The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

Changes of Mind

If your life is like my life, there are within it brief stretches, usually a week to ten days long, when your mind achieves a polished and freestanding coherence. The chanting tape-loops of poetry anthologies, the crumbly pieces of philosophy, the unsmelted barbarisms, the litter torn from huge collisions of abandoned theories — all this nomadic sub-orbital junk suddenly, like a milling street crowd in a movie-musical, re-forms itself into a proud, pinstriped, top-hatted commonwealth. Your opinions become neat and un-ruffleable. Every new toy design, every abuse of privilege or gesture of philanthropy, every witnessed squabble at the supermarket checkout counter, is smoothly remade into evidence for five or six sociological truths. Puffed up enough to be charitable, you stop urging your point with twisting jabs of your fork; you happily concede winnable arguments to avoid injuring the feelings of your friends; your stock of proverbs from Samuel Johnson seems elegant and apt in every context; you are firm, you think fast, you offer delicately phrased advice.

Then one Thursday, out on a minor errand, you inexplicably come to a new conclusion (“Keynesian economics is spent”), and it — like the fetching plastic egg that cruel experimenters have discovered will cause a mother bird to thrust her own warm, speckled ones from the nest — upsets your equilibrium. The community of convictions flies apart, you sense unguessed contradictions, there are disavowals, frictions, second thoughts, pleas for further study; you stare in renewed perplexity out the laundromat’s plate-glass window, while your pulped library card dries in a tumbling shirt pocket behind you.

Such alert intermissions happen only infrequently: most of the time we are in some inconclusive phase of changing our minds about many, if not all, things. We have no choice. Our opinions, gently nudged by circumstance, revise themselves under cover of inattention. We tell them, in a steady voice, No, I’m not interested in a change at present. But there is no stopping opinions. They don’t care about whether we want to hold them or not; they do what they have to do.

And graver still, we are sometimes only minimally aware of just which new beliefs we have adopted. If one of the wire services were able to supply each subscriber with a Personal Opinion Printout, delivered with the paper every morning, it would be a real help: then we could monitor our feelings about Pre-Raphaelite furniture, or the influences of urbanization on politeness, or the wearing of sunglasses indoors, or the effect of tort language on traditions of trust, as we adjusted our thoughts about them week by week, the way we keep an eye on lightly traded over-the-counter stocks. Instead, we stride into a discussion with our squads of unexamined opinions innocently at our heels — and, discovering that, yes, we do feel strongly about water-table rights, or unmanned space exploration, or the harvesting of undersea sponges, say, we grab the relevant opinion and, without dress rehearsals, fling it out into audibility (“Fly, you mother”), only to discover, seconds later, its radical inadequacy.

Let me now share with you something about which I changed my mind. Once I was riding the bus between New York City and Rochester. At the Binghamton stop, the driver noticed a shoe sitting on the ledge below the front windshield. The sight of it bothered him. He held it up to us and said, “Is this anybody’s?” There was no response, so he left the bus for a moment and threw the shoe in a nearby trash can. We drove on toward Rochester. Idle, I became caught up in a little plan to furnish my future apartment: I would buy yellow forklifts and orange backhoes, rows of them, upholstered so that my guests might sit if they wished in the scoops or on the slings slung between the forks. I had begun to calculate how many forklifts a typical floor would sustain when a man with disorderly hair walked to the front of the bus wearing two socks and one shoe. “Did you by any chance see a shoe?” he asked the driver. The driver said: “I asked about that shoe in Bing-hamton. It’s gone now.” The man apologized for having been asleep and returned to his seat.

Since that bus trip, five years ago, I find that, without my knowledge, I have changed my mind. I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes. Somewhere I jettisoned that interest as irrevocably as the bus driver tossed out the strange sad man’s right shoe. Yet I did not experience during the intervening time a single uncertainty or pensive moment in regard to a backhoe. Five years of walking around cities, flipping through seed catalogs, and saying “Oho!” to statements I disagreed with — the effect of which has been to leave me with a disinclination to apply heavy machinery to interior design.

