1 In one footnote, for instance, Lecky quotes a French biographer of Spinoza to the effect that the philosopher liked to entertain himself by dropping flies into spiders’ webs, enjoying the resultant battle so much that he occasionally burst out laughing. (History of European Morals, vol. 1, page 289.) Lecky uses this tidbit to illustrate his contention that sophisticated moral feelings are not consistent across a personality or a culture; you can be eloquently virtuous in one sphere, while tolerant of nastiness, or even nasty yourself, in another—a familiar enough point, perhaps, but never pivoting on the example of Spinoza before, I don’t think. Hobbes, too, we learn in a Penguin selection of John Aubrey’s Lives, page 228, liked during college (”rook racked” Oxford) to get up early in the morning and trap jackdaws with sticky string, using cheese as bait, hauling them in, fluttering and wrapped in the feather-destroying snare, apparently for fun. Jesus H. Christ! As our knowledge of these philosophers is brought within this domestic and anecdotal embrace, we can’t help having our estimation of them somewhat diminished by these cruel, small pursuits. And Wittgenstein, as well, I read in some biography, loved to watch cowboy movies: he would go every afternoon to watch gunfights and arrows through the chest for hours at a time. Can you take seriously a person’s theory of language when you know that he was delighted by the woodenness and tedium of cowboy movies? Once in a while, fine—but every day? Yet while these tiny truths about three philosophers (of whom, to be honest, I have read very little) have at least temporarily disabled any interest I might have had in reading them further, I crave knowledge of this kind of detail. As Boswell said, “Upon this tour, when journeying, he [Johnson] wore boots, and a very wide brown cloth great coat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio dictionary; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing. I remember Dr Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glascow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, instead of buckles.” (Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Penguin, page 165. Think of it: John Milton wore shoelaces!) Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of “ibid.’s” and “compare’s” and “see’s” that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind. They knew the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, a gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom. (They were aware, more generally, of the usefulness of tiny type in enhancing the glee of reading works of obscure scholarship: typographical density forces you to crouch like Robert Hooke or Henry Gray over the busyness and intricacy of recorded truth.) They liked deciding as they read whether they would bother to consult a certain footnote or not, and whether they would read it in context, or read it before the text it hung from, as an hors d’oeuvre. The muscles of the eye, they knew, want vertical itineraries; the rectus externus and internus grow dazed waggling back and forth in the Zs taught in grade school: the footnote functions as a switch, offering the model-railroader’s satisfaction of catching the march of thought with a superscripted “1” and routing it, sometimes at length, through abandoned stations and submerged, leaching tunnels. Digression—a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument—is sometimes the only way to be thorough, and footnotes are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters. And yet the MLA Style Sheet I owned in college warned against lengthy, “essay-like” footnotes. Were they nuts? Where is scholarship going? (They have removed this blemish in later editions.) It is true that Johnson said, on the subject of exegetical notes to Shakespeare, “The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.” (”Preface to Shakespeare.”) But Johnson was referring here to the special case of one writer’s commentary on another—and indeed whose mind is not chilled by several degrees when the editors of the Norton Anthology of Poetry clarify every potentially confusing word or line for us, failing to understand that the student’s pleasure in poetry comes in part from the upper furze of nouns he can’t quite place and allusions that he only half recognizes? Do we really need Tennyson’s “unnumbered and enormous polypi” neatly footnoted with “3. Octopus-like creatures”? Do we need the very title of that poem (”The Kraken,” printed on pages 338-339 of the revised shorter edition of that anthology) explained away for us? And do we need the opening sentence of James’s The American, which mentions the “Salon Carré, in the Museum of the Louvre,” dental-flossed (in the Penguin American Library edition, of all places) with the following demoralizing aid:
1. The heart of the picture-galleries in the great French national museum, this room contains, in addition to works by the old masters whom James mentions below, Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa.”
But the great scholarly or anecdotal footnotes of Lecky, Gibbon, or Boswell, written by the author of the book himself to supplement, or even correct over several later editions, what he says in the primary text, are reassurances that the pursuit of truth doesn’t have clear outer boundaries: it doesn’t end with the book; restatement and self-disagreement and the enveloping sea of referenced authorities all continue. Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.
1 I also liked the black Penguins because on the front page they had a biographical note about the translator that was in the same small print as the biographical note about the major historical figure he had rendered into English, a pairing that made those minor translational lives in Dorset and Leeds seem just as important as the often assassinating, catty, and conspiring lives of the ancients. The Penguin translators seemed frequently to be amateurs, not academics, who had, after getting their double firsts, lived quietly running their fathers’ businesses or being clergymen, and translating in the evenings—probably gay, a fair number of them: that excellent low-key sort of man who achieves little by external standards but who sustains civilization for us by knowing, in a perfectly balanced, accessible, and considered way, all that can be known about several brief periods of Dutch history, or about the flowering of some especially rich tradition of terra-cotta pipes.
