Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker

Author:Nicholson Baker [Baker, Nicholson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Weidenfeld
Published: 1990-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

9

EVEN SO, when Patty’s handwriting paused for a moment that evening soon after the Bug was born, and I held in my mind a tiny pen-sound that I felt sure was a comma, I didn’t at first think of literary punctuation at all, but of the distant preliterate sight of Mal Green’s markings on my horn études. The idea of the comma as an oasis of respiration, a point of real as opposed to grammatical breath, of momentary renewal and self-marshaling in the dotty onslaught of sixteenth notes, overlaid itself on my idea of the comma as a unit of simple disjunction in written English. How had we come up with this civilized shape? I wondered. Timidly and respectfully it cupped the sense of a preceding phrase and held it out to us. It recalled the pedals of grand pianos, mosquito larvae, paisleys, adult nostril openings, the spiraling decays of fundamental particles, the prows of gondolas, half-spent tubes of antifungal ointment, falcon or airplane wings in cross section: there was an implied high culture in its asymmetrical tapering swerve that gave it a distinct superiority over the Euclidean austerity of the full point, or period. You might in fact have expected these two elements of disjunction tc exhibit reversed functions: the comma seems more of a foil to the progress of the eye, a fallen branch partially impeding a stream, while the period, a mere dot, a small cold pebble, should allow sense to slip smoothly past. But perhaps the functions were as they were, I thought, because the graceful purling motion necessary to the creation of the comma, that inclusive flip of the pen, is similar to the motions we use in writing the prose that surrounds it, while the period is an alien jab, tacking the sentence with finality onto the paper. Even after Aldus Manutius put his type-casters to work, and they resolved the informal kinetics of its written formation into theoretically sound protractor-twirls and conic sections, the comma still retained all its original expressiveness, miming the extenuating dips of the hand we use when taking exception to a point in polite conversation. And in those recent typefaces in which commas have been chamfered into little more than rude cuneiformal wedges, their newer shape nonetheless manages at least to evoke the rubber doorstop’s dependable amenity, keeping the ostioles free from clause to clause, allowing metaphors to mix more freely. Working myself up into a state of reverence as I lay there, I began to be curious whether the statistical ratio of commas to sentences might have a predictive use in some sort of moral stylometrics: maybe, as a general rule, the fewer commas a person used, the more ruthless a tyrant he would prove to be if placed in a position of power. It was a test that would itself be useful to the tyrannically minded, and it was worthless besides, as I realized only a few seconds later, remembering for the fiftieth time a 1975 Thanksgiving

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.