Volume 43, Number 11 · June 20, 1996
Up to the Minutiae
By Michael Wood
The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber
by Nicholson Baker
Random House, 355 pp., $25.00
There is much to be said for tiny signs, and we don't have to laugh at the idea of what Erich Heller once called a 'profound' semicolon in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Borges's story 'The Library of Babel' opens with a pretty deep parenthesis: 'The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries….' Just a pair of small curved marks, but what a difference they make. You could get the meaning here, and even the rhythm, with commas or dashes, but you couldn't get the dizzying sense of the throwaway, of information that almost wasn't given to us, and even now scarcely seems to matter.
Review, 3340 words
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