The Way the World Works

by Baker, Nicholson

  One summer I worked at a job where we had to wash hundreds of venetian blinds in a tall metal tank that stood in a loud room next to the air circulation fans. We dipped the blinds in soapy water in the tank, and then we moved them up and down. The dipping was supposed to remove the dust from the slats, but the dust had bonded with the paint and it stayed. So the man said we had to wash the slats by hand, with a rag. This made the white paint come off. We put all the blinds back in the windows, although they were bent and peeling and sorry-looking. Later I used a sledgehammer on a big piece of cement.

  One summer I went to a Nautilus Fitness Center at the Americana Hotel in Rochester. I did various strenuous things on the machines, and then I crossed the street to McDonald’s and ordered two Big Macs. My hand trembled so much from the exercise that I could barely push the straw through the little cross in the plastic lid of my root beer.

  One summer my son and I built a tree house near the compost pile. We painted it green. We ate dinner up there a few times.

  One summer after my wife and I spent all day packing boxes I had a dream in which I’d grown a split personality that snarled and lunged at me like a police dog. I woke up and lay perfectly still, too afraid to close my eyes or click on the light. After several minutes of motionless nostalgia for the days when I had been a sane person, I finally touched my wife and said, “Dear one?” She made a questioning noise from deep in her sleep. I said, “I’m sorry to wake you but I’m having some kind of unusual panic attack.” She said, “I’m so sorry, baby.” I said, “It’s really bad, I’m scared about everything, I’m even scared to turn on the light.” She said, “I’ll hold you. Everything is good. Go back to sleep now.” She held me and I turned a different way in the bed and the fear dissolved and I went back to sleep. I woke up feeling fine.

  One summer I dropped a bowl of hot fudge that I’d warmed up in a microwave onto the kitchen floor of a Howard Johnson’s and burned myself.

  One summer my friend and I dug in his back yard using a hose to blast holes deep in the dirt. We made a series of small ponds and bogs. My friend’s mother was unhappy with us because the water bill was very high.

  One summer my family and I ate dinner at a restaurant that had a machine that made saltwater taffy. The machine had two double-forked prongs that folded and stretched the taffy ball onto itself until there were unimaginable numbers of layers. When the taffy had been stretched and folded enough times a man rolled it into a loaf and mounted it in a machine that cut it and wrapped the cut pieces with waxed-paper wrappers. The device that twisted the wrapper ends moved too fast for the eye to see. The taffy man looked at us without acknowledging us or smiling. He had no privacy—he was like a zoo creature. He had a small mustache.

  One summer we moved from Boston, Massachusetts, to New York State. I was driving the old brown car and my wife was driving the new red car down Routes 5 and 20. There was a big hot blue sky and enormous trees. I rolled my window all the way down. Immediately the wind sucked a map of New York State off my dashboard. In my rearview mirror I saw the pale creased shape float on air for a moment, as if deciding what to do. Then it plastered itself to my wife’s windshield, where she pulled it inside. She waved.

  One summer when I was fourteen I took care of an orange cat at a house owned by two minimalist painters. All their walls were flat white, and they had many of their paintings up—long, narrow paintings, with silver metallic paint sprayed in from the ends, dripping subtly. The lonely cat roamed this minimalist house, meowing. I read issues of Artforum neatly stacked on their coffee table. There was an article about an artist who created an empty room with a sloping wooden floor. The artist, whose name was Vito Acconci, “pleasured himself” under the sloping floor, while visitors walked around the room overhead. I fed the cat, pleasured myself, and rode my bike home.

  One summer I wrote “Truth wears sunglasses” in my notebook.

