The Way the World Works

Mowing

Sometimes everything seems simple. This morning, a Saturday in July, I reached down to the books beside my bed and pulled up a Dover collection of old Robert Benchley columns. I looked at the copyright page and I saw the dates—1930, 1931. The dates meant something to me. I knew people who had lived through those dates. I knew who Robert Benchley was, and I knew what Dover Books was. I came downstairs and tried to pour a cup of coffee. The coffeepot was empty, but as soon as I determined that it was empty I knew that my wife had very kindly transferred the coffee into the red thermos so that it would stay hot. And indeed there it was, in the red thermos. My wife was out walking the dog. It was nine-thirty. It had been nine-thirty on many Saturday mornings before this. All the sounds I heard were familiar: the tires swooshing intermittently by, and the birds — the nearby rapid chirpers and the distant screechers — and the single cricket just getting revved up for the day. I understood the kitchen tablecloth perfectly — a white cotton tablecloth with faded blue and yellow stripes. It had dried outside on the drying rack that we stuck into a flagpole socket in the yard.

I felt I understood the New York Times on the tablecloth as well, why it was there, and when I walked out through the dining room into the front hall and paused in front of a bookcase there, I looked at all the titles. Every title in the bookcase meant something to me. Most of the books I had packed and unpacked several times. I already had a place in my head that held each book. Each was one I wanted in my life in this unobtrusive way, on the shelf in the front hall where nobody would pay much attention to it. The door was open and the cool air from outside pushed gently through the screen and reached me. I was barefoot. Never had I known quite this particularity of peace.

So I thought again, Sometimes everything seems simple. Today I’m going to mow part of the lawn. I enjoy mowing the lawn — I know this lawn well, and I sing mildly obscene songs while I mow and think about the way grass looks. My son will mow part of the lawn. I will pay him for the part he mows. I understand how money works, green dollar bills — they’re in my wallet. My daughter will sunbathe on the mown lawn near the asparagus plant, reading a book. What book is she reading? Nabokov’s Pnin. How comprehensible is that! I have read Nabokov’s Pnin, more than once. My wife wrote a paper on Pnin in college for a Russian literature class. She and I have talked about Pnin many times. Everything around me is anchored somehow or other in a familiar past.

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)