The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  (v)

  In his seventy-eighth Rambler essay, for Saturday, December 15, 1750, Johnson wrote:

  The most important events, when they become familiar, are no longer considered with wonder or solicitude, and that which at first filled up our whole attention, and left no place for any other thought, is soon thrust aside into some remote repository of the mind, and lies among other lumber of the memory, over-looked and neglected.

  When I first read this sentence, in 1982, I had no notion of the long-bearded and -barded history of lumber. The phrase “lumber of the memory” appealed to me because it brought to mind dim palletized piles of pressure-treated two-by-fours, their end-grain sprayed bright nonwooden colors to distinguish grades and brands, laid out in a huge, fragrant mind-hangar—a place like the Home Depot, or Grossman’s, or Chase Pitkin, where new sawdust, and not the dust of ages, covers the floor, and where unfinished ten-foot pieces of molding (quarter-rounds, coves, and coronado caps) are stored upright in allées of sequential pens; lengths that when you bring them up to the register, intending to Make Something New with them, spring in sympathy with your steps, like the rhythmic slow-motion warp of the sprinting vaulter’s resilient prop: a forward-looking, American lumber of imminence, then, of unrolled plans and dormer punch-throughs and vest-pocket solariums, not a backward-looking European lumber of decrepitude and decay.1 Remote repositories of the mind were just the sort of places you would need to store a heavy, dentable, sandable percept like lumber: the roundedness of the word implies the shearing scream of the tablesaw in some distant neighbor’s yard on summer afternoons, which is always followed by a reassuringly melodic mallet-plink as the shorn end falls into the pile of angled scrap.

  But if someone had quietly let me know back then that Johnson’s chosen word had nothing directly to do with wood, that it was often used euphemistically to mean “rubbish,” in metric placements where a single syllable like “trash” wouldn’t work, I, though ashamed of the seriousness of my misunderstanding, would still have treasured the sentence. I connected it with Johnson’s way of walking, his oddly love-inspiring “infirmity of the convulsive kind” (as Pope called it, when recommending some of Johnson’s early verses to a friend)—an affliction “that attacks him sometimes, so as to make Him a sad Spectacle.” Boswell, attempting a diagnosis, quotes a description of St. Vitus’s dance from a medical book: “It manifests itself by halting or unsteadiness of one of the legs, which the patient draws after him like an ideot.” Thus Johnson lumbered into the drawing rooms of dancing masters like Chesterfield; and his gait easily merged with my reverence for the extensive mental millyards of knowledge that he was able to pack into his Dictionary, a book that as soon as it was published stood for the raw materials of prose, so definitive an inventory that even Pater, a century later, advised would-be Cyreniasts to be wary of any word that Johnson hadn’t seen fit to define.

  And I was also certain, when I first read it, that Johnson’s sentence was the secret fuse-force that lay behind Coleridge’s better-known description of the power of philosophy and of poetic genius: the sort of genius that “rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission”:

  Truths of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet being at the same time of universal interest, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the life and efficiency of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side, with the most despised and exploded errors.

  Johnson’s lumbered “repository of the mind” reforms itself as Coleridge’s slumbering “dormitory of the soul.” Even Coleridge’s use of “exploded errors” has a Johnsonian sound: Johnson elsewhere (The Adventurer, no. 126) censures the recluse who “thinks himself in possession of truth, when he is only fondling an error long since exploded.” Coleridge wrote his version for the fifth issue of The Friend, a short-lived periodical (it ran from 1809 to 1810) that seems to have been modeled in part on Johnson’s Ramblers, Idlers, and Adventurers; but he liked his passage so much that he worked it into his Biographia Literaria (1817).2 Right he was to fondle it a second time, too: he had renovated and Sardanopalized Johnson’s truth, which had itself become so true that it lay bedridden in a multivolume collection of passé eighteenth-century moral essays by a critic who, in the eyes of the Lakers (as Jeffrey called Wordsworth et al.), stood for the falsely orotund diction of the Popists. Those hinted shapes that you can almost detect in the turbid shadows of Coleridge’s sentence—the sprawling forms of despised and exploded opium-eaters sleeping off their murky glassfuls in a communal paralysis of indolence, bad dreams, and missed deadlines—force the inherited assertion to assume once again all the life and efficacy of truth.

  Both quotations, I hope I am the first to note, can be traced back to a particular passage in Saint Augustine, whom Johnson read carefully and occasionally quoted from in essays and ghost-written sermons. In Chapter X of the Confessions, Augustine thinks about how cogo (to gather) and cogito are allied words, and how in remembering something, we must gather, or re-collect, truths that sparsa prius et neglecta latitabant—that before lay hidden away, scattered and ignored; or, in Coleridge and Johnson’s variations, lay “despised and exploded” or “overlooked and neglected.” “If,” writes Augustine, in Pine-Coffin’s Penguin translation,

  If, for a short space of time, I cease to give them my attention, they sink back and recede again into the more remote cells of my memory, so that I have to think them out again, like a fresh set of facts, if I am to know them. I have to shepherd them out again from their old lairs.…

  (Augustine also refers here to the mind’s contents as thesauri, “treasures,” and compares his memory to a “huge temple” and a “spacious palace” and, with a little more neurological justification, to a place with ineffabiles sinus—ineffable sinuses, or secret recesses, folds, fastnesses, or deep pockets in the financial sense.) The first version of Johnson’s Rambler essay, which has “the remoter repositories of the mind”3 rather than the (better) singular “some remote repository,” further points up the Augustinian source, which is plural.