Multiply this example by a thousand, a hundred thousand, unannounced reversals: a mad flux is splashing around the pilings of our personalities. For a while I tried to make home movies of my opinions in their native element, undisturbed, as they grazed and romped in fields of inquiry, gradually altering in emphasis and coloration, mating, burrowing, and dying, like prairie dogs, but the presence of my camera made their behavior stilted and self-conscious — which brings us to what I can’t help thinking is a relevant point about the passage of time. Changes of mind should be distinguished from decisions, for decisions seem to reside pertly in the present, while changes of mind imply habits of thought, a slow settling-out of truth, a partially felt, dense past. I may decide, for instance, that when I take off my pants I should not leave them draped over the loudspeakers, as I normally do, but contrive to suspend them on some sort of hook or hanger. I may decide to ask that person sitting across from me at the table to refrain from ripping out the spongy inside of her dinner roll and working it into small balls between her palms. We are bound to make lots of such future-directed choices: they are the reason for risk-benefit analysis. But at the same time, on the outskirts of our attention, hosts of gray-eyed, bright-speared opinions have been rustling, shifting, skirmishing. “What I think about Piaget” is out there, growing wiser, moodier, more cynical, along with some sort of answer to “What constitutes a virtuous life?” Unless I am being unusually calculating, I don’t decide to befriend someone, and it is the same way with a conviction: I slowly come to enjoy its company, to respect its counsel, to depend on it for reassurance; I find myself ignoring its weaknesses or excesses — and if the friendship later ends, it is probably owing not to a sudden rift, but to a barnacling-over of nearly insignificant complaints.

Seldom, then, will any single argument change our minds about anything really interesting or important. In fact, reasoning and argument count for surprisingly little in the alluvial triumph of a thought — no more than 12 to 15 percent. Those reasons we do cite are often only a last flourish of bright plumage, a bit of ceremony to commemorate the result of a rabblement of tendencies too cross-purposed to recapitulate. A haphazard flare of memory; an irrelevant grief; an anecdote in the newspaper; a turn of conversation that stings into motion a tiny doubt: from such incessant percussions the rational soul reorganizes itself — we change our minds as we change our character. Years go by and the movement remains unrecognized: “I wasn’t aware of it, but my whole feeling about car-pool lanes (or planned communities, or slippery-slope arguments, or rhyme, or Shostakovich, or whether things are getting better or worse) was undergoing a major overhaul back then.” We must not overlook sudden conversions and wrenching insights, but usually we fasten on to these only in hindsight, and exaggerate them for the sake of narrative — a tool perfected by the great nineteenth-century novelists, who sit their heroines down and have them deduce the intolerability of their situation in one unhappy night, as the fire burns itself into embers in the grate.

Consider “whether things are getting better or worse” at closer range. Impossibly vague and huge as it is, most of us nonetheless believe it to be a question that merits a periodical self-harvest of opinion. Here are some of the marginally rational things that from one season to the next may contribute to my feelings concerning progress: There is more static in long-distance calls than there was a while ago. The Wonder Bread concrete they now use for sidewalks is a real step down from the darker, pebblier substance they used to use, and that in turn was a decline from the undulant slabs of weathered blue slate, thrust into gradients and peaks by the roots of a nearby tree, that were on my street as a child. Progresso artichoke hearts frequently have sharp, thistly pieces left on them now, as they never used to. When I tip the paper boy these days, he doesn’t say thank you. Cemetery statues suffer increasing vandalism. On the other hand, there is Teflon II. Reflective street signs. The wah-wah pedal. Free libraries for everyone. Central heating. Fire codes. Federal Express. Stevie Wonder. Vladimir Nabokov. Lake Ontario is cleaner. My friends like my new blue coat. Somehow the mind arrives at a moving weighted average of these apples and oranges.

Occasionally a change of mind follows alternate routes. One belief, about which initially I would admit of no doubt, gradually came to seem more porous and intricate in its structure, but instead of moderating my opinion correspondingly, and conceding the justice of several objections, I simply lost interest in it, and now I nod absently if the topic comes up over lunch. Another time a cherished opinion weakened as I became too familiar with the three examples that advocates used over and over to support it. Under the glare of this repetition, the secondary details, the richer underthrumming of the opinion, faded; I seemed to have held it once too often; I tried but failed to find the rhetorical or figurative twist that would revive it for me. I crept insensibly toward the opposing view.