1 Not quite true anymore. Since she told me the St. Ives riddle, it has taken a place on my carousel, too: I’m bothered that the answer is supposed to be “None, dummy—the man was coming from St. Ives,” because (a) you can certainly “meet” a person on the road by falling in step with him and talking to him; and (b) the line is not specific as to whether the man has seven wives “with” him right there on the road, or merely that he is responsible for seven wives as an ongoing condition of his life. I worry, thus, about how much perplexity a riddle like this would have caused children in households where riddles were exchanged; whether I would have liked this perplexity as a child if I had been exposed to it (rather than to, say, Jack and Spot and their wagon); what the intention of the original framer of the riddle had been; and what station in life he or she had occupied—I think about it all roughly nineteen times a year.
1 I am fairly certain now that shoelaces will rank higher. In the course of preparing the present record of that Aurelius-and-shoelace noon, I lived through a rigorous month in which the subject of shoelace-tying and shoelace wear came up 325 times, whereas Aurelius’s sentiment cycled around only 90 times. I doubt very much that I will ever concentrate on either of them again, having worn both of the thoughts out for myself. But these sudden later flurries may not count, since they are artificial duplicative retrievals performed in order to un
derstand how the earlier natural retrievals had come about. The very last instance of shoelace thought happened as follows: by chance, I was flipping through the 1984–1986 Research Reports of MIT’s Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity at my office, and I noticed that there was active work going forward on the subject of the “pathology of worn ropes.” The research was described as follows:
Numerous marine ropes have been gathered from around the world, representing a variety of deployment modes and periods of exposure. Patterns of mechanical and chemical deterioration were detected and quantified. Major mechanisms of deterioration have been established for specific deployments. Degradation patterns are now being assembled for application to structural models of ropes with a view towards establishing a valid retirement policy.
Degradation patterns were now being assembled! Iyiyi! Aside from deciding, very briefly, that I had to quit my job and apprentice myself to this exciting project, I wondered whether S. Backer and M. Seo’s results could be adapted so that they applied, however crudely, to the case of my own shoelaces. To my surprise, the library did not own a copy of the referenced September 1985 Proceedings of the Third Japan-Australia Joint Symposium on Objective Measurement: Application to Product Design and Process Control. I wrote for a reprint, but in the meantime my impatience drove me to look further. I soon found that I had been a fool to think that the twisted pathology of marine ropes could have had anything to do with the woven pathology of shoelaces. I consulted volume 07.01 of the massive guidelines of the American Society for Testing and Materials, and found a discussion of the procedures and instrumentation for the abrasional testing of textiles. The abrasion machines pictured looked like they were products of the 1930s, but in the realm of abrasion, the known effect of established testing machines might, I thought, be more important than sophisticated instrumentation. This also proved to be untrue. Moving to the periodical literature, I learned of the Microcon I, the Instron Tensile Tester, the Accelerator Abrasion Tester, and the Stoll Quarter Master Universal Wear Tester, or SQMUWT. (For this last, see Textile Technology Digest, 05153/80; Pal, Munshi, and Ukidre, of India’s Cotton Technology Research Laboratory, have used the machine in the determination of flex abrasion of sewing threads.) Nonetheless, as H. M. Elder, T. S. Ellis, and F. Yahya of the Fibre and Textile Unit, Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, write, “it is doubtful if any one machine can be developed that is able to duplicate the complex range of abrasive stresses, and their respective proportions, to which a textile material is subjected in service.” (J. Text. Inst., 1987, No. 2, p. 72.) This Scottish skepticism was exhilarating, since it bore out what I had myself suspected in those first few minutes in my office, after my second pair of shoelaces had snapped.
And then, checking the 1984 volumes of World Textile Abstracts, I read entry 4522:
Methods for evaluating the abrasion resistance and knot slippage strength of shoe laces
Z. Czaplicki
Technik Wlokienniczy, 1984, 33 No.l, 3-4 (2 pages). In Polish.
Two mechanical devices for testing the abrasion resistance and knot slippage performance of shoe laces are described and investigated. Polish standards are discussed. [C] 1984/4522
I let out a small cry and slapped my hand down on the page. The joy I felt may be difficult for some to understand. Here was a man, Z. Czaplicki, who had to know! He was not going to abandon the problem with some sigh about complexity and human limitation after a minute’s thought, as I had, and go to lunch—he was going to make the problem his life’s work. Don’t tell me he received a centralized directive to look into a more durable weave of shoelace for the export market. Oh no! His very own shoelace had snapped one time too many one morning, and instead of buying a pair of replacement dress laces at the corner farmacja and forgetting about the problem until the next time, he had constructed a machine and strapped hundreds of shoelaces of all kinds into it, wearing them down over and over, in a passionate effort to get some subtler idea of the forces at work. And he had gone beyond that—he had built another machine to determine which surface texture of shoelace would best hold its knot, so that humanity would not have to keep retying its shoelaces all day long and wearing them out before their time. A great man! I left the library relieved. Progress was being made. Someone was looking into the problem. Mr. Czaplicki, in Poland, would take it from there.
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