The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  I love you because you

  Are helping me to make

  Of the lumber of my life

  Not a tavern

  But a temple,

  Out of the works

  Of my every day

  Not a reproach

  But a song.19

  Who Hugh Croft is I don’t know. He isn’t in the anthologies of wedding poetry or the library catalogs that I checked, and he isn’t in Books in Print, and he isn’t as good as Elizabeth Bishop. Even so, he is someone worth thanking—he has helped keep the old sense of the l.-word current in the U.S. through 1993.

  I was looking forward to quoting Elizabeth Bishop’s lumber in this warehouse-in-progress—I was inching my way toward it—when Sven Birkerts’s funereal Gutenberg Elegies, about the decline and fall of the culture of print, arrived on December 14, 1994, sent by book-loving, book-reading Barbara Epstein of The New York Review of Books, and sent extravagantly by Federal Express even though Ms. Epstein knew then, because I had warned her, that my lumberfest had grown fifteen times too long for her noble tabloid. Sven Birk-erts quotes Bishop’s “Crusoe in England,” including the lines

  I’m bored, too, drinking my real tea,

  surrounded by uninteresting lumber

  but he neglects to write with wonderment about Bishop’s atypical use of this word, my word. Did Birkerts stop to think about it when he was retyping the passage? Bishop, despite the fact that she is as American a poet as you could ask for, uses the word in the English way, defiantly, as if our Crown Zellerbachs and Georgia-Pacifies and International Papers had not successfully pruned out the old-growth meaning, even though Daniel Defoe’s own novel doesn’t use it at all.20 (Defoe contents himself with “provisions,” “divers pieces,” “goods,” “luggage,” and “warehouse”—no lumber or lumber-room.) 21 Of course it isn’t an error on Birkerts’s part to use this innocent, very good poem by Bishop to do something big and floppy like run down “our cultural condition and its prospects,” as Birkerts does (poems can and should be used for all sorts of apoetical purposes—it keeps us thinking about them), and Birkerts does follow his Bishop quotation up with a thought-provoking half-sentence: “The more complex and sophisticated our systems of lateral access, the more we sacrifice in the way of depth.” The half-sentence isn’t true, though, in my experience: I have made “lateral access” my catechism for the past nine lumberlost months, and I have as a result read more, read deeper, read with more curiosity, joy, fanaticism, found more writers I look forward to reading more of, loved the Printed Page in the abstract more, saw more thrilling future in its past, than I have since early college. Lateral access uncovers new places to go deep. I have been reading my great-grandfather Nicholson’s five-volume 1767 Tonson edition of Dryden,22 and my grandfather Nicholson’s copy of Meredith’s poems, books I once doubted I would ever get to—and I owe these reactionary pleasures in great part to the ostensibly heartless, plastic English Poetry Database, whose thousand sideways shocks air-hockey us into an unusually vivid realization of the number of poems there are out there, waiting for us—good, funny poems sometimes, and not (as we might hope, because then we would feel better about not having looked them up) wasted efforts. A passing fret that literacy is under siege is good for reading; it lends grandeur to a commonplace pastime. I am not merely reading Elizabeth Bishop, one can say, I am doing my part to preserve culture from the Straw Men. And is there, I wonder, any point in Birkerts’s lamenting how few there are who now read books with the trough-snortingly ludic absorption with which many allegedly used to read books, if the few who still do—readers like Birkerts himself—forget to bring to them the verbal attentiveness, the readiness to hear what Pater called the “finer edge of words still in use” that will demonstrate by example why one given piece of lithography merits attention over all its laterally accessible alternatives? Bishop’s poem is itself no more than “uninteresting lumber” unless you can hear the strangeness of her use of lumber. Or do I censure Sven Birkerts for being unfruitfully dour about electronic encroachments only because he managed to quote the lumber-passage from “Crusoe in England” in his book before I did in this essay? Am I so petty?23 Or is it really just because Birkerts’s meditation on reading doesn’t find space to mention somewhere my own meditation on reading, called U and I, published in 1991? Am I indignant at Birkerts’s sourness about our unbookish culture because U and I failed to cheer so thoughtful a man up about the future of the book? What unbecoming garbage!

  1 “Up, my comrades! up and doing!” yodels John Greenleaf Whittier in “The Lumbermen”—an unintentionally funny poem, now that Monty Python’s “I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK” has transvestized forestry, and a poem that isn’t in the English Poetry Database, because no American poems are—

  Up, my comrades! up and doing!

  Manhood’s rugged play

  Still renewing, bravely hewing

  Through the world our way!

  2 Chapter 4, “On Fancy and Imagination,” in Collected Works, vol. 7, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, p. 82.

