Topical Guide 384
Mark Dorset
The Habitual, the Familiar, the Customary, versus the Extraordinary, the New, the Exceptional
After Mark left, Lorna began moving around her kitchen, following her accustomed patterns, clearing the dishes, washing them. Herb went through the house in his accustomed pattern, turning lights off, turning the radio off, locking the doors. Everything they did was familiar, habitual. But tonight there was something odd about all this homely activity. They were making far too much of it, and the little sounds attendant to it, each click of a lock, each creak of a door when Herb tested it, each clink of a plate on the counter, the slosh of the water in the kitchen sink, the squeak of Lorna’s towel when she polished a glass, echoed in the house like amplified recordings, hyper-precise, hyper-audible, because the only background for them was the echoing silence of people wholly preoccupied by their thoughts.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 18
One one hand:
I have tried, every day, to cling on to something stable, I have tried desperately to recover a present, to establish it, to widen it. I have traveled in search of an intact world over which time would have no power. Indeed, two days’ travel, the discovery of an unfamiliar city slows down the rush of events. Two days in a new country are worth thirty spent in the place we are used to, days shortened by triteness, debased by familiarity. Familiarity smooths down time, so that you slip on it as on an over-polished floor. A world that is new, a world that is forever new, a world that is forever young forever, that is Paradise.
However, on the other hand:
And furthermore:
I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when the man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.
the unnamed narrator in Vladimir Nabokov’s “A Guide to Berlin”
The entire universe does not satisfy the contemplation and thought that lie within the scope of human endeavor; our ideas often go beyond the boundaries by which we are circumscribed, and if we look at life from all sides, observing how in everything that concerns us the extraordinary, the great, and the beautiful play the leading part, we shall soon realize the purpose of our creation.
This is why, by some sort of natural instinct, we admire, not, surely, the small streams, beautifully clear though they may be, and useful too, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and even more than these the Ocean. The little fire that we have kindled ourselves, clear and steady as its flame may be, does not strike us with as much awe as the heavenly fires, in spite of their often being shrouded in darkness; nor do we think it a greater marvel than the craters of Etna, whose eruptions throw up from their depths rocks and even whole mountains, and at times pour out rivers of that pure Titanian fire. In all such circumstances, I would say only this, that men hold cheap what is useful and necessary, and always reserve their admiration for what is out of the ordinary.Longinus or Dionysius, On the Sublime (translated by T. S. Dorsch)
“I enter these contests,” she said. She indicated a pile of pages torn from magazines. “They all ask you to do the same thing. They want you to tell them, ‘in your own words,’ or ‘in twenty-five words or less,’ why you like the thing they make, whatever it is. Let’s see—suitcases, orange juice, padlocks, pineapple slices, car wax, shoe polish, toilet cleaner—they go on and on. There are more of them every week. I can hardly keep up with them.”
“Do you win a lot of things?”
“I’m starting to,” she said. “At first, I didn’t win anything. Nothing at all.”
“Mm,” I said.
“I didn’t get it. I didn’t get how to do it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But they send you the winners, if you ask them to. Not the winners. What the winners wrote. The winning entries. … So I studied them. Very carefully. And I learned the secrets. …”
She seemed to be about to tell me her secrets, and I leaned forward, the better to hear them …
“The shock of the new, cushioned by the familiar, wrapped in hope,” she said. “That’s what wins these contests.”
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