And then I considered the phrase “often wondered.” Feeling Aurelius pressing me to practice philosophy on the scant raw materials of my life, I asked myself exactly how often I had wondered about the profitability of Penguin Classics. Merely saying that you often wondered something gave no indication of how prominent a part of life that state of mind really was. Did it come up every three hours? Once a month? Every time a certain special set of conditions recurred to remind me? I certainly did not think about Penguin’s financial condition every time I set eyes on one of their books. Sometimes I just thought of whatever that particular book was about, uninterested for the moment in who the publisher was; sometimes I thought of the fact that the orange-backed Penguin novels faded in the sunlight like dry cleaners’ posters, and how amazing it was that a color scheme as intrinsically questionable as that orange, white, and black would come to seem lovely and subtle, intimately associated with our idea of the English novel, just because it happened to be what somebody at a publishing firm had decided to use as a standard format. Sometimes the orange backs made me think of the first Penguin book I had read, My Family and Other Animals: my mother had given it to me one summer, and not only had I liked the lizards and scorpions and sunlight, I had also been interested, as I read my way deeper into the bulk of the pages, by a tiny printed code that occurred every twenty pages or so at the bottom left margin of the right-hand page: “FOA-7,” “FOA-8,” “FOA-9,” etc. Some kind of private technical bookbinder’s jargon, I thought—”Facing Off Alternate 7,” or “Feed Onto Assembly 7,” perhaps. Much later, when I noticed this feature of Penguin books again, in the middle of reading Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat (”F.H.D.-6,” etc.) and realized that it was simply the initials of the book’s title, a quick way of avoiding mixups in manufacture, I felt a retroactive reach of love for this previously unsolved mystery, and gratitude to Penguin for providing us with this more absolute set of milestones to measure our progress through a book: for when you reach something like “F.H.D.-14” (as far as I got in that particular Murdoch, I have to say, much as I like her writing), you feel that your forward progress is confirmed more objectively than when you merely reach a new chapter.
All of these particular Penguin-related observations had different cycles of recurrence and therefore microscopic differences of weight in my personality—and it seemed to me then that we needed a measure of the periodicity of regularly returning thoughts, expressed as, say, the number of times a certain thought pops into your head every year. I wondered about the financial situation of Penguin books maybe four times a year. “A periodicity of 4”—it had a scientific ring. Once a year, just when Muzak switched over to Christmas carols, I thought, “It’s funny that ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’ is in a minor key.” Every time I stubbed a toe I thought, “Amazing that a man’s toe can take that kind of shock and not break”—and I stubbed a toe maybe eight times a year. About every other time I took a vitamin C pill, fifteen times a year, I thought as I filled the water glass,”. . . livin’ on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine . . .” If we could assign a periodicity number in this way to every recurrent thought a person had, what would we know? We would know the relative frequency of his thoughts over time, something that might prove to be more revealing than any statement of beliefs he might offer, or even than a frozen section of available, potential thoughts (if that were possible) at any one time in particular. Just as the most frequent words in English are humdrum ones like “of” and “in” and “the,” so the most frequent thoughts are bland and tiresome things like, “Itch on face,” “[fleeting sexual image],” and “Is my breath bad?” But below the “of” and “in” level of thought-vocabulary, there was a whole list of mid-frequency ideas. I imagined them taking the form of a chart—something like:
Subject of Thought
Number of Times
Thought Occurred
per Year
(in descending order)
L.
580.0
Family
400.0
Brushing tongue
150.0
Earplugs
100.0
Bill-paying
52.0
Panasonic three-wheeled vacuum cleaner, greatness of
45.0
Sunlight makes you cheerful
40.0
Traffic frustration
38.0
Penguin books, all
35.0
Job, should I quit?
34.0
Friends, don’t have any
33.0
Marriage, a possibility?
32.0
Vending machines
31.0
Straws don’t unsheath well
28.0
Shine on moving objects
25.0
McCartney more talented than Lennon?
23.0
Friends smarter, more capable than I am
19.0
Paper-towel dispensers
19.0
“What oft was thought, but ne’er” etc.
18.0
People are very dissimilar
16.0
Trees, beauty of
15.0
Sidewalks
15.0
Friends are unworthy of me
15.0
Identical twins separated at birth, studies of traits
14.0
Intelligence, going fast
14.0
Wheelchair ramps, their insane danger
14.0
Urge to kill
13.0
Escalator invention
12.0
People are very similar
12.0
“Not in my backyard”
11.0
Straws float now
10.0
DJ, would I be happy as one?