How is it that whole cultures and civilizations can change their “minds” in ways that seem so susceptible to synoptic explanation? From the distance of the historian of ideas, things blur nicely: one sees a dogma and its vocabulary seeping from discipline to disciplines, from class to class; if you squint away specificity you can make out splinter groups, groundswells of opposition, rival and revival schools of thought. The smoothness and sweep is breathtaking; the metaphors are all ready-made.

But when I am at the laundromat, trying to reconstitute for myself the collaboration of influences, disgusts, mistakes, and passions that swept me toward a simple change of heart about forklifts, the variables press in, description stammers and drowns in detail, and imagination hops up and down on one shoe to little purpose. I consult more successful attempts by the major intellectual autobiographers — Saint Augustine, Gibbon, Mill, Newman, and men of similar kidney — but even their brilliant accounts fail to satisfy: I don’t want the story of the feared-but-loved teacher, the book that hit like a thunderclap, the years of severe study followed by a visionary breakdown, the clench of repentance; I want each sequential change of mind in its true, knotted, clotted, viny multifariousness, with all of the colorful streamers of intelligence still taped on and flapping in the wind.

(1982)

The Size of Thoughts

Each thought has a size, and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product. Once in a while, a thought may come up that seems, in its woolly, ranked composure, roughly the size of one’s hall closet. But a really large thought, a thought in the presence of which whole urban centers would rise to their feet, and cry out with expressions of gratefulness and kinship; a thought with grandeur, and drenching, barrel-scorning cataracts, and detonations of fist-clenched hope, and hundreds of cellos; a thought that can tear phone books in half, and rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings; a thought that may one day pack everything noble and good into its briefcase, elbow past the curators of purposelessness, travel overnight toward Truth, and shake it by the indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent — this is the size of thought worth thinking about.

I have wanted for so long to own and maintain even a few huge, interlocking thoughts that, having exhausted more legitimate methods, I have recently resorted to theoretical speculation. Would it be possible to list those features that, taken together, confer upon a thought a lofty magnificence? What makes them so very large? My idle corollary hope is that perhaps a systematic and rigorous codification, on the model of Hammurabi’s or Napoleon’s, might make large thoughts available cheap, and in bulk, to the general public, thereby salvaging the nineteenth-century dream of a liberal democracy. But mainly I am hoping that once I can coax from large thoughts the rich impulses of their power, I will be able to think them in solitude, evening after evening, walking in little circles on the carpet with my arms outspread.

In my first attempt to find an objective measure for the size of thoughts, I theorized (as most of us have at one time or another) that I had only to mount the narrow stairs to my attic, stand in the hypotenuse of sunlight that passed through the window there in midwinter, and, concentrating, punch the thought in question once firmly, as if it were a pillow. The total number of tiny golden dust-monads that puffed forth from the thought’s shocked stuffing would indicate, I believed, its eternal, essential size.

I found this to be a crude technique, and rejected it. Next, influenced by Sir John Eccles, the neurophysiologist, who used the axon of the giant-squid neuron to arrive at truths about the chemistry of human nerve fibers (small truths, needless to say: all scientific truths are small), I cast about for a suitably large thought existing in a form compact enough for me to experiment on it intensively. I tried a line of Wordsworth’s,

… steps

Almost as silent as the turf they trod.

But it wasn’t really big enough for my purposes. I tried Keats’s

O, for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

but I lost my composure every time I read it and got nowhere. Finally I decided to think about Henry James’s sentence: “What is morality but high intelligence?” It came to seem so conveniently vast, so ideally ample, that I handled it for several days, as if it were some richly figured object carved from soapstone; and when it failed to relinquish the secret of its size after that period, I discovered that I had indirectly arrived at my first theorem regarding large thoughts, which was:

(1) All large thoughts are reluctant. I don’t think this is intentional on their part. It follows from the unhasty, liquid pace of human thinking. As an experiment, overturn half a glass of wine onto a newly starched tablecloth. Watch, wholly absorbed, as the borders of the stain search their way outward, plumping up each parched capillary of cotton, threadlet by threadlet, and then traveling on — a soundless, happy explosion, with no moving parts. Thought moves at the velocity of that stain. And since a large thought seems to wish to pierce and acknowledge and even to replenish many more shoots and plumules of one’s experience, some shrunken from long neglect (for every thought, even the largest, tires, winds down, and hardens into a hibernating token of chat, a placeholder for real intellection, unless it is worried into endless, pliant movement by second thoughts, and by the sense of its own provisionality, passing and repassing through the many semipermeable membranes that insulate learning, suffering, ambition, civility, and puzzlement from each other), its hum of fineness will necessarily be delayed, baffled, and drawn out with numerous interstitial timidities — one pauses, looks up from the page, waits; the eyes move in meditative polygons in their orbits; and then, somehow, more of the thought is released into the soul, the corroborating peal of some new, distant bell — until it has filled out the entirety of its form, as a thick clay slip settles into an intricate mold, or as a ladleful of batter colonizes cell after cell of the waffle iron, or as, later, the smell of that waffle will have toured the awakening rooms of the house.

