Every day when I come home from school, my mom asks “How was school?” My answer is always “Good.” When people ask me about my day, I say it was boring. The reason? Because to me, it is relatively straightforward. I had classes. I went to them. I ate food. I did my work. It’s a very repetitive schedule. To Howie however, each of these actions probably has infinite potential for discussion. I wonder how Howie’s mom felt after he came back from school as a kid. She probably stopped asking him in the fear that he would blab for so long she wouldn’t get anything done anymore. I believe that Nicholson Baker is trying to tell us, through Howie, that our everyday lives contain a lot more than we usually notice.
I’ve probably drunk from a straw thousands of times. Here’s what I notice when I drink from them: Wow this drink is nice. Of course I have little thoughts like enjoying the cool sensation of cold water/soda going up the straw and touching my lips for the first time, or feeling the carbonation sizzle on my tongue. However, it was never something worth analyzing. Baker, however, presents drinking straws as something very unique and yet has issues that I had never even thought of, describing “a plastic straw floating in a paper cup [as] a small, precise problem of fluid dynamics” (Baker 42). Everyone sees a paper straw “bob” up on a drink lid before including me, but I’ve never thought about it nor even given any mental attention to it whatsoever. All there is is a sliver of vague recognition, more of a “concept” that flashes through your brain rather than something that is expressed into words. I think it’s funny how Baker decides to use elegant and eloquent prose to describe this conceptual sensation so deeply and accurately. This happens with other objects throughout the novel as well, like shoelaces and paper towels. Howie obsesses over every single one of these things, as if expanding thoroughly on something not worth expanding on. That’s what makes reading his thoughts so entertaining. In a regular novel, many details like these are cut out as they aren’t relevant to the plot. Baker does the complete opposite and makes these digressions the whole point of the book.
Baker does more than just tell us that ordinary objects are worth looking at. He also dives into themes of growth, coming-of-age topics, and how this magical way of viewing the world might exist in each of us, being most active in childhood and slowly fading away as we age. Howie, of course, seems like an obvious exception—The escalator is a prime example. The escalator is, in my opinion, the clearest demonstrator of his superpower. He rides the elevator every freaking day. There’s nothing that gets more boring than that. However, somehow on a random day he still looks at it intently, considering its design and comparing it to integrals, looking at how the light hits the blackness of the railings and disperses into different light-patterns. This kind of fascination is childlike in nature. Kids can look at something hundreds of times and still enjoy it as if its brand new. I remember I played with one toy for years as a kid and it never got old. Howie never loses this childlike aspect of everyone’s personality. In one perspective you can claim he is left in the dust while everyone else progresses in maturity. But is becoming desensitized to the environment truly a good thing? I don’t think Baker thinks so.
DJ, I wonder if Howie's office experience changes from day to day. As you said, you've drunk from a straw thousands of times, and so has Howie, yet he thought about it this particular time. There are plenty of other things he could notice, like the texture of the floor or the pattern of lights on the ceiling, but he doesn't give those details. Maybe some days, he thinks about these things, but on this lunch hour, he didn't. Another hypothesis I have is that Howie wasn't actually considering all of these things as the lunch hour occurred, but instead he considered them as he recalled the day to write about it.
ReplyDeleteHello DJ! I wonder if everyone really loses the curiosity and fascination we are more bent towards as children. Does it just change shape? I know I am WAY more interested in my classes now than I was in third grade. At that point. I just wanted to play Prodigy! But, I do also think there is something that we stuff down: the continued fascination to keep searching and learning and witnessing something ordinary as unique. Our ability to adapt may be our downfall!
ReplyDeleteYou're right that it is the *routine* nature of much of our daily experience that prevents us from living our lives like Howie does: we put our heads down, do what we need to do, moving through familiar spaces in the same patterns day by day. But maybe that's the core revelation of this novel: that pattern or routine can suddenly become very "interesting" once we defamiliarize it, freshen our perception, refuse to be deadened by familiarity and habit. The unremarkable nature of most of what Howie writes about is the point, in this sense: he is "remarking" on stuff that we usually don't view as worthy of remark, let alone literary transformation via metaphor. Hopefully the pastiche assignment will enable you to freshen your own habitual perceptions!
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