The size of thoughts
Many years ago, a very tall man and I went on our first date. After watching East of Eden in the campus auditorium, we went back to my dorm room, made popcorn, and talked.
One of the things my new friend mentioned was an article he’d just read in the Atlantic Monthly called “The Size of Thoughts,” by Nicholson Baker. It begins like this:
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.
Really large thoughts. That’s what we talked about, and then he went home, and I couldn’t get to sleep that night because something huge had just happened, I could tell.
Two years later, I married him.
A few years after that, with our children, I had cause to revisit an old friend, the illustrious Dr. Seuss. Who wrote, of course “Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”
Sometimes, I channel Seuss, like this:
Maybe it matters, though,
Matters a lot.
Whether we don’t, or we do
have a thought.
It might make you rich -
But then it might not.
It might make no difference
or might make a lot.
It might be the kind
that gets in the way,
but it also might lead to
your future, that day.
* * *
Mr. Baker makes the best point of all about the importance of thoughts, though, so my final words must be his:
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 19th-century dream of a liberal democracy.
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Related Posts:
In defense of thoughts (part 1)
To have as many thoughts as possible (part 2)
The size of thoughts (part 3)
