sinner . "You couldn't point to any song on the radio and be like, 'This sounds like that,' " he told MTV News. "Everything about it, from the beat to even the way I'm flowing - you never really heard me rap so sleepily. I really did those verses in my crib and just loved the way they felt."
• Cole originally sang the hook by himself until Roc Nation founder Jay-Z gave him a bit of advice. "When I played it for Jay-Z, his first words were, 'Yo, you should get Miguel on this,'" the rapper recalled to Billboard magazine.
• Cole raps in his first verse to his crush that he "even wrote the song 'Dreams' for you." This is a reference to an actual cut "Dreams," that appeared on the rapper's 2009 mixtape, The Warm Up . The track finds Cole fantasizing about murdering the boyfriend of a girl he barely knows, which would then give him the opportunity to console her.
• Cole came up with the concept for the video, which sees him kill Miguel over jealousy of his relationship with a woman. It was shot in Cole's hometown of Fayetteville, North Carolina except for the final scene where he buries Miguel out in the woods on the outskirts of the city.
• It was Jay-Z who persuaded Cole to release this as the lead single from Born Sinner . "There was a point when I almost went with this other song as the [first] single," he explained to MTV News. "My team and people around me were like, 'Yo, you're bugging; you need to go with 'Power Trip.' So I called Mark Pitts, my manager, and he's like, 'You need to call Jay.'" He added: "His perspective on that - and period, since he's seen so much in the game - he really set me straight and let me know I was bugging. He was like, 'You've got to an opportunity to come in and usher a new sound, go with that!'"
• Cole told Rolling Stone that he created the track in his living room. "I made that beat," he said, "wrote that song, recorded the rough version of the vocals in my crib."
• The song samples "No More," a track from jazz flautist Hubert Laws' 1972 album Morning Star .
• Cole shouts out his landlord, Mohammed, who rented him an apartment in his early days in Jamaica, New York. "Even back then when I was up there in Mohammed crib Paying 1700 for the rent, money well spent No heater, but a n—- made heat, may I vent." Cole raps that the ridiculous amount he had to pay for rent in New York was money well spent. This was because being in the Big Apple helped him make the connections that eventually landed him his deal with Roc Nation.
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Power Trip At Home? 3 Reasons Why Circuit Breaker Keeps Tripping And How To Fix It

• Author : daylightadmin4

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In Singapore, power trips are a frequent electrical emergency faced by homeowners. This occurs when the current in a circuit breaker exceeds the prescribed amount, thereby cutting off the electric supply. 

Although a power trip prevents damage to the wiring and other appliances, it can also result in a blackout. So to prevent it, here are some reasons why a power trip may occur in your circuit breaker and how you can resolve it. 

3 Reasons Why Circuit Breaker Keeps Tripping

Overloaded Electric Circuit

One main reason why a power trip happens is because of the electrical circuit getting overloaded beyond the prescribed limit.  When the current exceeds the rated capacity of the wiring, it can get damaged or create a fire hazard.  In order to prevent an actual fire from taking place, a circuit trip occurs. 

Connecting multiple electrical appliances to a power supply may also cause the power supply to trip. Malfunctioning appliances in particular may use up more power, increasing the total current supply and causing the circuit breaker to trip.

Short Circuit

A short circuit can also cause an HDB circuit breaker trip . One way to identify this is by checking for burning smells. Usually, a Short circuit occurs when the hot wire (black) touches a neutral wire (white).  A surge in current supply can also happen when electrical wiring with damaged insulation come into contact with each other. Damaged appliances or lighting components with wiring problems can also cause a short circuit when plugged into an outlet.

Ground Fault 

Besides short circuits, a power trip can also happen because of a ground fault. . When the circuit breaker’s hot wire comes into contact with the ground, the resistance is lowered and causes increased current.  A hot wire (black) which makes contact with a metallic object can also cause a circuit breaker trip to occur. 

Ground faults can also happen when homeowners ignore general electricity safety tips . Furthermore, this can cause a highly dangerous accident such as an electrical shock from switches or sockets . 