9.0
“If you can’t get out of it, get into it”
9.0
Pen, felt-tip
9.0
Gasoline, nice smell of
8.0
Pen, ballpoint
8.0
Stereo systems
8.0
Fear of getting mugged again
7.0
Staplers
7.0
“Roaches check in, but they don’t check out”
6.0
Dinner roll, image of
6.0
Shoes
6.0
Bags
5.0
Butz, Earl
4.0
Sweeping, brooms
4.0
Whistling, yodel trick
4.0
“You can taste it with your eyes”
4.0
Dry-cleaning fluid, smell of
3.0
Zip-lock tops
2.0
Popcorn
1.0
Birds regurgitate food and feed young with it
0.5
Kant, Immanuel
0.5
But compiling the list, as I saw as soon as I began sketchily to do so in my head, was not the enlightening process of abstraction I had expected it to be: thoughts were too fluid, too difficult to name, and once named to classify, for my estimate of their relative frequency to mean very much. And there were way, way too many of them. Yet this ranking of periodicity, as an ideal of description, was the best I could do that afternoon. Introspection was the only slightly philosophical activity I felt capable of practicing, sitting on the bench in the sun, waiting until the last possible minute before I went back into work; and the attribution of frequency did at least force a truer sort of introspection than the wide-open question “What do I think about?” People seemed so alike when you imagined their daily schedules, or watched them walk toward the revolving door (as Dave, Sue, and Steve, not noticing me, were doing now), yet if you imagined a detailed thought-frequency chart compiled for each of them, and you tried comparing one chart with another, you would feel suddenly as if you
were comparing beings as different from each other as an extension cord and a grape-leaf roll. L. once told me that she thought “all the time” (I asked her to be more specific, she said once every three weeks or so) about a disturbing joke someone had told her when she was eleven, which goes: “Q: Do you know the description of the perfect woman? A: [Puts hand waist-high.] This tall with a flat head to rest your beer on.” Until two or three years ago, she told me, she had, from the time she was ten or so, often against her will, thought several times a week of a rhymed riddle that went:
As I was walking to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives
Every wife held seven sacks
And every sack held seven cats
And every cat had seven kits
Kits cats sacks wives
How many were going to St. Ives?
Every month and a half, so she told me, she thought with pleasure of a description in Daniel Deronda of a room in which everything was yellow, not having imagined high-Victorian rooms decorated in that color before. And I thought about none of those things!1 She and I knew each other well; we felt that we were alike in important ways, delighted and not delighted in tandem, yet charts of repeating thoughts and their periodicities for the two of us would reveal surprisingly little overlap in the mid-frequency range.
Above the periodicity of solitary, internal thought, dependent upon it yet existing on a separate plane, was the periodicity of conversation, on the phone and in person. Twenty times a year L. and I talked about the fact that women characters in film comedies almost always functioned as comic straight men. Twenty-five times a year we wondered what it would have been like if my parents had stayed married, or if hers had gotten a divorce. Fifty times a year we talked about promiscuity’s effects on outlook and personality, with examples taken from her friends’ lives and from our own. Every other day we considered which city or area we would most like to live in, and in what kind of house, if we were rich. Affirmative action had a periodicity of 4; the heritability of mental traits, of 12. Twice every summer we discussed whether colors in nature could clash. When a subject recurred, we felt it as familiar, but indistinct: almost always it came up (that is, felt worth discussing again) only after we could no longer remember exactly what our previous respective opinions had been—we remembered vaguely, unattributively, the telling points that had been made the last time, but often reversed our positions, each of us more enthusiastic now about the fresher-feeling arguments the other had made the last time, and less convinced by our own earlier ones.
And there were periodicities superimposed on the plane of conversation, too: nationwide fifteen-year cycles of journalistic excitement about one issue or another; generational corrections and pendular overreactions; and, above these, the periodicity of libraries and Penguin Classics, slower still, resurgencies and subsidings of interest in some avenue of inquiry or style of thinking from one century to the next, restatings of mislaid truths in new vernaculars.
On all these planes, I thought, the alternation of neglect and attention paid to an idea was like the cycle of waxing and buffing, dulling down and raising the shine higher, sanding between coats and then applying another—things happened to it during the long unsupervised stretches. Just now, for the sixth time in two workweeks, I had paid attention to one sentence-long idea of Aurelius for a minute or two, thereby lifting it up from artificial Penguin storage into living memory for that short time, when but for its occupying my thoughts, it might not have been for those minutes under consideration by anyone else in the entire city, maybe even in the world. Today, too, for the first time in twenty years, I had on two separate occasions been reminded of the act of tying my shoelaces (three occasions, if you count the momentary pride I had felt just before the shoelace had snapped), a lifetime average periodicity of around one-tenth of a reminding per year, although that number is misleading, since frequencies should, I decided, be averaged over a shorter interval, like five years, to be meaningful, at least until you have died. It was impossible to predict which of the two, Aurelius or shoelaces, would rank higher in my overall lifetime periodicity ratings upon my death.1
It was time to go in. The fingers of my sun hand felt sticky; I rubbed them with my thumb until a tiny dark-gray cylinder, composed of popcorn oil, urban dirt, skin, and cookie sugar, was brought into being. I flicked it away. The date, I noticed, was still visible on my palm, but it would be gone after my next hand-washing. With some effort I was able to twist and crumple the Papa Gino’s bag tightly enough to stuff most of it, too, into the milk carton; I took an obscure satisfaction in the inside-outness of this achievement. Collecting my possessions, my stapled CVS bag and my paperback, I stood up. The stuffed carton of milk I threw out; or, more accurately, I placed it very carefully at the apex of a mound of bee-probed lunch trash ready at any minute to overflow a nearby oil drum, making sure the carton wasn’t going to topple at least until I was gone by steadying it gently with my fingertips in its precarious spot for a few seconds. I couldn’t crush the underlying trash down, as I had half an hour earlier outside the CVS, because any application of pressure would only have made the whole mound disintegrate. A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside. I entered the lobby and made my way toward the up escalator.
