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

Muriel Spark’s approximate contemporary Elizabeth Bishop is a modern poet-commonplacer for whom Sister Helena would more likely have had some affinity. The Concordance to Elizabeth Bishop , one of a whole series of Garland Concordances put together under the supervision of Todd K. Bender, directed me to the lumber in Bishop’s late book of poetry, Geography III . Bishop, adopting the voice of Robinson Crusoe, has a passage about how Crusoe’s few island possessions, which once “reeked of meaning” when they were all he had, are now no more than “uninteresting lumber.” 17This by an American in 1976. It is the most recent use of the older English sense of the word by an American writer that I have found — with the exception of the title of an essay in Government Publications Review , vol. 13, 1986, called “A Mystery Tour Through the Lumber Room: United States Census Publications, 1820–1930, A Descriptive Essay,” by Michele Fagan, 18and also excepting a poem (assuming he is American) by a person named Hugh Croft that was part of a wedding ceremony between Keith and Kirsten Evans-Orville whose “online recreation” was posted in a series of messages in September 1993 on the WELL. I found the poem by typing a Unix command, “!extract — f lumber misc,” to extract lines from any messages holding “lumber” (or “golden slumbers” or “convention of plumbers”) from the WELL’s Miscellaneous Conference. The relevant stanza is:

I love you because you

Are helping me to make

Of the lumber of my life

Not a tavern

But a temple,

Out of the works

Of my every day

Not a reproach

But a song.

19

Who Hugh Croft is I don’t know. He isn’t in the anthologies of wedding poetry or the library catalogs that I checked, and he isn’t in Books in Print , and he isn’t as good as Elizabeth Bishop. Even so, he is someone worth thanking — he has helped keep the old sense of the l.-word current in the U.S. through 1993.

I was looking forward to quoting Elizabeth Bishop’s lumber in this warehouse-in-progress — I was inching my way toward it — when Sven Birkerts’s funereal Gutenberg Elegies , about the decline and fall of the culture of print, arrived on December 14, 1994, sent by book-loving, book-reading Barbara Epstein of The New York Review of Books , and sent extravagantly by Federal Express even though Ms. Epstein knew then, because I had warned her, that my lumberfest had grown fifteen times too long for her noble tabloid. Sven Birk-erts quotes Bishop’s “Crusoe in England,” including the lines