Yet I sensed that reluctance was insufficient. What else did a large thought have to have? Filled with an ambitious sort of wistfulness, I flung open the door of the island cottage where I was staying, nodded to the moon, and began to walk up the fairway of a golf course, repeating, to the pulse of my invisible feet, a large thought of Tennyson’s on which I had decided to perform a few experiments:

Witch-elms that counterchange the floor

Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright

The sand traps, ghostly objects shaped like white blood cells, floated slowly past. At last I reached the green, the moon-colored green, where a dark flag flapped, and looked out over the warm white sea. I threw my arms wide, and waited. Right then my second theorem regarding large thoughts ought to have formed itself in silver characters on the far horizon, but, in fact, it reached me only some weeks later, in a public library:

(2) Large thoughts are creatures of the shade. Not deep shade, necessarily, but the mixed and leafy shade at the floor of large forests. Small thoughts are happy to run around in their colorful swimwear under the brutalest of noons, but large thoughts really must have sizable volumes of cool, still air, to allow room for the approach and docking of their components of sadness. Nobody can frown intently at a delicate task sitting on the floor of a large forest, and large thoughts, too, evade the pointedness and single-purposiveness of a frown; instead, they assert with a general pressure, and avoid contentiousness, and limit themselves to the suggestion that not far off, not far off, there are wholly convincing marginalia of still-undiscovered feeling, stored like heaped carpets in unlit vaults: they exhibit, then, a lush shadiness, as do the purple fastnesses in one’s lungs, or the wrought, jeweled, dark interiors of water-resistant watches. All large thoughts are also patched and played over by leaf-shadows of slight hesitation and uncertainty: this tentativeness gives the thought just enough humility for it to be true. (All that is untrue is small.) Indeed, dusk — the moment of planetary shade — is the most likely time to encounter large thoughts. Because of some power struggle between the retina’s rods and cones brought on with the coming of darkness, there is a quarter-hour or so when colors, though less distinct, seem superbly pigmented, and the important things, faces and especially the teeth of smiles, become sources of genial light: it is then that large thoughts may best be observed, strolling on their somber porches, and reciting from their codices.

As you may imagine, by the time I had successfully formulated this second theorem regarding large thoughts, I was desperately tired of them. If I felt one looming up in a page of Tolstoy, I ran off; I hid. The party seemed over: Dave Peters and his orchestra had packed up, and the devitalized balloons scudded about the floor.

I took a chair. More than anything else, I wished just then for the minty breath of a slighter truth or two in my ear. A minor botanical discovery concerning an unusual species of fern, perhaps; a paradox or an aperçu would do; faint harpsichord music; tricks with coins or cards; witty biographies of peripheral Victorians. What was so very contemptible about small thoughts? Where, indeed, would we be without Cornish game hens such as “It is one of the chief merits of proofs that they instill a certain skepticism about the result proved,” which came to rest in Bertrand Russell’s lucky mind one day? Or Charles Churchill’s little two-step:

With curious art the brain, too finely wrought,

Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought.

Or this, from Pater: “There is a certain shade of unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which may be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract questions”—a thought that bounds beamingly, radiantly skyward for an instant, but is then, like many fine small thoughts, snuffed out on the second bounce by a bookish delegation of counterexamples. If we exiled all that is nifty, careless, wildly exaggerated, light-footed, vulnerable, or circumspectly spiced from our spiritual landscape, we would be in terrible shape. I scolded myself for my callousness toward the small. “We must refine all epics into epigrams!” I said. “We must measure only the flares and glimmers of the world, thimbleful by peerless thimbleful; nor should we grudge even the jingle of a lightbulb filament the silence of an enraptured continent!”