  There is another figure behind Johnson’s and Coleridge’s rooms full of neglected memory-lumber, as well. In Locke’s “Of the Conduct of the Understanding,” a work posthumously published in 1706 and probably intended as a coda to the much better-known but less interesting and human (and lumberless) Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke writes that “General Observations drawn from Particulars, are the Jewels of Knowledge, comprehending great Store in a little Room; but they are therefore to be made with the greater Care and Caution,” since, Locke warns, we are always in peril of overdoing our jewel-storage, making

  the Head a Magazine of Materials, which can hardly be call’d Knowledge, or at least ’tis but like a Collection of Lumber not reduc’d to Use or Order; and he that makes every thing an Observation, has the same useless Plenty and much more falsehood mixed with it.

  Some pages later, Locke (who was in the habit of using metaphors to point out the dangers of metaphor) says that he who has not a mind to represent to himself an author’s sense “divested of the false lights and deceitful ornaments of speech,” will make

  his understanding only the warehouse of other men’s lumber; I mean false and unconcluding reasonings, rather than a repository of truth for his own use, which will prove substantial, and stand him in stead, when he has occasion for it.4

  This is a form of the great scholarly worry—a worry which hydroptically book-thirsty poets like Donne, Johnson, Gray, Southey, and Coleridge all felt at times—the fear that too much learning will eventually turn even an original mind into a large, putty-colored regional storage facility of mislabeled and leaking chemical drums. Locke wasn’t much of a poetry reader,5 so it isn’t likely that he got his lumber from Butler or Dryden. But he might have had Charles Cotton’s translation of Montaigne in mind. I know I do now, as I retype Locke. One of the first places I looked for lumber was in
Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s Essays, figuring that Florio would have given it to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare would have passed it on to everyone else (via The Tempest, say), since that was one of vocabulary’s known spice-routes—but vexingly I didn’t find it in Book 1, Chapter XXIV, “Of Pedantisme,” where it should have been, and the Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare was able to cough up only the one unremunerative Lumbert Street address from Henry IV, Part II. So I set Florio’s Montaigne aside, in one of my floor-piles, as a false lead—regretfully, since E. J. Trechmann, one of Montaigne’s later translators, likens the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Florio’s version to “the finding of a valuable piece of old furniture.”6 But then I discovered, working my way through some of the screens from the Library of the Future CD-ROM, that Charles Cotton (1630–1687) found a way to put lumber into his 1685 translation of the Essays. (It was Cotton’s version, not Florio’s, that Pope and Emerson read.) “Some one may say of me,” Cotton has Montaigne say (in the late essay called “Of Physiognomy”), “that I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them.”7 Montaigne has a thousand quote-crammed volumes ranged about him in his circular library as he writes, and he can borrow, if he wants to, “from a dozen such scrap-gatherers, people about whom I do not much trouble myself, wherewith to trick up this treatise of Physiognomy.” But he will try to resist, since

  These lumber pies of common-places, wherewith so many furnish their studies, are of little use but to common subjects, and serve but to show us, and not to direct us.…

  Lumber pies? What are these succulent-sounding baked goods that Cotton serves us, in his version of Montaigne’s unusual phrase “pastissages de lieux communs”? Florio’s translation kneejerks here with “rapsodies of common places,” a cliché; modern versions by J. M. Cohen and Donald Frame offer the relatively vague “concoctions of commonplaces.” Yet a pastissage is, according to Godefroy’s Dictionnaire de l’Ancienne Langue Française, a “making, or baking of pies, or pastmeats,” or figuratively, a mélange. Possibly Donald Frame would object that Cotton erred on the side of overspecificity. But Cotton seems to be aware of the range of metaphorical meaning that pastissage can have, since he translates the only other use of the word in the Essays, in “Of the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers,” less colorfully: “we call the piling up [pastissage] of the first laws that fall into our hands, justice.”8 Trechmann translates pastissage as “pasties” and M. A. Screech, most recently, substitutes “meat pies.” But to my nose, Cotton’s translation retains more of the steamy savoriness of the original, a lumber pie being, depending on the dictionary you consult, a “highly seasoned meat-pie, made either of veal or lamb” (lumbard-pie in Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs, and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century, 10th ed., 1881), or “A pie in which balls of minced meat or fish are baked with butter and eggs” (Webster’s Second; definition omitted in Webster’s Third), or even possibly an uncle or nephew of the numble, umble, or humble pie, a pie made from the lombles (cf. loins and lumbar-organs) or “certain inward parts” of the deer, according to Dr. Ernest Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Elsevier, 1966–67), whose dedication pages made me cry furtively and without warning at the copying machine of the Berkeley Public Library. Volume I of Klein’s dictionary is

