The first night we played Night Watchman, Marvin was the watchman. There must have been thirty crawlers in my back yard, trying to get into the tower without being caught. Most of them weren’t very good at avoiding detection. They snapped twigs, sneezed, stood up if the tricky watchman called their names, asked for time out to go to the bathroom, and were caught in the beam of the watchman’s flashlight every time. Impatience was their common fault. They got twitchy. Those of us who learned to play the game well discovered that it was a waiting game. A crawler had to be willing to lie perfectly still for long periods of time, waiting for the watchman to shift position, for a car to honk its horn somewhere, for another crawler t o make an error, for anything that would cover the sound of an inch’s progress toward the tower, and had to enjoy the idea that the game had no time limit.
After a couple of weeks, Raskol, Marvin, and I were the only ones who still played the game regularly. There were always other kids playing with us, but they came and went and never amounted to more than static. We three, however, had become passionate devotees. I was a masterly crawler, and proud of it. I had had some training. My idle days in the field where the Purlieu Street School now stood had taught me crawling. My afternoons beside Ariane had taught me the art of inching up. Most of all though, I had a new knack for patience. I was so good at being patient that I amazed myself. I learned the trick from my encyclopedia ramblings; my secret consisted mainly of letting my mind wander while I waited for an opening, rambling from thought to thought as a way of keeping myself from growing impatient and making a mistake that would reveal me. If I waited, my time would come. So I would lie in wait and think, deliberately think. A word might get me going, or a memory, but every time I’d find myself wandering from one thought to another.
I think my preference for working in small bites began with this game, this lying in the dark and thinking about something for a while and then moving on to something suggested by it. When I think hard about something, pay really close attention to it, I can sustain the effort only for short bits. At the level of really close attention, my mind is working too fast, like the windup record player when I had it operating at its highest possible speed, and there seems to be some danger of a rattling collapse—best to slow it down for a while. However, operating always at a comfortable speed, looking always at the surface of things, thinking at the level of generalities, wouldn’t be satisfactory. Nothing really interesting can be comprehended at that level without simplifying it to the point where it’s no longer particularly interesting at all, and what would be the good of examining something interesting, anything interesting—for example, making observations of your personal history, adventures, and experiences—at such a gross level of perception? At the grosser levels of perception, you see surfaces, you see edges, and you seem to see mostly differences, boundaries where things are differentiated from one another, but for short, tiring periods you can get down to the finer levels, working with extremely fine tools, set at fantastic degrees of magnification. When you look at yourself—or anything—that closely, you are looking at tiny bits, each of which yields only a tinier bit of information. You absorb it, consider it, and move on to the next tiny bit. You may have to take some time at the surface to catch your breath, change your leaky batteries, rewind your spring, but you’ll be back. You are an explorer of the minuscule, and the picture you begin to form is busy and bumpy, not at all the smooth and regular impression you got from a greater distance, or at a lower magnification. Down here differences are harder to see. As Quanto the Minimum and Elementary Introductory Physics Made Easy for Beginners (Book One) taught me, things get strange down among the tiny bits. Sometimes things overlap, and it’s hard to tell whose electron is whose, hard to tell where one edge stops and another starts, hard to tell when you’ve stopped thinking about one idea and started on another.
Thoughts like that—not that one specifically, of course, but thoughts like it—kept me quiet in the dark until the time was right to wriggle closer to the tower.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 639, Mark Dorset considers Patience: As a Strategy from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here.
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, and Reservations Recommended.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
🎧 639: The first night ...