The Way the World Works

by Baker, Nicholson

  But that’s not true, is it? Gibbon couldn’t have formed his style—that unique window display of teacups and sarcophagi—without having felt his way, word by word, at the artificially impeded speed of handwriting, through some of the poetry of Gray and Pope, for instance. Probably he remembered Johnson’s Idler essay because he had once been moved to commonplace it himself.

  To commonplace—is it a legal verb? It is, according to Samuel Johnson:

  Commonplace-book

  A book in which things to be remembered are ranged under general heads.

  I turned to my common-place book and found his case under the word coquette. Tatler.

  To Commonplace

  To reduce to general heads.

  I do not apprehend any difficulty in commonplacing an universal history. Felton.

  “Felton” turns out to be one Henry Felton, D.D., who in A Dissertation on the Classics (1710) wasn’t sure that the activity of reducing to general heads was always beneficial:

  Common-Placing the Sense of an Author, is such a stupid Undertaking, that, if I may be indulged in saying it, they want common Sense that practise it. What Heaps of this Rubbish have I seen! O the Pains and Labour to record what other People have said, that is taken by those, who have nothing to say themselves! . . . When I see a beautiful Building of exact Order and Proportion, taken down, and the different Materials laid together by themselves, it putteth me in mind of these Common-Place Men.

  Felton may be right—you don’t want to take it too far. Charles Reade, the nineteenth-century novelist, had so many commonplace books that “they completely filled one of the rooms in his house,” according to Richard Le Gallienne. He devoted one full day out of each week “cataloguing the notes of his multifarious reading.” Still, it worked for him. The big risk, if you accumulate a lot of chirographic bits and pieces, is that you will be tempted to quote more of them than you should. In a review of a book called The Progress of the Intellect, George Eliot criticizes the author (Robert William Mackay) for writing pages that “read like extracts from his common-place book, which must be, as Southey said of his own, an urn under the arm of a river-god, rather than like a digested result of study, intended to inform the general reader.” Don’t feel you must recirculate everything that you have found (so I tell myself); a recopied passage will urn its keep even if you never quote it anywhere.

  There is good to be gained in signing someone else’s mind-signature, in scribbling in tongues: the retracing of a series of long-lost authorial motions with your own present pen, if you do it in the proper spirit, out of a desire to stay delight’s presence rather than out of autodidactic obligation, or even if you begin reluctantly, dutifully, troubled by feelings of self-pelf in the face of so many pressing university-press editions, can calm and steady your state, not to mention improve it, for while the transcribing may appear to be a form of close and exclusive concentration, it has an equally important element of peaceable meditative mindlessness as well, like playing with a paper clip. Reading is fast, but handwriting is slow—it retards thought’s due process, it consumes irreplaceable scupperfuls of time, it pushes every competing utterance away—and that is its great virtue, in fact, over mere underlining, and even over an efficient laptop retyping of the passage: for in those secret interclausal tracts of cleared thought-space, in those extended dreaming blanks of fair-copying between the instant it took the eye to comprehend a writer’s phrase, and the seeming eternity it then takes the hedgehog hand to negotiate that phrase again in legible, physical loops on the notebook page (especially on the verso side of the notebook page, when the spiral binding interferes annoyingly with the muscle of the little finger), during which all of your purplest hopes are compelled to idle, and you must pay attention to some common rhetorical turn that you had never until then deigned to think about, at the same time your constrained prose-aptitude is stimulated to higher rates of metabolism by what Johnson called “the contagion of diligence” and through its temporary forced conformity with another person’s exhaust-system of expression—in this state of rubber-burning, clutch-smoking subservience, new quiet racemes will emerge from among the paving stones and foam greenly up in places they would never otherwise have prospered.

  Just don’t do it too much—and always use quotation marks.