But this extreme reaction missed the point, which was, as I found out not long afterward, that:

(3) Large thoughts depend more heavily on small thoughts than you might think. Why does velvet feel smoother than chrome? Because smoothness is a secondary inference on the part of the confused fingertip, based on its perception of many fleeting roughnesses running underneath it too quickly to be individually considered. This suggestion of resistance in all truly smooth surfaces, like the sense of ornamental insurrection in all truly graceful lines, is analogous to the profusion, the anarchy, of lovely, brief insights that we often experience as we read or listen our way through a great work of the mind, a work that, once completed, will leave us filled with large, calm truths. The villi on the inside of the small intestine — dense groves of microscopic protuberances — constitute a total surface area dedicated to the absorption of nutrients that, if flattened out, would shade the entire island of Manhattan, I am told. Large thoughts, too, disembellished of and abstracted from the small thoughts that diversify their surface, become sheer and indigestible. Consider the infinitesimal hooks on horsehairs that draw from the cello string its lavish tone; consider the grosgrain in silk, the gargoyles on a cathedral, the acanthus sprays or egg-and-dart molding along the tasteful curve of a chair, the lumps of potato that, by exception, prove the otherwise fine uniformity of a cream soup; consider the examples that enforce a moral essay, the social satire in a novel with a tragic ending, the sixteenth notes in a peacemaking melody, the incessant roadside metaphors in a work of metaphysics; consider all the indefensible appliances, the snags, the friction, the plush, that seem to hinder the achievement of a larger purpose, but are, in fact, critical to it. Major truths, like benevolent madonnas, are sustained aloft by dozens of busy, cheerful angels of detail.

I have tested these three theorems — the theorem of reluctance, the theorem of shade, and the theorem of dependency — on as many of the artifacts of reason as I could while holding a steady job. My results may have a certain severe appeal. Few indeed are the hobbyists in human memory who have known the craft of building a spacious, previously unthought thought of their very own: how to obtain, in arranging its long hallways and high, ornate rooms, that pull of an ever-riper deferment, by returning to it again and again, after some studied distraction — now full-face, now three-quarter view, now very near, now far off; how to gather in its huge, slow force with an encircling persistence that is three parts novelty, two parts confirming, strengthening repetition. I count Henry James, Brahms, Bellini. Burke, Bach, Pontormo. A mere eighty-six others.

And now, in a mood of icy impartiality, I am going to test the size of the thought I am offering you right here, which I expect to see peter out very shortly with few surprises, wrapped up after another two or three breaths of the mind, extended perhaps by a last, gravelly spatter of instantiation, unless, O yearn! I just happen to happen upon that loose-limbed, reckless acceleration, wherein this very thought might shamble forward, plucking tart berries, purchasing newspapers, and retrieving stray refuse without once breaking stride — risking a smile, shaking the outstretched hands of young constituents, loosening its tie! — no, that’s all, I believe: this thought has rounded itself out, and ratified itself, despite all of its friendly intentions, as small.

(1983)

Rarity

Has anyone yet said publicly how nice it is to write on rubber with a ballpoint pen? The slow, fat, ink-rich line, rolled over a surface at once dense and yielding, makes for a multidimensional experience no single sheet of paper can offer. Right now dozens of Americans are making repetitive scrolly designs on the soft white door-seals of their refrigerators, or they are directing their pens around the layered side-steppes and toe-bulbs of their sneakers (heads bent, as elders give them advice), or they are marking shiny initials on one of those gigantic, dumb, benevolent erasers (which always bounce in unforeseen directions when dropped, and seem so selfless, so apolitical, so completely uninterested in doing anything besides erasing large mistakes for which they were not responsible), and then using the eraser to print these same initials several times, backward, on a knee or forearm, in a fading progression. These are rare pleasures.

And then someone mentions several kinds of rubber penmanship in his opening paragraph. Has a useful service been performed? A few readers, remembering that they did once enjoy taking down a toll-free phone number on the blade of a clean Rubbermaid spatula, react with guarded agreement: “Yes, I guess I am one of those not-so-uncommon people who have had that sort of rare experience.” Infrequent events in the lives of total strangers are now linked; but the pleasure itself is too fragile, too incidental, to survive such forced affiliation undamaged. Regrettably, multiplying the idea of a thing’s rarity is nearly identical in effect to multiplying the thing itself: its rarity departs. Some readers may never again engage so unthinkingly in this particular strain of idleness. It is no more common than it was before I brought it up, but it is more commonplace.

