I've returned to the Lake from the Cities, where I passed a laptopless dawn with Nicholson Baker's The Size of Thoughts. There’s a critique of memexing – and of all writing about one’s life – in “Changes of Mind”: I thought of reading that piece – it seemed for the first time – yesterday morning, suddenly could not recall the title (“changing one’s mind?”), brought up Google Desktop, searched on “the size of thoughts,” and found:
Saturday,
Sept. 16, 2000
I intend
to try dictating a couple of paragraphs from the first essay in Nicholson
Baker's book "The Size of Thoughts."
From "Changes of Mind" (after noting of himself that "I no longer wish to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes")
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 partly 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 ands, 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 to cross-purposed to recapitulate. A haphazard flair 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 onto these only in hindsight, and exaggerate them for the sake of narrative -- the 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. (Baker, 1982, 5-7)
Comments