  (2000)

  Inky Burden

  Preface to A Book of Books, by Abelardo Morell

  In the old black-and-white TV series, Superman, when he needed to pass through a wall, would put his palms against it and lean, frowning. Gradually his caped form would merge with the plaster and pass through lath and two-by-fours, and then he would reappear in the next room. It wasn’t as easy as flying, apparently, but it could be done. This became my childhood model of reading. You press your mind, your forehead, against the beginning of a book, the cool cover of it, appreciating its impenetrability. It is rectangular and thick, heavy enough to stop a bullet or press a leaf flat. It will, you think, never let you through. And then you begin to lean into it, applying a little attentive pressure, and the early pages begin to curl back with a soft, radish-slicing sound, and you’re in. You’re in the book. The thick, unitary clumps of chapters fan out into their component pages, and each turned page dematerializes itself, once read, into the fluent, cajoling voice its words carry, and then you’re past the midpoint, and the book stretches out before you and behind you like a string of paper lanterns in a huge shadowy tent. Then you’re almost done, and the pages begin to shrink and solidify once more. When you reach the last sentence, there rests under your left thumb a monolithic clump of paper through which, it seems, you could not possibly have traveled.

  What unites all books, as Abelardo Morell is able to document in these magnificent photographs, and what is responsible for a good measure of their appeal, is their inter-dimensional ambiguity. Does the printed page inhabit two dimensions, or three, or four? As we read or look, we pretend that a page is an ideally flat and code-bearing plane, with a measurable height and width but no thickness and no curvature. But a page is almost never flat except when a book is closed; opened, its surface rises up slightly toward the inside margin and then veers south into the binding, like a mounding wave.

  And of course each page has thickness. Your fingertips know this perfectly well: they inform you immediately when they have by mistake snagged two corners together, rather than one, in preparation for turning. The embossed letters in a book for the blind cast sharp shadows. Some paper is marvelously thin: the thickest books, the big dictionaries, for instance, whose bindings arch upward into mining tunnels when opened, sometimes have the flimsiest, rattliest pages. And into these towering cliffs of reference the publisher scoops out a series of alphabetic fingerholds as an aid to the word-hunter; crescent-moon notches that then become worn, so Morell’s camera records, as if made of soft sandstone, by the impatient touch of many queries.

  Bad things happen to books all the time, and then the books hold the record in their pages of those disasters, too. Books become water-soaked and writhe into the shapes of giant clams, and they wait in warehouses for dealers to cut pages out of them for piecemeal sale. Over many decades, paper changes color and becomes more fragile (though considerably less fragile than some paper-apocalyptists have claimed)—the particular fragility of an old volume is part of what it has to tell us.

  Some of the most evocative photographs in this collection are the ones in which a book is allowed to fall open slightly, so that we glimpse some of the foreshortened secrets (an upward-glancing face, a colosseum) it may hold. Pages, for the most part, live out their long lives in the dark, keeping hidden what inky burdens they bear, pressed tightly against their neighbors, communicating nothing, until suddenly, like the lightbulb in the refrigerator that seems to be always on but almost never is, one of them is called upon to speak—and it does.

  (2002)

  No Step

  In 1994, I took a nap on an airplane. On waking, I pushed up the oval window shade and looked o
utside. The window was surprisingly hot to the touch: incoming sunlight had bounced off the closed shade, heating it up. And the wing looked hot, too, like something you would use to press a shirt. But it wasn’t hot; volumes of freezing wind were flowing over and under it—invisibly wispy, top-of-Mount-Everest wind. Suddenly I felt an injustice in being so close to the wing, closer than any other passenger, and yet being unable to determine for myself, by touch, what temperature it was. Would my finger stick to it?

  The plane turned, so that the long sickle-shape of sun-dazzle slid from the wing and fell to earth; and then, in the shadow of the fuselage, dozens of Phillips-head screws appeared, like stars coming out in an evening sky. Some of these wing screws surrounded a stenciled message, which I read. The message was: WARNING WET FUEL CELL DO NOT REMOVE.

  A few months later, on a Boeing 757, I was given a window seat with an excellent view of the right engine. The engine was painted a dark glossy blue; it hung below the wing, shiny and huge, bobbling a little in the turbulence, like a large breast or a horse’s testicle. There was a message on the engine. HOIST POINT, it said.

