Pnin is a scholar, “ideally bald.” He is a figure of fun. What’s the point of scholarship? Why do I sometimes, indeed often, want to be surrounded by lots of things I don’t understand? Why do I want to travel to some historical society and ask to see a dead man’s papers and work slowly through them, learning hundreds of new names? Is it because I want to be responsible for a piece of life that nobody else is responsible for? Is it because I want some heretofore unchronicled episode in deep time to become almost as familiar to me as the surroundings in my own life, so that I can walk around the bonsai arrangement that I have resurrected out of letters and guest lists and memos, and be as unsurprised by any part of it as I am unsurprised by my own red thermos bottle and bookcase? I don’t really know why I’m drawn to do scholarship of this old-fashioned sort. I know I like finding things out — I like rationed chaos. I feel sorry for newspaper reporters who have only a day or two to research a story. Each story deserves five years. Not ten — ten years and the story goes stale. But five.
Finding things out: there is an infinitude of things you don’t know, but it’s not a very interesting infinitude, because it has no grain. Only some of the unknown things, a much smaller subset, are things that you are aware of not knowing, and then within that subset is a smaller set still — the unknowns that pull at you. Curiosity is a way of ordering and indeed paring down the wildness of the world. Of all the unmown fields, all the subjects I don’t know anything about, this one right here is the one I would like to pursue. Why? Because nobody else is, and because it happens to be here and it draws me. I will contribute most efficiently to the whole if I pursue this topic, knowing that it is obscure enough that nobody would be foolish enough to duplicate my efforts. I will mow my own lawn, part of it, anyway.
Sometimes, though, I have a very different sort of ambition. I want to write a short book called The Way the World Works. I want it to be a book for children and adults, that explains everything about history, beauty, wickedness, invention, the meaning of life. The whole unseemly, bulging ball of wax. One of those books that Dover Books reissues, retaining the original typography, like On Growth and Form. I get this ambition most powerfully when I have the feeling I have right now, that everything is simple. I know it isn’t really simple, and I know I’ll never write the book, but still, I sense that I’m on the verge of understanding the rules, the laws, the sleights of hand, that govern every human action. I know why people are angry, why they laugh, why they sue other people, why they wear certain kinds of hats, why they get fat, why they say the things they do — or I almost know it. Another half an hour of frowningly careful thought and I will have it figured out. Why am I the lucky one who almost knows all this? It’s because I did some patient research into a few forgotten areas. I filled out the call slips and summoned the acid-free boxes stuffed with archival folders. I half mastered several isolated turf-squares of history, and I know a little about my own lived world as well, and with these several stake-points to steady me, I can pitch my moral tent.
The feeling will pass; in fact it’s already passing. But that’s all right. One’s head is finite. You pour more and more things into it — surnames, chronologies, affiliations — and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish. Then you can forget most of the details — eject them, clean those warrens out, make room for more. And once in a while, as on a perfect morning such as this, you’ll have the rapturous illusion that everything you know adds up.
(2004)
Acknowledgments
The essays in this book first appeared in the following publications, sometimes under different titles.
Periodicals
The American Scholar: “String,” “Narrow Ruled,” “No Step,” “I Said to Myself,” and “Mowing.”
Areté: “The Nod.”
Columbia Journalism Review: “Defoe, Truthteller.”
Duke University Libraries: “If Libraries Don’t Do It, Who Will?”
Granta: “La Mer.”
Harper’s Magazine: “Why I’m a Pacifist.”
Literaturen: “Sunday at the Dump” (in German translation).
Married Woman: “How I Met My Wife.”
McSweeney’s, “San Francisco Panorama” issue: “Papermakers.”
The New Yorker: “Coins,” “Truckin’ for the Future,” “Grab Me a Gondola,” “Kindle 2,” “Steve Jobs,” and “Painkiller Deathstreak.”
The New York Review of Books: “The Charms of Wikipedia.”
The New York Times: “The Times in 1951.”
The New York Times Book Review: “From A to Zyxt,” “Sex and the City (Circa 1840),” and “Google’s Earth.”
NYRblog: “We Don’t Know the Language We Don’t Know.”
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America: “Reading the Paper.”
Port: “David Remnick.”
The Washington Post Magazine: “One Summer.”
Books
“Inky Burden,” preface to A Book of Books, by Abelardo Morell.
“Take a Look at This Airship!” introduction to The World on Sunday, by Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano.
“Thorin Son of Thráin,” in The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading, edited by Michael Dorris and Emilie Buchwald.
“What Happened on April 29, 1994,” in 240 Ecrivains Racontent une Journée du Monde: l’Album Anniversaire: 1964–1994, edited by Le Nouvel Observateur (in French translation).
“Why I Like the Telephone,” in Once upon a Telephone: An Illustrated Social History, by Ellen Stock Stern and Emily Gwathmey.
“Writing Wearing Earplugs,” in How I Write: The Secret Lives Of Authors, edited by Dan Crowe with Philip Oltermann.
About the Author
© ELIAS BAKER
Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and grew up in Rochester, New York. He studied at the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published nine novels, the latest of which is House of Holes, and four previous works of nonfiction. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. A nonfiction work, Double Fold,