A Commonplace Book

I'd transferred from physics to literature because of one man, the incomparable Taylor. He led me to believe, at eighteen, that a person could lay hands on the key to all mythologies. I now saw that literature might indeed teach me about my father's death, but the study of literature would lead no further than its own theories about itself.

We humans are winging it, improvising. Input pattern x sets off associative matrix y, which bears only the slightest relevance to the stimulus and is often worthless. Conscious intelligence is smoke and mirrors. Almost free-associative. Nobody really responds to anyone else, per se. We all spout our canned and thumbnailed scripts, with the barest minimum of polite segues. Granted, we're remarkably fast at indexing and retrieval. But comprehension and appropriate response are often more on the order of buckshot.

I began to keep a reading diary. Not very dramatic as turning points go, but there it is. A lifetime later, rereading these notebooks, I saw that the lines I copied out, the words I deemded worth fixing forever in the standing now of my own handwriting, clumped up with unlikely frequency toward the start of any new book. The magic quotes thinned out over any book's length. the curve was linear and invariable. Perhaps writers everywhere crowded their immortal bits up toward the front of their books, like passengers clamoring to get of a bus. More likely, reading, for me, meant the cashing out of verbal eternity in favor of story's forward motion. Trapping me in the plot, each passing line left me less able to reach for my notebook and fix the sentence in time.

The abandoned warehouse that flourished briefly as a bar where youth in search of the chemically enhanced Authentic congregated and methodically slammed into itself, studying the dance floor as if meaning were there, in designer-drugged Arthur Murray footprint.

Desperation is always more moving than discretion, or more recognizable, at least, to the person addressed.

"Does it follow that the more facts it has, the harder it is to take in new facts?"

"Thirty-five is about when that starts to happen, Marcel. You begin to think, 'Well, I more or less understand how things work. Do I really want to disassemble tens of thousands of tangled, semiaccurate beliefs on the off chance that I might be able to bring one small receptor field into better focus?'"

I felt the slack of all those who try to live by eloquence and find it useless at the end.

Mann's Doktor Faustus, the formative storybook of my adult years. In it, a brilliant German, by blinding himself to all pursuits but articulation, allows his world to pull itself down around him. I remembered the man, already middle-aged, writing a love letter to the last woman who might have accepted him.

But the letter sabotages itself. It engineers its own rejection. It bares a loneliness that it knows will scare off any attempted comfort. I haven't looked up the passage since first reading it. I will never read it again. The real thing might be too far from the one I've kept in memory. "Consider me," the marriage proposal says, "as a person who suddenly discovers, with an ache at the lateness of the hour, that he might like to have a real home."

... old enough for a glimpse at meaning, immature enough to still think meaning pursuable.

Books are what we make of them. And not the other way around.

Always more books, each one read less. The world will fill with unread print. Unless print dies.