I just wrote two pages about a strawberry...

That was my reaction after I finished my pastiche of Baker's The Mezzanine. I was surprised; a) because I'd just written a full two pages about one single strawberry (complete with three footnotes), and b) because it had gone by so quickly. I found it so easy to sit down and let ideas come to me. Once I'd found my main topic (the strawberry that I'd happened to be eating at the time...) I wrote without filter. Normally when we write papers and essays for school, or even when we're writing something creative like a short story, we don't just write the first thing that comes into our heads. Well, we might do that to start off, but eventually we have to edit things out because they just sound weird. But writing this pastiche, I literally wrote about the first thing that came into my head. Just a teensy tiny little thought, and I ran with it. Whole footnotes about cat food, and taking an imaginary bus to an imaginary street to obtain said cat food; creating Marshall's Seedless Jams, a factory specializing in...seedless jams; all of it, I was able to do, because I was pretending to be Nicholson Baker.

Who, incidentaly, borders on the insane. He must do if he can write without filter for an entire novel, not just two pages. But, not only do I question his sanity, I admire his decision to write in this manner. It was so liberating to sit down for an hour or two, and write write write about...nothing! Or everything, if you want to look at it through Howie's eyes. Everything was important, everything was a big deal, I didn't have to omit anything because I thought people would think it was stupid, or because it just plain was stupid. It was great. And if it was this liberating for me, Nicholson Baker must be an extraordinarily liberated man indeed.

Toffee.

As I was reading pages 13-28 of Mrs. Dalloway, a few things jumped out at me that I thought I'd relate to everyone (because I know you're all waiting with bated breath to hear my opinions). The first thing I noticed was how well Virginia Woolf captures Septimus Warren Smith's insanity; she never comes right out and says, "So, this one bloke named Septimus? Yeah, he's crazy." What she does is she uses a combination of his wife Lucrezia's reactions and feelings about her husband's state, what Lucrezia tells us that his doctor recommends her to do, and Septimus's own thoughts to let us create our own picture of what sort of mental condition Septimus is in. I liked a few things about her portrayal, first of all how random Septimus's thoughts are. On page 22, Septimus is watching the trees:

"Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds. A child cried. Rightly far away a horn sounded. All taken together meant the birth of a new religion--" 'Septimus!' said Rezia. He started violently. People must notice."

Septimus makes all of these observations about how important everything around him is, how it's going to create a new religion, so we know that he's not mentally impaired, but we know something's up. Another way we know that there is something wrong is that Rezia always looks around and says to herself, "People must notice." Towards the beginning of this section, we think, "Notice what?" but it soon becomes clear. 

That brings me to the next point I had, which was how easily and subtly Virginia Woolf can change the subject. On page 15, to continue to talk about Septimus and Rezia, there is a paragraph ["People must notice;...into some park."] which is very "stream of consciousness"-like and flies through about 10 different ideas and gives us just a flash more of information about the Warren Smiths. Woolf also does this on page 20, where people are watching the airplane write letters in the sky. She actually ends up describing three things in a few sentences, and I'll color-code them, because it's funny to see how entangled the ideas are. 

"The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater --

'That's an E,' said Mrs. Bletchley -- or a dancer -- 

'It's toffee,' murmered Mr. Bowley -- (and the car went in at the gates and nobody looked at it), and...shutting off the smoke..."

I think it's so...interesting to continue the description of the plane ("or a dancer") after the first quotation, and to pick up the account of the motor car as it finally makes its way into the Palace, and how nobody is looking at it now because they're all looking at the plane. It's just a very clever way of bringing everything to a close.

"Wrong, wrong, wrong!"

On page 120 of The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker, our enthusiastic narrator begins to reveal which Penguin paperback he has been carrying around for the majority of the novel. The paperback in question is Aurelius's Meditations. He informs us that his problem with reading is that "you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before." and in his case, what made him stop was this: "Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all of mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes." This excerpt makes our narrator shout at his book, saying how wrong it is, and with good reason.

None of The Mezzanine's readers can possibly agree with such a excerpt after having read 120 pages of stunningly profound observations about staplers. Nor could they still think that the trivial things of life are still, well, trivial. Our narrator finds joy and wonderment in the most mundane things that almost everyone would overlook, and I couldn't help but be drawn into his childlike happiness as well. I was so involved in our narrator's view of the world that even I was outraged when Aurelius was quoted. Our narrator goes on to say that such a notion is "destructive and unhelpful" which I fully agree with. If one is going to take that view, that everything is transient, nothing matters, etc, then...what is one going to care about?

It's destructive and unhelpful because it doesn't allow you to take pleasure in everyday things, like our narrator does. Our narrator can talk about drinking your drink while you're chewing and how gross that is for a footnote a third of a page long. Are you going to tell him that milk and cookies are transient and therefore don't warrant a third of a page? Of course you're not! Where is the fun in thinking everything is pointless and the world is pointless and trivial and blah blah blah? Wouldn't you much rather feel like you're experiencing everything for the first time? Inspecting the way the trash bags are hooked around the edge of the trashcan so that you can throw heavy objects in the can without the bag falling in on itself? Praising your office building for keeping the good, white paper towels in their bathrooms? Finding something valuable in...just about everything?

I would, and I completely understand why our narrator is so angry at Aurelius's observation. Aurelius is trying to take away our narrator's "manchild" quality, and tell him that his excitement at everyday things is silly. Well, that's not very nice, is it Aurelius? Our narrator's views on life are the polar opposite of Aurelius's, and our narrator seems somewhat insulted by the very notion that everyday things could be trivial and not ridiculously interesting.

I'm beginning to wonder if Baker intentionally put the excerpt so far into the book, and not, for example, at the beginning. Had he put it at the beginning, he would have given away his intentions; he would have been saying, "This is the way my character feels about life; take it or leave it." By having it so far into the novel, he gives us time to become immersed in our narrator's perception of life, and leaves us to our own reactions to the excerpt. Our own reactions, generally, agreeing with the narrator's (at least in my case), which might be Baker's goal. Hmm...ulterior motives? Or just a kick in the pants to make us enjoy life more? I'm going to go with the second one.