Chapter Fifteen
AT THE VERY END of the ride, I caught sight of a cigarette butt rolling and hopping against the comb plate where the grooves disappeared. I stepped onto the mezzanine and turned to watch it for a few seconds. Its movement was a faster version of the rotation of mayonnaise or peanut butter or olive jars, or cans of orange juice or soup, when they are caught at the end of supermarket conveyor belts, their labels circling around and around—Hellman’s! Hellman’s! Hellman’s!—something I had loved to see when I was little. I looked down the great silver glacier to the lobby. The maintenance man was at the bottom. I waved to him. He held up his white rag for a second, then put it back down on the rubber handrail.
About the Author
NICHOLSON BAKER was born in 1957 and grew up in Rochester, New York. He attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. His work has appeared in The Atlantic and The New Yorker. He lives in Mount Morris, New York, with his wife and daughter.
1 I love the constancy of shine on the edges of moving objects. Even propellers or desk fans will glint steadily in certain places in the grayness of their rotation; the curve of each fan blade picks up the light for an instant on its circuit and then hands it off to its successor.
1 I stared in disbelief the first time a straw rose up from my can of soda and hung out over the table, barely arrested by burrs in the underside of the metal opening. I was holding a slice of pizza in one hand, folded in a three-finger grip so that it wouldn’t flop and pour cheese-grease on the paper plate, and a paperback in a similar grip in the other hand—what was I supposed to do? The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback. I soon found, as many have, that there was a way to drink no-handed with these new floating straws: you had to bend low to the table and grasp the almost horizontal straw with your lips, steering it back down into the can every time you wanted a sip, while straining your eyes to keep them trained on the line of the page you were reading. How could the straw engineers have made so elementary a mistake, designing a straw that weighed less than the sugar-water in which it was intended to stand? Madness! But later, when I gave the subject more thought, I decided that, though the straw engineers were probably blameworthy for failing to foresee the straw’s buoyancy, the problem was more complex than I had first imagined. As I reconstruct that moment of history, circa 1970 or so, what happened was that the plastic material used in place of paper was in fact heavier than Coke—their equations were absolutely correct, the early manufacturing runs looked good, and though the water-to-plastic weight ratio was a little tight, they went ahead. What they
had forgotten to take into account, perhaps, was that the bubbles of carbonation attach themselves to invisible asperities on the straw’s surface, and are even possibly generated by turbulence at the leading edge of the straw as you plunge it in the drink; thus clad with bubbles, the once marginally heavier straw reascends until its remaining submerged surface area lacks the bubbles to lift it further. Though the earlier paper straw, with its spiral seam, was much rougher than plastic, and more likely to attract bubbles, it was porous: it soaked up a little of the Coke as ballast and stayed put. All right—an oversight; why wasn’t it corrected? A different recipe for the plastic, a thicker straw? Surely the huge buyers, the fast-food companies, wouldn’t have tolerated straws beaching themselves in their restaurants for more than six months or so. They must have had whole departments dedicated to exacting concessions from Sweetheart and Marcal. But the fast-food places were adjusting to a novelty of their own at about the same time: they were putting slosh caps on every soft drink they served, to go or for the dining room, which cut down on spillage, and the slosh caps had a little cross in the middle, which had been the source of some unhappiness in the age of paper straws, because the cross was often so tight that the paper straw would crumple when you tried to push it through. The straw men at the fast-food corporations had had a choice: either we (a) make the crossed slits easier to pierce so that the paper straws aren’t crumpled, or we (b) abandon paper outright, and make the slits even tighter, so that (1) any tendency to float is completely negated and (2) the seal between the straw and the crossed slits is so tight that almost no soda will well out, stain car seats and clothing, and cause frustration. And (b) was the ideal solution for them, even leaving aside the attractive price that the straw manufacturers were offering as they switched their plant over from paper-spiraling equipment to high-speed extrusion machines—so they adopted it, not thinking that their decision had important consequences for all restaurants and pizza places (especially) that served cans of soda. Suddenly the paper-goods distributor was offering the small restaurants floating plastic straws and only floating plastic straws, and was saying that this was the way all the big chains were going; and the smaller sub shops did no independent testing using cans of soda instead of cups with crossed-slit slosh caps. In this way the quality of life, through nobody’s fault, went down an eighth of a notch, until just last year, I think, when one day I noticed that a plastic straw, made of some subtler polymer, with a colored stripe in it, stood anchored to the bottom of my can!
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