I’m bored, too, drinking my real tea,

surrounded by uninteresting lumber

but he neglects to write with wonderment about Bishop’s atypical use of this word, my word. Did Birkerts stop to think about it when he was retyping the passage? Bishop, despite the fact that she is as American a poet as you could ask for, uses the word in the English way, defiantly, as if our Crown Zellerbachs and Georgia-Pacifies and International Papers had not successfully pruned out the old-growth meaning, even though Daniel Defoe’s own novel doesn’t use it at all. 20(Defoe contents himself with “provisions,” “divers pieces,” “goods,” “luggage,” and “warehouse”—no lumber or lumber-room .) 21Of course it isn’t an error on Birkerts’s part to use this innocent, very good poem by Bishop to do something big and floppy like run down “our cultural condition and its prospects,” as Birkerts does (poems can and should be used for all sorts of apoetical purposes — it keeps us thinking about them), and Birkerts does follow his Bishop quotation up with a thought-provoking half-sentence: “The more complex and sophisticated our systems of lateral access, the more we sacrifice in the way of depth.” The half-sentence isn’t true, though, in my experience: I have made “lateral access” my catechism for the past nine lumberlost months, and I have as a result read more, read deeper, read with more curiosity, joy, fanaticism, found more writers I look forward to reading more of, loved the Printed Page in the abstract more, saw more thrilling future in its past, than I have since early college. Lateral access uncovers new places to go deep. I have been reading my great-grandfather Nicholson’s five-volume 1767 Tonson edition of Dryden, 22and my grandfather Nicholson’s copy of Meredith’s poems, books I once doubted I would ever get to — and I owe these reactionary pleasures in great part to the ostensibly heartless, plastic English Poetry Database , whose thousand sideways shocks air-hockey us into an unusually vivid realization of the number of poems there are out there, waiting for us — good, funny poems sometimes, and not (as we might hope, because then we would feel better about not having looked them up) wasted efforts. A passing fret that literacy is under siege is good for reading; it lends grandeur to a commonplace pastime. I am not merely reading Elizabeth Bishop , one can say, I am doing my part to preserve culture from the Straw Men . And is there, I wonder, any point in Birkerts’s lamenting how few there are who now read books with the trough-snortingly ludic absorption with which many allegedly used to read books, if the few who still do — readers like Birkerts himself — forget to bring to them the verbal attentiveness, the readiness to hear what Pater called the “finer edge of words still in use” that will demonstrate by example why one given piece of lithography merits attention over all its laterally accessible alternatives? Bishop’s poem is itself no more than “uninteresting lumber” unless you can hear the strangeness of her use of lumber . Or do I censure Sven Birkerts for being unfruitfully dour about electronic encroachments only because he managed to quote the lumber -passage from “Crusoe in England” in his book before I did in this essay? Am I so petty? 23Or is it really just because Birkerts’s meditation on reading doesn’t find space to mention somewhere my own meditation on reading, called U and I , published in 1991? Am I indignant at Birkerts’s sourness about our unbookish culture because U and I failed to cheer so thoughtful a man up about the future of the book? What unbecoming garbage!

1“Up, my comrades! up and doing!” yodels John Greenleaf Whittier in “The Lumbermen”—an unintentionally funny poem, now that Monty Python’s “I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK” has transvestized forestry, and a poem that isn’t in the English Poetry Database , because no American poems are—

Up, my comrades! up and doing!

Manhood’s rugged play

Still renewing, bravely hewing

Through the world our way!

2Chapter 4, “On Fancy and Imagination,” in Collected Works , vol. 7, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, p. 82.

3See W. J. Bate’s and Albrecht B. Strauss’s edition of the Rambler essays, vol. II, p. 46.

4In this second quotation I’m following a 1901 Maynard, Merrill, & Co. student edition of “Of the Conduct of the Understanding,” with spelling and capitalization modernized, p. 121, bought for a dollar at an estate sale. Locke’s “Of the Conduct,” may I say in passing, in its discussion of the ways to train and subjugate the caprices of ideational succession, in order that no “foreign and unsought Ideas will offer themselves,” and so that we will be able to keep these anarchic ideas “from taking off our Minds from its present pursuit, and hinder them from running away with our Thoughts quite from the Subject in hand,” seems to have influenced several of Samuel Johnson’s best Rambler essays, viz.: “Lest a power so restless should be either unprofitably, or hurtfully employed, and the superfluities of intellect run to waste, it is no vain speculation to consider how we may govern our thoughts, restrain them from irregular motions, or confine them from boundless dissipation.” ( Rambler no. 8.) Coleridge, an expert on muddle-headedness, attacks Locke in a letter to the Wedgewoods for his “complete Whirl-dance of Confusion” over mental terminology: “Sometimes again [in Locke’s Essay ] the Ideas are coincident as objects of the mind in thinking, sometimes they stand for the mind itself, and sometimes we are the thinkers & the mind is only the Thought-Box. In short, the Mind in Mr Locke’s Essay has three senses — the Ware-house, the Wares, and the Ware-houseman.…” (Quoted in A Locke Miscellany , edited by Jean S. Yolton, 1990, pp. 274–5.) Laurence Sterne was of the contrary opinion that Locke’s “glory [was] to free the world from the lumber of a thousand vulgar errors.” ( Tristram Shandy , vol. III, ch. 20.) See Patricia Graves’s meticulous Computer-Generated Concordance to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1974, p. 807).