Dead, wee become the Lumber of the World,
And to that Masse of matter shall be swept,
Where things destroy’d, with things unborne, are kept.
20
Rabbi Liebman’s style — psychotherapeutical uplift pitched in an exalted Emersonian key — isn’t easy to skim, but I was interested in his relatively late American use of “lumber room” in its traditional sense, and I didn’t think I could put it to etymological use having only seen it laid out on the sheeted gurney of a dictionary page. That would be lazy; not up to A. E. Housman’s exacting standard. Housman singles out for praise the scholar who is willing to spend
much of his life in acquiring knowledge which for its own sake is not worth having and in reading books which do not in themselves deserve to be read.
Housman could of course be wrong in his conception of scholarship: Edmund Wilson, who was hit hard by Freud, thought that “there was an element of perversity, of self-mortification, in Housman’s career all along.”21 But Housman’s self-denying intensity appealed to me in my outward-bound lumber-quest. And Liebman certainly qualified as a test of scholarly dedication: his book did not, in itself, deserve to be read, at least as literature. (As self-help, however, it is better written, certainly more allusive, than, say, Deepak Chopra’s Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, which is something.) I spent about two hours paging impatiently through Peace of Mind. I thought — for you begin to develop an instinct for where a sought word can hide when you have looked for it long enough — that my prize would be middened in the section called “Inferiority Complex May Hide Self-Hate.” It wasn’t. I looked for it in the vicinity of “Let us learn, then, not to take the depression of the day or the month as the permanent state of our life.” I expected to run into it as I came to: “When we are tired, every pinprick becomes the stab of a knife and every molehill becomes a mountain.” But I didn’t find it anywhere, and as I scanned steadily, feeling the marshmallow-sized minutes tumble by, occasionally tricked by two nearby words (number and plod, say), which my overeager stare united as the absent object of research — just as in adolescence my eyes would fuse an innocent word on one line (full) with another just below it (knuckle) into a short-lived neutrino of an obscenity that I would invariably hurry back to reread — I became troubled by the knowledge that this was not Rabbi Liebman’s only book: in other words, that I might have to scan Hope for Man or Psychiatry and Religion just as closely; and the suspicion that I was wasting my irreplaceable afternoon of research time got in the way of my attempt to concentrate on what I was looking at, so that several pages would rise in the east and set in the west without my being sure I had properly reviewed them. I flunked this test of scholarship: I couldn’t make myself thoroughly skim Peace of Mind.
I flunked, also, in the case of T. D. Weldon’s Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which I checked out because Webster’s Third included, as part of its entry for lumber,
<useless words … dropped as worthless linguistic ~
— T. D. Weldon>
Here I really tried: I took off my glasses so that I could be on closer terms with the page, and I braked the pace of my scanning by running a fingertip down each margin (the type was small, so it took me about three seconds), but again I kept blanking on the phrase that I was looking for; I had to whisper it to myself to keep my retinas primed for it. As the sense of my fallibility grew, I began to have fantasies of paying Text Busters, a local optical scanning service, the dollar or two per page it would take to put the whole book on a disk so I could search it electronically, even though that would take all the fun out of any finds I would make; and I remembered a New York Times article about Xerox’s invention of an automatic page-turning system for scanners and copiers that employed an electrostatically charged sliding glass plate. Was it true that only the books that didn’t deserve to be read deserved to be scanned, or only the books that did?
T. D. Weldon’s book was not a masterpiece — it was a careful work of explication, not merely a tissue of “useless words,” but not piercingly beautiful, either. George Herbert’s line, about how speech
Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
And in the eare, not conscience ring
chased its tail in my conscience as I skimmed doggedly along, until I realized that for an indeterminate number of pages I had been unwittingly looking for “flaring thing” rather than “worthless linguistic ~.” I didn’t have the fortitude to go back. Nonetheless, although no lumber forthcame that afternoon, I did find this variation on Locke’s dark room passage:
This completes the catalogue of the kinds of furniture which are constantly being conveyed by the senses into the empty room of the mind’s consciousness. (p. 31)
And I found this:
It is unlikely that any philosopher has ever produced a more unutterably tedious work on metaphysics than Baumgarten’s
Metaphysica
; or combined so successfully the pedantry of a dying scholasticism with the illusory clearness of a pseudo-geometrical demonstration. (pp. 40–41)
How exciting to be given a fresh touchstone of unutterable tedium! Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten it would be, then: I immediately looked him up. His earliest work, a set of poetic precepts and theorizings that appeared in Latin in 1735, was annotated and translated by Karl Aschenbrenner and William Holther in 1954 as Reflections on Poetry. At first there looks to be a sort of lumber-room in it, when Baumgarten discusses the definitions of poem, poetry, and poet: “For rehashing these scholastic terms by nominal definitions, the overstuffed cupboards of the Scaligers, the Vosses, and many others are there to be pilfered.” But “overstuffed cupboards” is only an anachronistic translation of “refertissima scrinia.” A scrinium is a scroll-box,22 or, in Baumgarten’s modern extension of the word, a bookcase. The phrase just means “crowded shelves,” then. Baumgarten does offer, however, a sensible note of warning some pages later:
§ 76. It is advisable to omit certain elements from a poem, § 75. If one were to try to present every interconnection of a historical theme, he might wonder if he should not include a substantial part of the world, not to say all the history of the ages: it is poetic to omit certain details and more remote connections.
And yet if I followed Baumgarten’s advice here, in this non-poem, I would have to leave him out altogether, and that I could never do.
1 Marlowe’s “Infinite Riches in a Little Room” is, by the way, the motto used in a nineteenth-century advertisement for Scribner & Armstrong’s “Bric-a-Brac Series” of literary reminiscences, edited by Richard Henry Stoddard. The ad appears in the back of the American edition of Leslie Stephen’s Hours in a Library, which contains two essays on Pope. Infinite Riches: Gems from a Lifetime of Reading (1979) is the title of a 588-page “garnering” by Leo Rosten, which excludes quotations from poetry, novels, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Under “Books” Rosten offers a précis of a relevant Hebrew legend: “Whenever the shelves in the Library of Heaven were entirely full, and a new, worthy book appeared, all the books in the celestial collection pressed themselves closer together, and made room.” The English Poetry Database is the most efficient compression of the celestial collection yet.