  In April 1996 I looked out directly over another wing. Its leading edge was made of shiny naked metal, but the middle of the wing had been painted a pinky beige color. The painted part looked like a path—and because the wing tapered, the edges of the path angled in and converged at the far end, so that it seemed by a trick of perspective to extend for miles, disappearing finally at the blue horizon. If I climbed out the window and set off down that path, I’d have to walk carefully at first, with my knees bent to steady myself against the rush of the invisible, very cold wind, which would otherwise flip me off into the void. But I would get my wind legs soon enough. When I was a quarter of a mile down the wing, I’d turn and wave at the passengers. Then, shrugging my rucksack higher on my shoulders, I would set off again.

  There were no words for me on that wing. But on the return flight I got a seat farther forward in the cabin, near the left engine. This engine said: CAUTION RELEASE UPPER FWD LATCH ON R.H. AND L.H. COWL BEFORE OPERATING. And it said: WARNING STAND CLEAR OF HAZARD AREAS WHILE ENGINE IS RUNNING. The hazard areas were diagrammed on a little picture—it was not difficult to heed this warning, since the areas were all out in empty space. I spent a long time looking at the engine. It was an impassive object, a dead weight. You know when propellers are turning, because you can see them turn, but this piece of machinery gave no sign that it was what was pushing us forward through the sky.

  Usually I don’t become interested in the wing until the plane has taken off. Before that there are plenty of other things to look at—the joking baggage handlers pulling back the curtain on the first car of a three-car suitcase train; the half-height service trucks lowering their conveyors; the beleaguered patches of dry grass making a go of it between two runways; the drooped windsock. As you turn onto the runway, you sometimes get a glimpse of it stretching ahead, and sometimes you can even see the plane that was in line ahead of you dipping up, lifting its neck as it begins to grab the air. Before the forward pull that begins a takeoff, the cabin lights and air pressure come on, as if the pilot has awakened to the full measure of his responsibility; and then, looking down, you see the black tire marks on the asphalt sliding past, traces of heavier-than-usual landings. (It still seems faintly worrisome that the same runway can be used for takeoffs and landings.) Some of the black rubber-marks are on a slight bias to the straightaway, and there are more and more of them, a sudden crowding of what looks like Japanese calligraphy, and then fewer again as you heave past the place where most incoming planes land. You’re gaining speed now. Fat yellow lines swoop in and join the center yellow line of your runway, like the curves at the end of LP records. And finally you’re up: you may see a clump of service buildings, or a lake, or many tiny blue swimming pools, or a long, straight bridge, and then you go higher until there is nothing but distant earth padded here and there with cloud. Then, out of a pleasant sort of loneliness, ignoring the person who is sitting next to you, you begin to want to get to know the wing and its engine.

  In April 1998, sitting in an emergency exit row on the way to Denver, I was surprised by how sharp-edged some mountains were. I was used to the blunt mountains of three-dimensional plastic topographical maps, which are pleasing to the fingertips. But real mountains would scrape your palm if you tried to feel them that way. I passed a salt lake, perhaps the Great Salt Lake, which had a white deposit on its edges like a chemistry experiment. And then I gave up on the world and looked out at my new friend, the wing. It had nothing to say to me at first, no words that I could see; but then, when I put my head as close as I could to the window and looked down, I could make out two arrows. These were painted on a textured non-slip area near where the wing joined the fuselage. We passengers were not meant to see these arrows from our seats: they were there in case of a catastrophe, when we would hurry out the window and leap off the wing onto an inflatable rubber slide. How fast do you go down a slide? Fast enough to break a leg, I would think. I wouldn’t want to leap onto that slide, but I like the arrows.