How to Fix a Power Trip

Overloaded Electric Circuit 

• Firstly, switch off all electronic appliances, gadgets, and light installations in the house.
• Next, switch on  all low power consumption electrical devices.  
• Now turn on your high power consumption appliances gradually until an electric trip occurs. Note down which high power consumption devices were connected when the trip happened.
• Whichever appliance has caused an increase in the power supply is likely to be the cause of your power trip.
• After determining the cause of your power trip, you can Connect the high power consumption electric appliance to another electric circuit to avoid another electric trip.
• Alternatively, you can upgrade your electrical wiring and hardware to carry the additional power load. While waiting for the wiring to be upgraded, you should minimize the use of appliances that consume more power as much as possible. You can also switch off all other appliances when only one is being used.

Compared to a power trip caused by overloading, fixing one which results from a short circuit is usually more difficult.

Usually, in the case of a short circuit, there is a massive spike in current which results in burning (causing a bad smell and discoloration). In that case, the electrical outlets should be switched off, and each of the power points and sockets should be inspected for any discoloration or smell. The insulation of the wiring should be checked as well. Furthermore, all the appliances should also be inspected for damage or odor. Usually the appliance with a short circuit will stop working and will have to be replaced or repaired.

Since most homes and offices have concealed wiring , it is not easy to inspect the wiring for damage or short circuit. Moreover, it is not easy to find out the exact condition of the wiring to detect any damage which has occurred. 

During monsoon seasons, an increase in the moisture levels or wet walls may cause a short circuit. Unfortunately, most property owners do not have the tools and experience to detect the damage to the concealed wiring. Hence it is advisable to hire the services of a licensed and experienced electrician who can accurately detect the short circuit and conduct an electrical wiring repair or replacement.

• Switch off all appliances and unplug them from the electric circuit.
• Switch on the circuit breaker .
• If there is no electric trip, each of the appliances should be connected to the circuit. Once the defective appliance is connected, the circuit breaker will trip.
• The faulty appliance should be repaired or replaced to prevent another ground fault.

If the circuit breaker continues to trip, it’s p o ssible that you might have electric wiring mistakes present. In that case, you should contact a reliable electrician to check the wiring and fix it if needed.

Depending on the cause of the electric trip, the property owner can either fix it himself or hire the services of a well-trained licensed electrician in Singapore.  If you opt for the latter, you can contact someone from Daylight Electrician Singapore  with many years of experience in providing all kinds of electrical services .

Daylight Electrician Singapore provides complete electrical services including emergency electrician service in Singapore. Our network of electrical workers and EMA licensed electricians are specially trained to execute all kinds of electrical repairs and works including electrical installation such as light installation , ceiling fan installation , power failure recovery as well as electrical wiring and rewiring , power socket , electrical switches , light switches and DB Box replacement . We have over 10 years of electrician experience and have done thousands of electrical works for both residential (Landed, condo and HDB electrician) and commercial electrician. We are the highly recommended electrician in Singapore with many happy customers and positive reviews over the years both on Google and Facebook . WhatsApp us at +65 8241 0032 for transparent quotation and honest pricing for all your electrical needs or Call us at +65 6909 9921 . We offer a fast and efficient service to serve any of your electrical needs!

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The Power and Impact of Good Listening

Active listening impacts speakers and listeners in mutually beneficial ways..

Posted April 28, 2024 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

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“Listening is not the act of hearing the words spoken; it is the art of understanding the meaning behind those words.” –Simon Sinek

Speaking is a critical life skill that we’re taught from birth. In fact, effective speaking and communication skills are so highly valued in our society that there are thousands of courses on the topic as well as myriad opportunities to earn degrees in communications, all the way up to a Ph.D., with a focus on critical thinking, public speaking , media, and writing skills to prepare students for careers in influential industries such as journalism, law, public relations, speechwriting, and all forms of administration (Bouchrika, 2024; Hamilton, 2023).