  DEDICATED TO THE SACRED MEMORY OF THE BEST PARENTS

  MY DEAR MOTHER

  WHO AFTER A LIFE OF SELF-SACRIFICE DIED IN SZATMAR IN 1940

  AND MY DEAR FATHER,

  THE WORLD-RENOWNED RABBI AND SCHOLAR

  RABBI IGNAZ (ISAAC) KLEIN OF SZATMAR,

  WHO DIED A MARTYR OF HIS FAITH IN AUSCHWITZ IN 1944;

  AND TO THE SACRED MEMORY OF MY WIFE

  AND OF MY ONLY CHILD JOSEPH (HAYYIM ISRAEL)

  WHO ALSO FELL VICTIMS TO NAZISM IN AUSCHWITZ IN 1944

  And Volume II is

  DEDICATED TO THE BLESSED MEMORY OF

  ARTHUR MINDEN, Q.C.

  THE DEAREST FRIEND I EVER HAD,

  THE NOBLEST MAN THAT EVER LIVED,

  WHO DIED IN TORONTO IN 1966

  MAY HIS SOUL BE BOUND IN THE BOND OF LIFE

  Dr. Klein: a quiet and disciplined scholar who, after these awful deaths, was left with an extended etymological word-family to keep him company. I would like to thank him, if he is still with us, and even if he is not, for his help with the numbles and umbles and other inward parts that I hereby bake in this lumber pie—a pie that is, regardless of which fishes or meats may have participated in its recipe at various times, above all a mixed dish: Montaigne intended us to think of his “pastissage de lieux communs” as a shepherd’s pie, a calzone, a frittata, a scrapple, a haggis, a pizza ai quattro formaggi, of commonplaces. Frame’s “Concoction” sounds water-based and medicinal and unchewable—it is a non-nutritive pestle-product that Homais the apothecary would formulate in his capharnaüm. The English Poetry Database offers further elucidation: a lumber pie is a “compound paste” in a poem called “A Farewel to Wine, by a Quondam Friend to the Bottle” (1693 is the date of the edition used by the database), by one Richard Ames. Several screens in, Ames samples one vintage and rejects it:

  I’ve tasted it—’tis spiritless and flat,

  And has as many different tastes,

  As can be found in Compound pastes,

  In Lumber Pye, or soporifrous Methridate.

  The lumber pie also appears to be made, at least at some periods, without benefit of milk or butter or beef, and possibly with ox-heel—or so I nervously conclude (feeling in matters of culinary and bovine history more than a little out of my depth) from a 1717 poem by Edward (“Ned”) Ward entitled “British Wonders: Or, A Poetical Description of the Several Prodigies and Most Remarkable Accidents That have happen’d in Britain since the Death of Queen Anne,” another finding from the Poetry Database. Ward sings of the “hornplague” that “like a fatal Rot or Murrain,/Turn’d all our Bulls and Cows to Carrion,” leaving a queasy populace unwilling to touch beef or anything made with dairy products, such as “custard,” for instance—an “open pie” (according to the OED) often containing meat in an egg and cream sauce:

  Custard, that noble cooling Food,

  So toothsome, wholsome, and so good,

  That Dainty so approv’d of old,

  Whose yellow surface shines like Gold …

  That crusty Fort, whose Walls of Wheat,

  Contain such tender lusheous Meat,

  And us’d so often to be storm’d

  By hungry Gownmen sharply arm’d,

  Was now, alas, despis’d as nought,

  And slighted wheresoe’er ’twas brought;

  Whilst Lumber-Pies came more in play,

  And bore, at Feasts, the Bell away.

  So in wet Seasons, when our Mutton

  Is e’ery where cry’d down as rotten,

  Cow-heel becomes a Dish of State,

  And climbs the Tables of the Great.

  The OED also informs us that “cow-heel” can mean “ox-heel.” So a lumber pie was at one time a non-dairy ox-product. Or not: I may be misapplying the last four lines, which possibly do not refer specifically to the pie that precedes them.9

  Another and (to be honest) incompatible explanation for the appearance in the Essais of the rare phrase “pastissage de lieux communs” is that Montaigne was quietly adapting, as was his way, and not quite understanding, a pie-figure from a text that was originally in English, or English mediated by Latin. Pie is—as I happened to discover while looking for lumber in Froude’s Short Studies on Great Subjects, Second Series, vol. II10—a printer’s term. In “On Progress,” Froude writes:

  When a block of type from which a book has been printed is broken up into its constituent letters the letters so disintegrated are called “pie.” The pie, a mere chaos, is afterwards sorted and distributed, preparatory to being built up into fresh combinations. A
distinguished American friend describes Democracy as “making pie.”