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

But if someone had quietly let me know back then that Johnson’s chosen word had nothing directly to do with wood, that it was often used euphemistically to mean “rubbish,” in metric placements where a single syllable like “trash” wouldn’t work, I, though ashamed of the seriousness of my misunderstanding, would still have treasured the sentence. I connected it with Johnson’s way of walking, his oddly love-inspiring “infirmity of the convulsive kind” (as Pope called it, when recommending some of Johnson’s early verses to a friend) — an affliction “that attacks him sometimes, so as to make Him a sad Spectacle.” Boswell, attempting a diagnosis, quotes a description of St. Vitus’s dance from a medical book: “It manifests itself by halting or unsteadiness of one of the legs, which the patient draws after him like an ideot.” Thus Johnson lumbered into the drawing rooms of dancing masters like Chesterfield; and his gait easily merged with my reverence for the extensive mental millyards of knowledge that he was able to pack into his Dictionary , a book that as soon as it was published stood for the raw materials of prose, so definitive an inventory that even Pater, a century later, advised would-be Cyreniasts to be wary of any word that Johnson hadn’t seen fit to define.

And I was also certain, when I first read it, that Johnson’s sentence was the secret fuse-force that lay behind Coleridge’s better-known description of the power of philosophy and of poetic genius: the sort of genius that “rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission”:

Truths of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet being at the same time of universal interest, are too often considered as

so

true, that they lose all the life and efficiency of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side, with the most despised and exploded errors.

Johnson’s lumbered “repository of the mind” reforms itself as Coleridge’s slumbering “dormitory of the soul.” Even Coleridge’s use of “exploded errors” has a Johnsonian sound: Johnson elsewhere ( The Adventurer , no. 126) censures the recluse who “thinks himself in possession of truth, when he is only fondling an error long since exploded.” Coleridge wrote his version for the fifth issue of The Friend , a short-lived periodical (it ran from 1809 to 1810) that seems to have been modeled in part on Johnson’s Ramblers, Idlers, and Adventurers; but he liked his passage so much that he worked it into his Biographia Literaria (1817). 2Right he was to fondle it a second time, too: he had renovated and Sardanopalized Johnson’s truth, which had itself become so true that it lay bedridden in a multivolume collection of passé eighteenth-century moral essays by a critic who, in the eyes of the Lakers (as Jeffrey called Wordsworth et al.), stood for the falsely orotund diction of the Popists. Those hinted shapes that you can almost detect in the turbid shadows of Coleridge’s sentence — the sprawling forms of despised and exploded opium-eaters sleeping off their murky glassfuls in a communal paralysis of indolence, bad dreams, and missed deadlines — force the inherited assertion to assume once again all the life and efficacy of truth.

Both quotations, I hope I am the first to note, can be traced back to a particular passage in Saint Augustine, whom Johnson read carefully and occasionally quoted from in essays and ghost-written sermons. In Chapter X of the Confessions , Augustine thinks about how cogo (to gather) and cogito are allied words, and how in remembering something, we must gather, or re-collect, truths that sparsa prius et neglecta latitabant —that before lay hidden away, scattered and ignored; or, in Coleridge and Johnson’s variations, lay “despised and exploded” or “overlooked and neglected.” “If,” writes Augustine, in Pine-Coffin’s Penguin translation,

If, for a short space of time, I cease to give them my attention, they sink back and recede again into the more remote cells of my memory, so that I have to think them out again, like a fresh set of facts, if I am to know them. I have to shepherd them out again from their old lairs.…

(Augustine also refers here to the mind’s contents as thesauri , “treasures,” and compares his memory to a “huge temple” and a “spacious palace” and, with a little more neurological justification, to a place with ineffabiles sinus —ineffable sinuses, or secret recesses, folds, fastnesses, or deep pockets in the financial sense.) The first version of Johnson’s Rambler essay, which has “the remoter repositories of the mind” 3rather than the (better) singular “some remote repository,” further points up the Augustinian source, which is plural.

There is another figure behind Johnson’s and Coleridge’s rooms full of neglected memory-lumber, as well. In Locke’s “Of the Conduct of the Understanding,” a work posthumously published in 1706 and probably intended as a coda to the much better-known but less interesting and human (and lumber less) Essay Concerning Human Understanding , Locke writes that “General Observations drawn from Particulars, are the Jewels of Knowledge, comprehending great Store in a little Room; but they are therefore to be made with the greater Care and Caution,” since, Locke warns, we are always in peril of overdoing our jewel-storage, making

the Head a Magazine of Materials, which can hardly be call’d Knowledge, or at least ’tis but like a Collection of Lumber not reduc’d to Use or Order; and he that makes every thing an Observation, has the same useless Plenty and much more falsehood mixed with it.

Some pages later, Locke (who was in the habit of using metaphors to point out the dangers of metaphor) says that he who has not a mind to represent to himself an author’s sense “divested of the false lights and deceitful ornaments of speech,” will make

his understanding only the warehouse of other men’s lumber; I mean false and unconcluding reasonings, rather than a repository of truth for his own use, which will prove substantial, and stand him in stead, when he has occasion for it.

4

This is a form of the great scholarly worry — a worry which hydroptically book-thirsty poets like Donne, Johnson, Gray, Southey, and Coleridge all felt at times — the fear that too much learning will eventually turn even an original mind into a large, putty-colored regional storage facility of mislabeled and leaking chemical drums. Locke wasn’t much of a poetry reader, 5so it isn’t likely that he got his lumber from Butler or Dryden. But he might have had Charles Cotton’s translation of Montaigne in mind. I know I do now, as I retype Locke. One of the first places I looked for lumber was in Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s Essays , figuring that Florio would have given it to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare would have passed it on to everyone else (via The Tempest , say), since that was one of vocabulary’s known spice-routes — but vexingly I didn’t find it in Book 1, Chapter XXIV, “Of Pedantisme,” where it should have been, and the Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare was able to cough up only the one unremunerative Lumbert Street address from Henry IV, Part II . So I set Florio’s Montaigne aside, in one of my floor-piles, as a false lead — regretfully, since E. J. Trechmann, one of Montaigne’s later translators, likens the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Florio’s version to “the finding of a valuable piece of old furniture.” 6But then I discovered, working my way through some of the screens from the Library of the Future CD-ROM, that Charles Cotton (1630–1687) found a way to put lumber into his 1685 translation of the Essays . (It was Cotton’s version, not Florio’s, that Pope and Emerson read.) “Some one may say of me,” Cotton has Montaigne say (in the late essay called “Of Physiognomy”), “that I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them.” 7Montaigne has a thousand quote-crammed volumes ranged about him in his circular library as he writes, and he can borrow, if he wants to, “from a dozen such scrap-gatherers, people about whom I do not much trouble myself, wherewith to trick up this treatise of Physiognomy.” But he will try to resist, since