  On the return from Denver, the wing, attached to an Airbus A-230, said DO NOT WALK OUTSIDE THIS AREA. I had no interest in walking outside that area. The clouds were enormous flat-bottomed patties resting heavily on an ocean of low-pressure air. A few days after that, on a Boeing 767—one of the ones with the mis-designed call buttons on the sides of the armrest which people press when they are trying to adjust the volume on their headphones, so that when the movie begins, the cabin is filled with unintended dinging calls for flight attendants—I had, just after takeoff, a quick, pleasing view of the neighborhood where I lived, visible just above the lump of the left engine, whose crest bore the words NO STEP. And then in June of that year I again saw NO STEP on the top of a jet engine, while the plane I was on was still on the ground. A man was leaning into the engine, so that only his legs were visible. On the wing there were faint wind-wear lines streaking like aurora borealises from behind one of a group of eight little flathead screws. Two weeks later, the engine of a Boeing 757 said: HOIST POINT SLEEVE ONLY, and THRUST REVERSE ACTUATOR ACCESS, and LEAVE 3 INCH MAXIMUM GAP BETWEEN FAIRINGS PRIOR TO SLIDING AFT AND LATCHING, and SAFETY LINE ATTACH POINT.

  By 1999 I had become a collector of wing language. I copied the words down on folded pieces of paper, with arrows pointing out which words were stenciled in red paint and which in white. McDonnell Douglas planes were a pleasure to fly, because they were less common and offered different messages. Once when I was in an emergency exit row in a McDonnell Douglas MD-80, there were two pilots seated behind me. “This is an old plane,” one of the pilots said, “but it’s got new engines—you can hear the new engines.” I listened for the note of newness in the engines but wasn’t sure that I could hear it. On the wing there was an irregular area bounded with red paint, with NO STEP commands around the inside, and then in the middle it said ELECTRIC HEATER BLANKET 110 VOLTS.

  In April 1999 I rode a little propeller plane called a Dash 8 to Seattle. The window looked out below the wing, leaving the landing gear, projecting from below the engine, spindledly visible from my seat, as if I were looking at someone’s legs from under the dinner table. I watched the wheels as we began the surge down the runway, to see whether the tires (there were two tires on each side) would change shape at the moment of liftoff. They didn’t, but the moment was marked by a sudden extension of the greased piston of the shock absorber, and by the appearance of the tire’s crisp shadow against the asphalt. Then came a small surprise: the wheels kept turning, fast, as we rose a few hundred feet, and then the wheel struts folded and disappeared into the under-nacelle, and, with the wheels still going, the carapace flaps closed.

  When the plane descended an hour later, I watched our shadow coming into focus on the blur of the skidmarked ground; and when the now motionless tire first touched the runway there was a beautiful puff of white smoke before it began to turn. As we drove to the gate, the rubber sho
wed its whitish burned patch over and over; it was almost worn away by the time we reached the gate. I was so interested in the wheel struts and the smoke puff that I failed to note down the messages on the engine. Later, though, when I rode a Dash 8 propeller plane again, I recorded this from the engine cowling: WARNING HYDRAULIC SERVICES MAY OPERATE / CLEAR PERSONNEL FROM RUDDER FLAPS AND LANDING GEAR DOORS BEFORE CONNECTING.

  On an Airbus A330 this past March, the engine said CAUTION—PRESS HERE ON LATCH TO ENSURE LOCKING, and there was a little set of gills next to which were the words FAN COMPARTMENT VENT AIR INTAKE. I copied down the cautionary words and then walked the aisles and galleys until I reached the curtain beyond which was the first-class cabin. Parting the curtain, I saw a man’s shoulder and, beyond it, a small china plate on which there had been a bunch of grapes. Now the grapes were gone, but the fireworks display of green spent stems was there. I walked back down the coach-class aisle, allowing my eye to fall on the tableaus of sleeping passengers, each of whom arranged his or her blue blanket a different way. I kept thinking I was getting close to my row, but I wasn’t—instead there was someone in a black sweater asleep with her head on a bunched blue blanket. I was one whole cabin section off, I realized. And then I saw a magazine with a clear plastic protective cover angled over a file folder, and the back of one of my shoes just visible on the floor. I was home. I slid into the window seat and looked outside. The window was cool to the nose. The engine, my engine, was still out there, toiling away, as inanimate and companionable as a thermos bottle. NO LIFT NO STEP NO LIFT NO STEP NO LIFT NO STEP, said the wing.