  (2005)

  Reading

  Thorin Son of Thráin

  I learned how to read, in the sense of knowing how to follow a story with pleasure as it accumulates over many chapters, by being read to. My mother read us (my sister and me) the things she had liked as a child, with several additions—she took us through The Hobbit, Mistress Masham’s Repose, Tove Jansson’s Moominland books, Lear’s “The Pelican Chorus,” The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh, the Dr. Dolittle series, some Kipling, several Tintin books, and Hawthorne’s Wonder-Book. She was an expert at the seamless substitution of a comprehensible phrase for the more involuted elegancies of Hawthornian diction, a fact I discovered only after I knew how to read by eye and could compare her version with the text. Her shoulder had a bone in it that was comfortable against my temple; I was under the impression that I was hearing some of each book through that shoulder-bone. And I was interested in how entertained she was by certain scenes: how much she liked, for example, the image of Toad sitting entranced by the side of the road near his overturned canary-yellow traveling wagon, murmuring “Poop-poop!” at the dwindling sight of the motorcar that had just zoomed past. It only became funny after she laughed.

  But the most emotional early reading experience I had was the devastating death of Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit. I had no practice then with the conventions of character flaws and the plot signals that such flaws provide, and thus Thorin’s greed and his brusque treatment of Bilbo didn’t tip me off that he, Thorin son of Thráin, King under the Mountain, wasn’t going to recover from the wounds of battle, even though my mother had gently tried to prepare me. I wept hard until I fell asleep. My mother wanted to abandon the book because it upset me so much, but the next night I convinced her that I could cry quietly, and she kept going until the end. It became one of my favorite books.

  Two Tintin books—The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure—were the first things I truly liked reading by myself. Golden Books was the publisher of a few Tintin titles then, and they had Americanized the text slightly: Haddock’s ancestral home was called Hudson Manor rather than the Marlinspike Hall of the other Tintins that we ordered later on from England like jars of marmalade. I loved the shark-shaped one-man submarine, and Tintin’s shameless habit of talking to himself in his diving helmet while he was being stalked by the real shark, and the scene in which Thomson and Thompson, tired out, forget to keep cranking the air pump that leads below. Following a brief post-Tintin apprenticeship with some Freddy the Pig volumes, the first small-type reading I did was of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils: attractive because it was an ostentatiously thick edition and had a promising high-altitude goose-riding scene and concerned a person with a name similar to my own. After a chapter or two I could hardly follow what was going on, though, and I finished Nils joylessly, out of brute pride. The second thick book was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which we owned in an old translation with fancy marbled boards. Since the only other use of leagues that I knew of was in the story of the cat with the seven-league boots, the notion of descending a full 20,000 leagues seemed eerily grownup. And the phosphorescent undersea glow of the Nautilus as it approached or fled from a ship at night was a glow that I have been on the lookout for in reading ever since.

  (1996)

  Narrow Ruled

  When I come across something I really like in a book, I put a little dot in the margin. Not a check, not a double line—these would be pedantic—but a single nearly invisible tap or nudge of the pen tip, one that could almost be a dark fleck in the paper. In fact, sometimes as I’ve flipped through a book that I read closely years before, my eye has been caught by an actual paper-blemish that I have taken to be one of my own dots of approval, and I’ve stopped to read slowly through some undistinguished passage, prepared for beauty—and sometimes the beauty is discoverably there, and sometimes it isn’t, and then, suspicious, I bring the page close to my eye and inspect the dot and find that I was misled.

  It’s best not to make too many dots—no more than, say, ten or fifteen for a single book. Compared with unde
rlining, or highlighting in yellow or pink, the dot method is unobtrusive—that’s one of its great advantages. I can reread a book that I have dotted here and there, and yet not be too distracted by the record of my earlier discoveries. And I can feel secure in the knowledge that if others idly open my books, they won’t be able to see at a glance what interested me—they won’t say to themselves, He thought that was good?

  But my method is not only to mark the passages I like. I also write the number of the marked page in the back. Then—and this is the most important part—at some later date, sometimes years later, I refer to the page numbers, locate the dots, and copy out the passages that have awaited my return into a spiral-bound notebook. About fifteen years ago I fell behind—I have dozens, probably hundreds of books with a column of page numbers written in the endpapers whose appealing sentences or paragraphs I have not yet transcribed. Sometimes many months will go by without my adding anything to my copybook. But it is almost the only handwriting I do now, aside from writing checks, and whenever I take up the studious pen and begin, it makes me a happier person: my own bristling brain-urchins of worry melt in the strong solvent of other people’s grammar.