  3 See W. J. Bate’s and Albrecht B. Strauss’s edition of the Rambler essays, vol. II, p. 46.

  4 In this second quotation I’m following a 1901 Maynard, Merrill, & Co. student edition of “Of the Conduct of the Understanding,” with spelling and capitalization modernized, p. 121, bought for a dollar at an estate sale. Locke’s “Of the Conduct,” may I say in passing, in its discussion of the ways to train and subjugate the caprices of ideational succession, in order that no “foreign and unsought Ideas will offer themselves,” and so that we will be able to keep these anarchic ideas “from taking off our Minds from its present pursuit, and hinder them from running away with our Thoughts quite from the Subject in hand,” seems to have influenced several of Samuel Johnson’s best Rambler essays, viz.: “Lest a power so restless should be either unprofitably, or hurtfully employed, and the superfluities of intellect run to waste, it is no vain speculation to consider how we may govern our thoughts, restrain them from irregular motions, or confine them from boundless dissipation.” (Rambler no. 8.) Coleridge, an expert on muddle-headedness, attacks Locke in a letter to the Wedgewoods for his “complete Whirl-dance of Confusion” over mental terminology: “Sometimes again [in Locke’s Essay] the Ideas are coincident as objects of the mind in thinking, sometimes they stand for the mind itself, and sometimes we are the thinkers & the mind is only the Thought-Box. In short, the Mind in Mr Locke’s Essay has three senses—the Ware-house, the Wares, and the Ware-houseman.…” (Quoted in A Locke Miscellany, edited by Jean S. Yolton, 1990, pp. 274–5.) Laurence Sterne was of the contrary opinion that Locke’s “glory [was] to free the world from the lumber of a thousand vulgar errors.” (Tristram Shandy, vol. III, ch. 20.) See Patricia Graves’s meticulous Computer-Generated Concordance to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1974, p. 807).

  5 Judging by his library and the slighting things he says in the Essay about the poetic imagination. Locke did, though, own Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Congreve’s The Mourning Bride. (See Richard Ashcraft, “John Locke’s Library: Portrait of an Intellectual,” in A Locke Miscellany.)

  6 The Essays of Montaigne, Oxford University Press, vol. 1, “Translator’s Preface.”

  7 And it is contemptible and wrong of Montaigne to have melted whole stolen crayons from Seneca into his paragraphs without announcing it, or for that matter for Georges Perec to work entire Frenched-over sentences from Joyce’s Ulysses into his Life: A User’s Manual without so much as a peep to his readers about it, or for Sterne to plagiarize paragraphs of Locke, or for Emerson to plagiarize a paragraph of Samuel Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare—it isn’t cute, it isn’t postmodern, it’s cheating, and always has been—and once we learn that a prose writer is capable of such silent filchery, we dismiss him, rightly, as a liar and a con-man, and no matter how good he is, we no longer completely trust anything he gives us.

  8 A sentence that (as I deter
mined only after much incredulous scrolling and searching) you will not find anywhere on the Library of the Future’s Third Series CD-ROM (you will in Roy E. Leake’s Concordance des Essais de Montaigne, 1981)—since the Library of the Future’s version of the Essays leaves out more than four fifths of the original Cottonian translation. (Rather scandalously, given that World Library, Inc., repeats the claim that “All books are complete & unabridged” five times in its product catalog.) The CD-ROM includes, for example, only two of the first twenty-five essays, leaving out “Of Pedantry,” “Of Liars,” and “Of Fear,” nowhere warning us, onscreen or off, that any material is cut. If this Library of the Future really is a foretaste of the Library of the Future, I hope we won’t, overawed by its exquisite searchability (and I am deeply indebted to it at present myself—although I would like to go on record as saying that I had already found the use of lumber in Boswell’s Life of Johnson by reading an old Everyman Library edition on the T in Boston in 1987), compromise the university Library of the Present, which typically holds Hazlitt’s full annotated nineteenth-century edition of Cotton’s translation, as well as a convenient one-volume 1952 Great Books edition that prints every word. (The electronic text that Library of the Future uses looks to be a scanned version of Doubleday’s handsome, footnote-free distillation of 1947, edited by Salvador Dali—an edition that in its physical paper form is accompanied by some interestingly autopsy-esque Dali illustrations not included on the disk—and I wonder, in passing, if Doubleday’s permissions department is aware that their selection was scanned, and if Dali’s act of essay-selection constitutes sweat-of-the-brow intellectual value that exists on top of a work in the public domain.)

  9 I like to think that Samuel Johnson ate lumber pies, too—one of the best passages in Macaulay’s article about Johnson in the Encyclopaedia Britannica goes: “Even to the end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey. His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries and à la mode beef shops, was far from delicate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled and the moisture broke out on his forehead.” But even Johnson might have had some difficulty with this gut-buster from the True Gentlewoman’s Delight (1676), quoted in Robert Nares’s Glossary, as supplemented by Halliwell and Wright (1867): “A lumber pie.—Take three or four sweet-breads of veal, parboil and mince them very small, then take the curd of a quart of milk, turned with three eggs, half a pound of almond-past, and a penny-loaf grated, mingle these together, then take a spoonful of sweet herbs minced very small, also six ounces of oringado, and mince it, then season all this with a quarter of sugar, and three nutmegs, then take five dates, and a quarter of a pint of cream, four yolks of eggs, three spoonfuls of rose-water, three or four marrow-bones, mingle all these together, except the marrow, then make it up in long boles, about the bigness of an egg, and in every bole put a good piece of marrow, put these into the pie; then put a quarter of a pound of butter, and half a sliced lemon, them make a caudle of white wine, sugar and verjuice, put it in when you take your pie out of the oven, you may use a grain of musk and ambergriece.”

