Nicholson Baker: The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

Yet I sensed that reluctance was insufficient. What else did a large thought have to have? Filled with an ambitious sort of wistfulness, I flung open the door of the island cottage where I was staying, nodded to the moon, and began to walk up the fairway of a golf course, repeating, to the pulse of my invisible feet, a large thought of Tennyson’s on which I had decided to perform a few experiments:

Witch-elms that counterchange the floor

Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright

The sand traps, ghostly objects shaped like white blood cells, floated slowly past. At last I reached the green, the moon-colored green, where a dark flag flapped, and looked out over the warm white sea. I threw my arms wide, and waited. Right then my second theorem regarding large thoughts ought to have formed itself in silver characters on the far horizon, but, in fact, it reached me only some weeks later, in a public library:

(2) Large thoughts are creatures of the shade . Not deep shade, necessarily, but the mixed and leafy shade at the floor of large forests. Small thoughts are happy to run around in their colorful swimwear under the brutalest of noons, but large thoughts really must have sizable volumes of cool, still air, to allow room for the approach and docking of their components of sadness. Nobody can frown intently at a delicate task sitting on the floor of a large forest, and large thoughts, too, evade the pointedness and single-purposiveness of a frown; instead, they assert with a general pressure, and avoid contentiousness, and limit themselves to the suggestion that not far off, not far off, there are wholly convincing marginalia of still-undiscovered feeling, stored like heaped carpets in unlit vaults: they exhibit, then, a lush shadiness, as do the purple fastnesses in one’s lungs, or the wrought, jeweled, dark interiors of water-resistant watches. All large thoughts are also patched and played over by leaf-shadows of slight hesitation and uncertainty: this tentativeness gives the thought just enough humility for it to be true. (All that is untrue is small.) Indeed, dusk — the moment of planetary shade — is the most likely time to encounter large thoughts. Because of some power struggle between the retina’s rods and cones brought on with the coming of darkness, there is a quarter-hour or so when colors, though less distinct, seem superbly pigmented, and the important things, faces and especially the teeth of smiles, become sources of genial light: it is then that large thoughts may best be observed, strolling on their somber porches, and reciting from their codices.

As you may imagine, by the time I had successfully formulated this second theorem regarding large thoughts, I was desperately tired of them. If I felt one looming up in a page of Tolstoy, I ran off; I hid. The party seemed over: Dave Peters and his orchestra had packed up, and the devitalized balloons scudded about the floor.

I took a chair. More than anything else, I wished just then for the minty breath of a slighter truth or two in my ear. A minor botanical discovery concerning an unusual species of fern, perhaps; a paradox or an aperçu would do; faint harpsichord music; tricks with coins or cards; witty biographies of peripheral Victorians. What was so very contemptible about small thoughts? Where, indeed, would we be without Cornish game hens such as “It is one of the chief merits of proofs that they instill a certain skepticism about the result proved,” which came to rest in Bertrand Russell’s lucky mind one day? Or Charles Churchill’s little two-step:

With curious art the brain, too finely wrought,

Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought.

Or this, from Pater: “There is a certain shade of unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which may be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract questions”—a thought that bounds beamingly, radiantly skyward for an instant, but is then, like many fine small thoughts, snuffed out on the second bounce by a bookish delegation of counterexamples. If we exiled all that is nifty, careless, wildly exaggerated, light-footed, vulnerable, or circumspectly spiced from our spiritual landscape, we would be in terrible shape. I scolded myself for my callousness toward the small. “We must refine all epics into epigrams!” I said. “We must measure only the flares and glimmers of the world, thimbleful by peerless thimbleful; nor should we grudge even the jingle of a lightbulb filament the silence of an enraptured continent!”

But this extreme reaction missed the point, which was, as I found out not long afterward, that:

(3) Large thoughts depend more heavily on small thoughts than you might think . Why does velvet feel smoother than chrome? Because smoothness is a secondary inference on the part of the confused fingertip, based on its perception of many fleeting roughnesses running underneath it too quickly to be individually considered. This suggestion of resistance in all truly smooth surfaces, like the sense of ornamental insurrection in all truly graceful lines, is analogous to the profusion, the anarchy, of lovely, brief insights that we often experience as we read or listen our way through a great work of the mind, a work that, once completed, will leave us filled with large, calm truths. The villi on the inside of the small intestine — dense groves of microscopic protuberances — constitute a total surface area dedicated to the absorption of nutrients that, if flattened out, would shade the entire island of Manhattan, I am told. Large thoughts, too, disembellished of and abstracted from the small thoughts that diversify their surface, become sheer and indigestible. Consider the infinitesimal hooks on horsehairs that draw from the cello string its lavish tone; consider the grosgrain in silk, the gargoyles on a cathedral, the acanthus sprays or egg-and-dart molding along the tasteful curve of a chair, the lumps of potato that, by exception, prove the otherwise fine uniformity of a cream soup; consider the examples that enforce a moral essay, the social satire in a novel with a tragic ending, the sixteenth notes in a peacemaking melody, the incessant roadside metaphors in a work of metaphysics; consider all the indefensible appliances, the snags, the friction, the plush, that seem to hinder the achievement of a larger purpose, but are, in fact, critical to it. Major truths, like benevolent madonnas, are sustained aloft by dozens of busy, cheerful angels of detail.

I have tested these three theorems — the theorem of reluctance, the theorem of shade, and the theorem of dependency — on as many of the artifacts of reason as I could while holding a steady job. My results may have a certain severe appeal. Few indeed are the hobbyists in human memory who have known the craft of building a spacious, previously unthought thought of their very own: how to obtain, in arranging its long hallways and high, ornate rooms, that pull of an ever-riper deferment, by returning to it again and again, after some studied distraction — now full-face, now three-quarter view, now very near, now far off; how to gather in its huge, slow force with an encircling persistence that is three parts novelty, two parts confirming, strengthening repetition. I count Henry James, Brahms, Bellini. Burke, Bach, Pontormo. A mere eighty-six others.

And now, in a mood of icy impartiality, I am going to test the size of the thought I am offering you right here, which I expect to see peter out very shortly with few surprises, wrapped up after another two or three breaths of the mind, extended perhaps by a last, gravelly spatter of instantiation, unless, O yearn! I just happen to happen upon that loose-limbed, reckless acceleration, wherein this very thought might shamble forward, plucking tart berries, purchasing newspapers, and retrieving stray refuse without once breaking stride — risking a smile, shaking the outstretched hands of young constituents, loosening its tie! — no, that’s all, I believe: this thought has rounded itself out, and ratified itself, despite all of its friendly intentions, as small.