  My first notebook dates from 1982, when I was twenty-five. On page 2 is a sentence from Boswell’s Life of Johnson: “I passed many hours with him, of which I find all in my memorial is, ‘much laughing.’” Back then, I did a lot of the copying on lunch hours in Boston, and on weekends at a dark restaurant near Park Street Station called the Mug ’n Muffin, where I ordered a coffee and a blueberry muffin, which would arrive sizzling, after two full minutes in the industrial microwave, too hot to remove from its fluted wrapper, and which then, as I obliviously transcribed, would slowly turn to stone. At nearby tables, Bible students from Park Street Church would have long, hoarse conversations about God’s love, shaking their heads over His mercy as they stubbed out their cigarettes. Every few months at the Mug ’n Muffin there was a rich, almost chocolatey smell of some comprehensive insecticide. It was the perfect place for longhand.

  I’ve filled seven notebooks since then—not many, I admit, but they loom large. They are all spiral-bound: the spiral is itself inspirational, a bit of chromium cursiveness worming through and uniting otherwise easily scattered pages, just as handwritten script links together what is, on the book’s page, an un-umbilicaled sequence of discrete letters. Over the years, I have stepped on some of the notebooks by mistake, so that their pages turn less freely than they once did: it is as difficult to restore a bent spiral binding as it is to repair an overstressed Slinky. In 1983, saline contact-lens solution leaked into the pages of one notebook in my briefcase, obliterating parts of passages from Bacon, Anthony Powell, Darwin, Johnson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as the word Memory in a sentence from Martin F. Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy (1852) that I had found reading the OED’s entry on rote: “Memory is not wisdom: idiots can rote volumes.” Still, despite these injuries, the page-turning, and the reading, continues to be extremely satisfying.

  As a rule I transcribe the work of people who wrote a long time ago. It is a way of momentarily reanimating them, slowly unwinding their sentential shrouds; it is the only sure way to sense their idiosyncrasies. Sometimes I whisper the words while I copy them. On December 5, 1994, I copied something from Richard Porson (1759–1808), a classical scholar who could recite much of Smollett’s Roderick Random by heart, but who drank too much and wrecked his life. “Anyone might become as good a critic as I am,” Porson says, “if he would only take the trouble to make himself so. I have made myself what I am by intense labour; sometimes in order to impress a thing on my memory I have read it a dozen times and transcribed it six.” I was struck by this before I copied it over, but only by copying it over did I notice the unobtrusive poise of “make himself so.” Porson spent years in poverty; from him I also transcribed this sentence: “I used often to lie awake through the whole night, and wish for a large pearl.”

  My notebooks are seven and three-quarter inches tall and five inches wide; they originally contained eighty sheets. (I’ve torn out pages in the back of some of them.) They are all “narrow ruled.” The first one has a postcard from the National Gallery of Bellini’s St. Jerome taped to the cover—I wanted to cover up the words “university note book” printed in eighties moderno-lowercase type. Bellini’s Jerome is an old man in knotted rags reading a big red book in front of a superb thesaurus of rock formations. A lion sleeps nearby. A more recent copybook bears a postcard of Albrecht Dürer’s Saint Jerome—the light through the bottle-glass windows in Dürer’s interpretation of Jerome’s study casts rows of shadows on the wall that resemble schematic drawings of plant cells, or softly spiraled cinnamon rolls arranged on trays, and there is a lordly gourd or squash presiding from an eyelet in a roof beam. The coiled feelers of this vegetable have nothing to entwine; they exult in their midair inflections and self-induced spiral bindings. My Dürer-decorated notebook begins with a vocabulary word, phlyctenule, that I found reading Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1975): a phlyctenule, for those who may be curious, is a small pustule on the cornea. I was interested in the disgusted “flick” that begins it, interested that it included its own revulsion—words with exotically unknowable foreign roots sometimes survive because we hear ordinary meanings in them.

