Nicholson Baker, who will forever be canonized among my favorite writers for his short but absurdly, beautifully funny The Mezzanine, offers his thoughts on the Kindle, "an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization." This is a man who, for several years, filled a warehouse with old newspapers, and well worth listening to. His thoughts on the semicolon will likely remain entertaining reading material for hundreds of years, not to mention his essay about visiting the Trim fingernail clipper factory.
The remarkable opening of his essay "The Size of Thoughts," from The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber:
Each thought has a size, and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product. Once in a while, a thought may come up that seems, in its woolly, ranked composure, roughly the size of one's hall closet. But a really large thought, a thought in the presence of which whole urban centers would rise to their feet, and cry out with expressions of gratefulness and kinship; a thought with grandeur, and drenching, barrel-scorning cataracts, and detonations of fist-clenched hope, and hundreds of cellos; a thought that can tear phone books in half, and rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings; a thought that may one day pack everything noble and good into its briefcase, elbow past the curators of purposelessness, travel overnight toward Truth, and shake it by the indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent—this is the size of thought worth thinking about.
