The Way the World Works: Essays by Nicholson Baker Read Free Book Online Page B

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 transcribedGeorge 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, someUpdike, 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 saying to her, for however long it took