  On January 15, 1988, and then again on June 7, 1994 (forgetting that I’d already done it once), I transcribed George Saintsbury’s judgment of a certain work of Erasmus. It comes from a posthumous collection of Saintsbury entitled A Last Vintage:

  Perhaps the best thing in it [Saintsbury writes] comes from the mouth of the unblushingly illiterate and good-for-nothing abbot when he says, ‘With immense labour learning is obtained: and then you have to die,’ which is better still in its native Latin, ‘Immensis laboribus comparatur eruditio: ac post moriendum est’; and which, if not original, remains consummate and unanswerable.

  “Consummate and unanswerable” (a phrase worth whispering to yourself three times slowly) has an autobiographical heartfeltishness: Saintsbury, more than most hard-reading garreteers, labored to accumulate and keep in good repair a productive enormity of book-memory. He consumed a French novel every morning before breakfast, but that was just warming up. All day his bookmarks were near at hand, finding pages to mark, and after dinner he was at it still, reading on, and writing with learnedly brimming charm and chattiness about what he read; with the result that there are few French, English, Greek, or Latin writers of more than antiquarian interest in whom he hasn’t found some trait, or tag, or particularity, worth praising. He is the greatest praiser in the history of criticism—each thing he reads provokes him to written acknowledgment in the form of a review-essay thank-you note, and every encountered writer feeds his own genial style without misdirecting or overburdening it.

  Lots of passages from George Saintsbury have gone into my copybooks, and a fair amount of William James, too; some Olivia Manning, some Iris Murdoch, some Dryden, some Updike, some Philip Sidney. Here’s a sample Olivia Manning passage, from The Great Fortune:

  They had been served with a rich goose-liver paté, dark with truffles and dressed with clarified butter. Inchcape swallowed this down in chunks, talking through it as though it were a flavourless impediment to self-expression.

  Here’s another Manning extract, from The Spoilt City:

  Yakimov, discomforted by a sense of lost advantage, stared into his empty glass for some moments before it occurred to him that he had in his possession the means of re-establishing interest in himself. He drew from his hip pocket the plan he had found in Guy’s desk. ‘Got something here,’ he said. ‘Give you an idea . . . not supposed to flash it about, but between old friends . . .’

  He handed the paper to Freddi, who took it smiling, looked at it and ceased to smile.

  In copying these over (in 1985) I was forced to take stock of every hyphen, every observational glance. I became Olivia Manning’s flunkey, her amanuensis, her temp worker, in effect sayi
ng to her, for however long it took to thread her words on the page, Where you go, I follow. Such labor is usefully humbling, because it delivers you back into the third grade, when you copied things off the board and had to pay attention to the little boat shape in the last stroke of the cursive capital B, but it isn’t mechanical or fancy-cramping because the transcriber’s mind can think its own pinstriped thoughts on the sly, betweentimes.

  And, just as helpfully, every appealing highpoint that you read with transient delight can become, through commonplacing, merely average: it is no longer the jewel it was when you pried it from the dried salt marsh of its page, but has now itself been reduced to the primordial matter out of which only your own writing can lift and deliver you—you become, even textually, Sir Thomas Browne’s Amphibian, “compelled to live in divided and distinguished worlds”—between the belly-squirming world of sedulous apprenticeship, and the nakedly leaping bipedal world of self-expression. Thus Bach copied out Buxtehude’s and Vivaldi’s music to learn its secrets, staying up late in his brother’s latticed music library even though forbidden to do so; thus Wallace Stevens copied out in his commonplace book (entitled Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujets) what D. J. Bach had to say about Schoenberg; thus E. M. Forster in middle age copied out Tennyson and Macaulay; and thus Gibbon copied over Pascal, and Giannone’s History of the Kingdom of Naples:

  This various reading, which I now conducted with discretion, was digested, according to the precept and model of Mr. Locke, into a large commonplace-book; a practice, however, which I do not strenuously recommend. The action of the pen will doubtless imprint an idea on the mind as well as the paper; but I much question whether the benefits of this laborious method are adequate to the waste of time; and I must agree with Dr. Johnson (Idler, No. 74), ‘that what is twice read is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed.’