Rarity, then, is an emotion as much as it is a statistical truth. Just say the word over to yourself: Rare. O rarer than rare. A long, piercing curve of light appears and fades in one’s darkened memory. It’s like that diminishing cry of cartoon characters when they are tricked into running off a cliff. The rare book room. A rare disease. Rarefied air. A miracle of rare device. Comprehended in the notion are all sorts of contributory pangs: brevity, chances barely missed, awe, the passing of great men and glorious eras. Frequency is a sudden movement of many wings, a riffle through a worn paperback; rarity holds the single hushing index finger raised. And yet the absolute number of “raremes” is enormous — too large, in fact, for us to give each one of them the rapt monocular attention it deserves. Not only are there priceless misstamped nickels, oddball aurora borealises hanging their ball-gowns over unpopulated areas, fraternal bananas enclosed in a single skin, holes-in-one, and authentic Georges de La Tours; there are also all the varied sorts of human talent and permutations of character: the master mimic of frog sounds, the memory prodigy, the man who can mix wit with sympathy. The universe of rares is surprisingly crowded, and yet it is somehow capable of holding its inmates in seeming isolation, each of them floating in a radiantly placental, fluid-filled sphere of amazement, miles from any neighbor.

But there is ferment, too, in this universe. The turnover rate is very high. One disk jockey, in a fit of inspiration, will substitute colder in the shrubs for colder in the suburbs, or T-storms for thunderstorms; within two weeks every keen-eared DJ in the country is in step, and these phrases, cooling quickly, are soon remaindered to lesser microphones. Forgotten commonplaces rare up their heads, and soiled rarities are tossed back into the commonplace, twenty-four hours a day, in processes as inevitable as the cycles of rain and evaporation. But in this churning lies our perplexity. Since rarity constitutes part of the pleasure we take in many of the things we value, how rare should we allow a rareme to remain when it is in our power to influence its frequency?

Maybe good ideas should supplant bad ones without the resistance of prejudice or habit; maybe inside information should become public knowledge with the shortest possible delay. We act as if it should. Automatic mechanisms are in place for the efficient display of any hidden gem — a clever household hint, a new theory, a patent, a fairly good poem. Seed money is everywhere. Venture capitalists, those sleepless invigilators, roam the laboratories for the tiniest tremor of a possibility, force-feed it ten million dollars, pump it up, bring it public, and move on. Grants committees and arts competitions chew through the applicant pools, funding anything that moves. Contrarians trample one another to buy unfashionable stocks. “New and Noteworthy” columns take any gruntling of an innovation and give it a paragraph, a title with a pun in it, and a close-cropped picture. We are chastened by past mistakes: Mendel died ignored; Brahms was hissed; Harvey’s patients dropped him when he came out with The Circulation of the Blood. This kind of embarrassment must not happen in our lifetime!

At times it’s fun to be part of a society so intent on institutionalizing its response to novelty. Our toes are curled right around the leading edge of the surfboard. Nothing far out will catch us off guard. We will monitor left field continually, and no hint of activity from that quarter will elude our scrutiny.

But there are ill-effects, nervous tics, symptoms of exhaustion, that arise in an audience when it oversolicits the heteroclite. Newness ought to suffer a period of frost — it should even have to submit, for its own good, to entrenched and outraged resistance. Neglect gives a winsome oddity more time to perform important tests on itself; widespread narrow-mindedness shelters surprise. No one will blame a publisher who has discovered an out-of-print minor masterpiece and feels it his duty to enrich and uplift the human spirit by publishing it in paperback, with a beautiful, spare, up-to-the-minute cover design. That is his job. But sometimes we can’t help wishing he would wait, and just buy one old copy for himself from an antiquarian dealer, preserving for at least a few more years the delight of private, proprietary knowledge, the ecstasy of arriving at something underappreciated at the end of a briareous ramification of footnotes, since the hope of such secrets is one of the things that keep us reading.