But what about the skill of listening? Where and when is that taught? The unfortunate answer is that listening, although arguably even more critical to effective and productive interpersonal, organizational, political, and global communication, is rarely taught. Absent possibly a few therapy -related graduate courses, you’ll be hard-pressed to find courses on the topic of listening, nor is it a skill that most parents or educators encourage children to practice as they’re learning to navigate the nuances of communication and relationships. Yet, how can we expect to think critically and make the best-informed decisions if we don't really know how to listen?

Listening Is Not the Same as Hearing

While listening is often viewed as something that just naturally occurs through the simple act of hearing spoken words, in reality there is nothing simple about good listening. It’s an acquired skill that requires daily practice and discipline, although well worth the time and effort because good listening helps us effectively examine, accept, or challenge the information we hear, thereby improving our decision-making . Equally important, active listening helps us better understand other positions, provides a path to finding common ground; builds trust, rapport, and connections in our communication with others; and increases our chance of being heard ourselves (Ury, 2015).

What Constitutes Good Listening?

Listening is a fluid process that involves five stages: receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding (DeVito, 2000). Within all of these stages, there are internal and external factors that can either interfere with or enhance good listening. The key is to engage in practices that reduce or eliminate disruptive factors and actively seek out situations and practice skills that advance good listening.

• Receiving. This first stage is the literal “hearing” part of listening, when your ears do their job and isolate incoming audible information without the interference of competing sounds. However, with the multitude of distractions almost constantly intruding into our awareness, this is easier said than done. As William Ury, expert negotiator and co-founder of the Harvard Program on Negotiation, points out, “We live in an age that we call the Age of Communication, but how much listening can there really be with so much interruption and distraction?” (2015). Good listeners focus on what a speaker is saying and ignore distractions. If the listening environment contains too many distractions or has loud competing sounds, it’s best to relocate to a quieter location, or postpone important conversations to another time.
• Understanding. Here is where our brains get involved as we attempt to process the meaning of the sounds we’re receiving. At this stage, good listeners zero in on what the speaker is generally trying to say and seek clarification or ask the speaker to repeat anything they can’t understand. Understanding can be negatively affected when a speaker is speaking too fast, providing great detail, or has an accent that makes it difficult for the listener to understand what is being said. This is not the time for a good listener to comment on the content of what is being said; the focus here should be on understanding.
• Remembering. This is when our brains process the information we’re hearing well enough to recall it for as long as we need to work with it. There are a multitude of factors that can interfere with memory , but for active listeners, the most common interferences are distractions, intermittent loss of focus, the amount of information being shared, and the complexity of the information being shared. To reduce these risks, good listeners must be keenly focused on the speaker’s verbal and nonverbal communications and actively stay engaged in the process of listening.
• Evaluating. This is the most dangerous stage for all listeners, even the most skilled ones, because it's the stage where there's the highest risk of consciously or unconsciously assigning some sort of value or weight to the information being shared. This often takes the form of a positive or negative “judgment” that we make, utilizing life experiences that are personal to us, and therefore often biased. These judgments can be based on a wide range of variables, such as the “type” of person delivering the message or the content of the message. For example, factors such as gender , race, culture, or political party may influence our judgment of a message. Content that doesn’t align with our values or beliefs can do the same. While we all have opinions and biases, good listeners are self-aware enough to recognize their biases and purposefully move past them to give speakers a safe space to express themselves. Rather than judge what they're hearing, good listeners try to understand and empathize with the meaning behind the words and encourage speakers to share everything they’re feeling using neutral prompts, such as “go on” or “tell me more.” As Simon Sinek (2021) explains, when we replace judgment with curiosity or genuine interest, we create a safe space for someone to "empty their bucket," which then makes it more likely they'll be interested in hearing what you have to say.
• Responding. The final stage of listening is responding, verbally and nonverbally, to shared information with respect, even if in the end, we disagree with what the speaker is saying or how they’re handling a situation. Good listening doesn’t mean that you should abandon your personal views or not be honest in your communications with others. It means that while you’re actively listening, you create an environment in which the speaker feels heard, understood, and respected, so that when you do respond, your own message is more likely to be received in the same way.

