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 Binghamton. 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.
-Nicholson Baker, The Size of Thoughts
2 comments:
Something about quotes in general is that if I read a quote that I like, the initial reactions is, "I like whomever wrote this quote, and I'd like to read more of what he wrote." But then I'm never sure, because it could very well be that the entire reason that the good quote is quoted in the first place is because it was the best thing that the man ever wrote and there is no more where it came from. So hence I ask, was Nicholas Baker anyone more interesting than a British politician and did he write about interesting ideas in general or only when he wrote this quote?
This quote comes from The Size of Thoughts which is a great collection of essays. This particular essay is about changing your mind...it really has nothing to do with errant shoes, or backhoes and forklifts, for that matter.
Nicholson Baker is a master of detail...his writing is full of complex footnotes and asides. Occasionally, he can also be a crank or a bit adult in subject matter. But this book is delightful.
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