Rough timetables, “appreciation schedules,” may be of some guidance. That pad dotted on both sides with suction cups, to which you can vertically affix a wet bar of soap while you are in the shower? It should remain unmentioned by any magazine’s “New and Noteworthy” column for six months. Each of us should have a fair chance of finding it, hanging unheralded from a hook in the hardware store, on our own. A good poem, as Horace suggested, ought to have a nine-year news blackout. And a major leisure item — a new sort of inflatable raft, for example — deserves at least five summers of quiet superiority before it gets a Best Buy rating from Consumer Reports and leans against the wall in the sporting-goods department at the high-volume discounters. After all, this successful raft — with its revolutionary osmotic inflater-valve — displaces several other very good makes of raft, which once so proudly rode the crest; and when we look through the still-hopeful catalogs of these inferior raft-crafters, and sense their anguish, deepening monthly, as they watch their sales go into steep decline, then they begin to take on rarity — the rarity of the underdog, one of the most seductive kinds — and we discover ourselves feeling, too soon, that we must root for the second-rate product. (Haven’t you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in? Haven’t you sometimes felt sleeve-tugs of compassion and guilt over an article of clothing that you dislike and therefore scarcely wear? Haven’t you at least once secretly sat down in the hardly-sat-in chair, wearing that ugly shirt, in order to rectify these inequities?) A little lengthening of the time it takes for new merit to out, for rare proficiencies to make their sudden bundle, would allow our sympathy for the underdog and our excitement in superiority to coincide; too rapid a transmittal of the knowledge of relative greatness, on the other hand, eliminates that beautiful period when these emotions overlap.

Subtotaling, then, we note that civilization ought to be superficially pigheaded, suspicious of all subversion, so that rarity can leap in with her accordion and startle the anatomy lesson. If the sadly underrated is kept sadly underrated, righteousness and a sense of urgent mission stay on the side of the deserving. But when all the goodies are pincered the moment they surface, when zoning rules demand public art in exchange for additional floor space, when writers curtail their finer efforts because the merest suggestion of expertise is enough to coast on for a decade, then one is unwillingly forced, in behalf of originality itself, to defend authority, stringency, unbendingness — not things one defends with real moral relish. So let the rare stay rare, at least for a while. Every piece of bad design praised does its bit to keep good designs under wraps. We need many incompetent arbiters; we need more choices to be foolish and uninformed.

Some desert fathers have gotten carried away, though. Say you are a genius, and you have just done something that has never been done before. There it lies, on your legal pad or your patio, as rare as it could possibly be. In a week or a year it might glint in thousands of other minds, like the tiny repeating images in a beetle’s eye. Paul Valéry has some stern words for you: “Every mind considered powerful begins with the fault that makes it known,” he writes. And: “the strongest heads, the most sagacious inventors, the most exacting connoisseurs of thought, must be unknown men, misers, who die without giving up their secret.” Even putting an idea in words, according to Arthur Schopenhauer, is a sellout: “As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere or at bottom serious. When it begins to exist for others it ceases to live in us.” The self-canceling quality of these verbal arguments for silence is obvious. Still, if behind them is simply the wish for a kind of privacy, for the insulation of inattention, for a few delays in the final sentencing of a thought, for a little sorrow intermixed with one’s eager self-expression, then any prudent introvert would raise a concurring absinthe glass.

Things often work better, too, when the portions of each person’s life that are wholly devoted to a quest for the rare are themselves somewhat infrequent. The staggering fluke and the exhilarating pathology ought to surprise their first discoverers as much as they surprise the rest of us. It is always more pleasing when the sweepstakes is won by the family who sent off their entry distractedly, in the midst of errands and trips to the vet, than when it is won by that man with the flat voice, in the hooded parka, who sent in five hundred thirty-seven separate entries — except that ultimately rarity accrues to him as well, once we contemplate him: all those unshaven mornings at the post office, those readings of the fine-print contest guidelines, those copyings of “Dove is One Quarter Cleansing Cream” on three-by-five pieces of paper.

For everyone besides that rare man in the parka, the provisional moral may be: Pursue truth, not rarity. The atypical can fend for itself: our innate, unconquerable human appetite for it will never let it lie low for long. And very often, when we are looking over several common truths, holding them next to one another in an effort to feel again what makes them true, rarities will mysteriously germinate in the charged spaces between them, like those lovely, ghostly zings that a guitarist’s fingers make, as they clutch from chord to chord.

(1984)