Good listening also encompasses behaviors that throughout these stages of listening convey interest and attention , such as eye contact, head-nodding, leaning toward the speaker, and encouraging facial expressions. However, good listeners aren't necessarily passive absorbers of information; some research suggests that the best listeners engage in the process by asking clarifying questions, restating what they've heard to make sure they're understanding it correctly, supportively suggesting alternative paths, and validating the speaker's feelings using supportive, nonjudgmental words and gestures (Zenger & Folkman, 2016).

At the same time, it's important to pack your patience and curb bad habits during these stages. For instance, most of us have been taught throughout our lives to hear and then immediately respond to what we heard. Therefore, it's common for listeners to begin preparing a response to what they’re hearing while they’re hearing it, which means they’re not fully listening to what is being said or giving safe space to the person saying it. While this urge to comment early and often is difficult to suppress, with practice and patience, good listeners learn to do it. This not only helps the speaker feel heard and understood, it also provides the listener with the entire picture, which ultimately allows for better responses and decision-making in interpersonal and organizational relationships.

Bouchrika, I. (April 17, 2024). Communications Degree: Requirements & Career Prospects for 2024 | Research.com

DeVito, Joseph A. (2000). The elements of public speaking (7th ed.). New York, NY: Longman.

Hamilton, I. (July 3, 2023). Best Online Communications Degrees Of 2024 – Forbes Advisor .

Sinek, Simon. (Oct. 27, 2021). The Art of Listening. YouTube ( Bing Videos ).

Ury, William. (Jan. 7, 2015). The power of listening. TEDxSanDiego ( Bing Videos ).

Zenger, J. & Folkman, J. (2016). What Great Listeners Actually Do, Harvard Business Review. What Great Listeners Actually Do (hbr.org)

Sherrie Bourg Carter, Psy.D. , psychologist and author of "High Octane Women: How Superachievers Can Avoid Burnout," specializes in the area of women and stress.

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Gather round — we’re talking death and renewal and the backspin of the petite but potent planet Pluto, which will begin its retrograde in the fixed air of Aquarius on May 2.

A reminder, planets do not truly move backward but they do decelerate during retrograde cycles and APPEAR to be going in reverse from our vantage here on Earth. This happens when Earth, in its orbit around the sun, essentially laps a planet.

While Mercury retrograde is the best-known and most maligned of retrogrades, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto all get down with a slowdown at some point.

During a retrograde period, the prefix re is a real deal power player inviting us to remember, reflect, reimagine, renegotiate, rework, revisit, and reframe themes associated with the planet in question. During retrograde cycles, people, patterns and unresolved issues from the past tend to return to us so that we can reckon with and/or release them.

Talk to me about Pluto

Discovered in 1930, Pluto is the final planet in our solar system. The wee one of woe is named for the Roman god of the underworld; that maiden-abducting, pomegranate-sucking romantic known to the Greeks as Hades.

Apropos of this dubious association, the planet is linked to endings and downfall, the ashes before the ascent. As master of ceremonies for death, Pluto teaches us that destruction is the wheel grease of creation and that holding power is the ultimate test of our humanity. Pluto rules Scorpio , the fixed water sign associated with transformational trauma, shadow work, mind control, power struggles, and other people’s money.

Pluto is linked to endings and downfall, the ashes before the ascent.

As the planet furthest from the sun, Pluto’s orbit is the longest; the planet shifts signs once every twelve to thirty years.

After a seriously long stint in stalwart Capricorn, Pluto moved into the revolutionary realm of Aquarius last year. Pluto will retrograde in Aquarius before slipping back into Capricorn on September 1, finishing its retrograde on October 11 and staying put in the sign of the sea goat until November 19th when the dark dwarf shifts back into Aquarius where it will rule for the next two decades.

Come September, the planet’s nip slip back into Cap is about unfinished business, professional development and daddy issues, making sure we know where we’ve been so we can get to where we are going.