  10 No lumber in Froude that I found, but I came across an interestingly indigestible equivalent: “To cram a lad’s mind with infinite names of things which he never handled, places he never saw or will see, statements of facts which he cannot possibly understand, and must remain merely words to him—this, in my opinion, is like loading his stomach with marbles.” (“Education: An Address Delivered to the Students at St Andrew’s, March 19, 1869,” in Short Studies on Great Subjects, Second Series, p. 455.)

  11 Emerson mentions Saint Augustine as one of the writers one must read in his “Books.” There is a helpful essay on Emerson’s fascination with Johnson by Stephen Swords called “Emerson and the Ghost of Doctor Johnson,” in The Age of Johnson, vol. 6, ed. Paul J. Korshin (New York: AMS Press, 1994). Swords does not mention one notable remaking of Johnson by Emerson. Johnson, in his “Life of Congreve,” says of a passage in Congreve’s The Mourning Bride: “He who reads those lines enjoys for a moment the powers of a poet: he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but he feels it with great increase of sensibility; he recognises a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty, and enlarged with majesty.” Emerson condensed this into his famous line (which I am temporarily unable to locate) about recognizing, in works of genius, our own rejected thoughts: “They return with an alienated majesty.” The Mourning Bride (first produced in 1697) is the only one of Congreve’s plays (according to David Mann’s Concordance to the Plays of William Congreve) that contains lumber. Zara says (II, ii),

  what are Riches, Empire, Power,

  But larger Means to gratifie the Will?

  The Steps on which we tread, to rise and reach

  Our Wish; and that obtain’d down with the Scaffolding

  Of Sceptres, Crowns, and Thrones; they’ve serv’d their End,

  And are like Lumber, to be left and scorn’d.

  12 The Pilgrims of the Rhine, 1834, quoted approvingly by the sixteen-year-old Ruskin in 1836 in his “Essay on Literature,” in Three Letters and an Essay on Literature by John Ruskin, 1836–1841: Found in His Tutor’s Desk (George Allen, 1893), p. 36.

  13 The essay is in the Penguin Classics edition, Selected Short Fiction, ed. Deborah A. Thomas, p. 131. In Dickens’s “Seven Dials,” included in the Penguin collection, there are “shops for the purchase of rags, bones, old iron, and kitchen-stuff” but no lumber-rooms. This may be as good a place as any to point out, if nobody has, that one of Leigh Hunt’s essays from The Indicator, published in 1833, contains a sentence that was possibly the piece of old iron that Dickens hammered and alloyed into the entirety of The Old Curiosity Shop. In “Of the Sight of Shops,” Hunt writes:

  The curiosity-shop is sometimes very amusing, with its mandarins, stuffed birds, odd old carved faces, and a variety of things as indescribable as bits of dreams.

  Here is Dickens’s version in the first chapter of The Old Curiosity Shop:

  There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour here and there, fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters, rusty weapons of various kinds, distorted figures in china and wood and iron and ivory: tapestry and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams.

  14 “But surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth an even greater poet than he is,—his thought richer, and his influence of wider application,—was that he should have read more books, among them, no doubt, those of that Goethe whom he disparaged without reading him.” (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.”)

  15 In his critical prose, that is. “Rugby Chapel” and the corded bales at the end of “The Scholar-Gypsy” are awfully good.

  16 Saintsbury seems to be half-remembering the aforequoted passages of Shelley here, or perhaps paraphrasing Horace, who had said some helpful things in his Art of Poetry about how difficult it is to treat in one’s own way what is common (line 128), and about the desirability of a poetry made of familiar things (line 240), and about the “beauty that may crown the commonplace” (line 243)—passages more helpful when pulled out of context, as they frequently were. (For instance, the “unutterably tedious” Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten writes in his Reflections on Poetry that a “confused recognition, if it occurs, represents in the most poetic way a mingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar,” and then he says, “Hence Horace, ‘I should look for my poetic fictions in familiar things.’ ”) In one of the early translations into English of Horace’s Ars Poetica, by Oldham (1683), a word leaps up:

  For there’s no second Rate in Poetry

  A dull insipid Writer none can bear,

  In every place he is the publick jeer,

  And Lumber of the Shops and Stationer.

  17 Some lines from G. K.
Chesterton’s Orthodoxy help explain Bishop’s choice of Crusoe. In the chapter called “The Ethics of Elfland” he says that Robinson Crusoe “celebrates the poetry of limits,” and then writes: “Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea.” I must thank my mother for reminding me of this passage. “ ‘Saved from the wreck,’ as Chesterton said, ‘saved from the wreck,’ ”she said, helping her grandchildren build a lean- to out of sticks on a beach.

  18 Michele Fagan said by phone that the “Mystery” in her title was an editorial addition—she had intended it simply to be “A Tour Through the Lumber Room.” The Beatles reference does confuse things a little. Her essay is a survey of the oddments that can be found in old census reports; I found it by searching the Wilson Library Literature CD-ROM.