Meaning of Pluto retrograde in Aquarius

Astrologer Evan Nathaniel Grim of Inner Worlds Astrology imparts, “This retrograde marks an intense five-month period in which the collective realizes their greatest hopes and dreams risk extinction (Pluto) unless they collaborate with one another (Aquarius) to rally behind a common cause. A cause that promotes the rebalancing of power towards the individual.”

Fittingly, and a little frighteningly, Pluto will complete its retrograde just as we enter the final throes of election season, indicating that we are on the brink of seismic change. The choices we make and ballots we cast will echo in the era to come and it is up to us to decide if it is a sound we can be proud of.

Chaos or community chorus my dudes?

Pluto “tests” the mettle of its children and casts out and cuts loose what holds them back. Rarely gentle but always necessary is the name of the game here, and we can’t see what will be until we burn what has been. Loli Moon of Mystic Moon Medicine maintains, “This retrograde will highlight our unhealthy attachments and addictions to certain spaces, material items and taboos of pleasure indulged to suppress the guilt.”

With death and revolution dancing backward cheek to cheek, here’s some questions to consider/pose to your shadowy underbelly; how, where and why do you accumulate power and is your relationship to that power supporting or subverting the status quo?

We don’t get to walk head held high into a new world order if we’ve been pulling strings for the man. Get free, get weird, face fear, and dare to believe a better way is being born.

Astrology 101: Your guide to the star

• The 12 zodiac signs
• What are the astrology houses
• Here’s what each planet represents
• Sun, moon and rising signs: Get to know your Big 3

Astrologer  Reda Wigle  researches and irreverently reports back on planetary configurations and their effect on each zodiac sign. Her horoscopes integrate history, poetry, pop culture, and personal experience.

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Paul Auster: a magician who assembled mosaics of meaning and memory

Author and academic kevin power assesses the career of the new yorker, whose fiction was a game of hide and seek.

Paul Auster at his home in Brooklyn, New York (Photograph: Timothy Fadek/Corbis via Getty Images

When Paul Auster was 14, he saw a young boy struck by lightning. This was at a summer camp in upstate New York, in July 1961. The boys were on a hike in the woods. A storm broke – “the summer storm to end all summer storms”, as Auster described it in his 1995 essay Why Write? “[E]verywhere we went, we were met by more lightning.” At last, someone spotted a meadow. “[T]o get to it, we had to crawl under a barbed-wire fence.”

Auster wriggled through; ahead of him was a boy named Ralph. Lightning struck. “I had trouble making out what happened,” Auster wrote. “All I knew was that Ralph had stopped moving […] Later, when they told me he was dead, I learned that there was an eight-inch burn across his back […] It was the barbed wire that did it, I suppose.”

The incident “absolutely changed my life”, Auster told a BBC interviewer in 2012. “I think about it every day. It never goes away.” The lesson Auster learned from Ralph’s death was the lesson of contingency. “There are very few necessary facts,” he said, in that BBC interview. “Once we’re born, we’re destined to die, and pretty much everything in between is up for grabs.”

Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947; he has just died, at his home in Brooklyn , of complications associated with lung cancer. In between, much was “up for grabs”. Auster studied English and comparative literature at Columbia, taking a BA (1966-69) and an MA (1970). After college he moved to Paris, where he scrounged work as a translator. To make extra cash, he published a novel, the baseball-themed thriller Squeeze Play (1982), under a pseudonym (Paul Benjamin, his first two names).

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Paul Auster in January,1988 in Brooklyn, New York. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

The same year, The Invention of Solitude, a memoir of Auster’s recently deceased father, was published to critical admiration but no great sales. “And then, suddenly, it happens there is death,” Auster writes, in the first paragraph of that book. “Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.” The lightning strike, again.

In 1971 Auster married the writer Lydia Davis; they divorced in 1974 (asked about Auster in a 2013 interview, Davis said only, “Oh, yeah, I don’t go there”). Davis and Auster had a son, Daniel, who struggled in his adult life with drug addiction. In November 2021, Daniel was minding his 10-month-old daughter, Ruby, in his Brooklyn apartment. Daniel took heroin and passed out; when he awoke, Ruby was dead. An autopsy concluded that she had died of an overdose of fentanyl and heroin. A few months later, in April 2022, Daniel himself was found dead of an overdose on a subway platform in lower Manhattan.

Neither Auster nor Davis publicly discussed these events; nor did Siri Hustvedt, the writer to whom Auster was happily married from 1981 until his death. But Daniel, or a Daniel-like figure, appears in Auster’s 2003 novel Oracle Night. The novels flirted with personal trauma and self-disclosure – the narrator of Oracle Night is named Trause, an anagram of Auster; a writer named “Paul Auster” features in City of Glass, the first volume of The New York Trilogy (1985-86) – but settled, almost always, for mediation, epistemological uncertainty, word games.

[  Paul Auster: ‘We should respond to Trump's stupidity with a world boycott of American goods'  ]

Auster’s habitual method, in memoir and in fiction, was mosaic. Between the tiles of significant memory, what? Often, the answer was padding, or cliche. Winter Journal (2012), a memoir, consists mostly of stock phrases: “The awful sting of the cold”; “A pounding storm”. The Washington Post critic Michael Dirda praised Auster’s style as “limpid”; Michelle Dean of the Los Angeles Times called parts of The New York Trilogy “surpassingly beautiful”. Others were not so charitable. “Although there are things to admire in Auster’s fiction,” James Wood wrote in 2009, “the prose is never one of them”.

Paul Auster in 2006. Photograph: Bebeto Matthews/AP

Paul Auster in Oviedo, Spain in 2006. Photograph: Rafa Rivas/AFP/Getty Images

Auster’s least successful books might tell us something about the relationship between contingency (the music of chance) and cliche (the music of emptied forms). Contingency, as an aesthetic given, tends to undermine meaning from the ground up. Where meaning is absent, dead language creeps in. Auster never quite managed to reconcile his epiphany about randomness (that lightning strike) with the essentially dialectical nature of literature’s relationship with the real, and with its responsibilities to see the world anew. Hence the placeholding cliches. Hence the recurring obsessions, turning sterile as the books piled up.

You could also say that a cloud of cliche is not just an aesthetic failing; it can also be a place to hide. Auster’s work – across 40-odd volumes of fiction, nonfiction, poetry – teeters bewilderingly between the higher evasiveness (a serious attempt to render the mediated nature of the postmodern self) and the lower evasiveness (bluster, boilerplate, banality). Now you see him, now you only think you do.

[  Paul Auster: a miscellany of the mind  ]

That Auster’s first published novel was a pseudonymous thriller is significant. All his life, he was a hermit crab, occupying the discarded shells of popular fiction – yet another place to hide. His novels are full of detectives, actual and metaphorical; they tend not to find out very much. The New York Trilogy parodies the detective story by sending its murder mystery plots down rabbitholes of epistemological ambiguity. Oracle Night riffs on Dashiell Hammett’s parable, in The Maltese Falcon (1930), about Flitcraft, the man who walks out of his successful life when a near miss with a falling girder shows him the randomness underlying everything.

Auster infiltrated the locked room of genre storytelling – all plot details sealed up tight – with serious questions about how we know what we know, how we assemble the tiles of our own mosaics of meaning, how stories shape our lives without our noticing. At the same time, he was the exemplary magician, directing your attention away from the serious questions he wasn’t asking – or answering.

Paul Auster in Oviedo, Spain in 2006. Photograph: Bernat Armangue/AP

Paul Auster in Brooklyn, New York. Photograph: Timothy Fadek/Corbis/Getty Images

Twenty years ago, The New York Trilogy looked like a fairly safe bet for canonical status. But literary fashion has moved on. (Another lightning strike.) For interested parties, Auster’s best, and most representative, book is probably Leviathan. Its opening sentence (“Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin”) ushers you superbly into Auster’s world of accident and memory. After that, as Auster’s various narrators will certainly remind you, you are, like the rest of us, on your own.

Kevin Power is a novelist, critic and assistant professor of creative writing at Trinity College Dublin.

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