Topical Guide 626
Mark Dorset
Metaphors and Similes: Wandering the Streets of a Town
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 29:
In the years that followed I sometimes used my encyclopedia in the usual way, as a reference—I “looked things up”—but only when I had to, because I really didn’t think that was the best use for the books. They were much better thought of as a town, where I was a tourist, invited to ramble through the streets, with no obligations or destinations to keep me from rambling. Invited to ramble that way, to explore the side streets, peek into the houses, who would choose to walk a straight line along the high street? Not me, certainly not at eleven, and not yet at forty-six. Time enough later for the grim business of getting somewhere. […]
I read through the encyclopedia, book by book, but not from beginning to end, not deliberately and not thoroughly. I wandered it like a child crawling through tall weeds, rambling, like a walker without a compass or a map, who chooses his route from the sound of the street names, going nowhere, anywhere, everywhere, for the pleasure of the going, of meandering, a pleasure different from any I’d gotten from books before.
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, “The Like of It Now Happens” (translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser):
The course of history was therefore not that of a billiard-ball, which, once it had been hit, ran along a definite course; on the contrary, it was like the passage of the clouds, like the way of a man sauntering through the streets—diverted here by a shadow, there by a little crowd of people, or by an unusual way one building jutted out and the next stood back from the street—finally arriving at a place that he had neither known nor meant to reach. There was inherent in the course of history a certain element of going off the course. The present moment was always like the last house of a town, which somehow no longer quite counts among the townhouses.
Allusion
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 29:
The magnificent thing about the books I was unwrapping was that they promised not just something but everything, and at that moment when the encyclopedia arrived I realized that everything was exactly what I wanted to know. Years later, when I began to write books myself, I knew—and this is the first time I’ve said it—that I really wanted to write a book about everything.
Gustave Flaubert, from a letter to Louise Colet, written in Croisset on January 16, 1852:
What seems beautiful to me, what I would like to write, is a book about nothing, a book with no attachments to the outside world, which would be self-sustaining thanks to the internal force of its style, as the earth holds itself in the void without being supported, a book that would have almost no subject, or one at any rate in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible.
Organization: Methods of: Cross-Reference
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 29:
I began reading, and I read until dinner time, following the cross-references that led from that one article to another, from that to another, and from another to another, following the route of cross-references, a stroll defined by divagation, a diversion at every corner.
I have in mind two sorts of cross reference — one concerned with words and the other with things. . . .
Matthew C. Simpson, “An Engineer of Subversive Ideas,” The New Republic:
The Encyclopedia […] taught its readers to be bold, curious, iconoclastic, and independent. In doing so, it undercut much of the political culture and religious dogma of eighteenth-century France. The authorities stopped the project on two separate occasions, and Diderot lived in constant fear of arrest.
He “engineered the dissemination of subversive ideas,” as [Andrew S.] Curran puts it, through a series of brilliant and often hilarious stratagems. […]
The Encyclopedia […] makes pitiless use of irony. The article on “Noah’s Ark” offers a matter-of-fact discussion of what would be involved in building such a boat, populating it with animals, feeding them, and getting rid of their manure. Merely saying it shows its absurdity. By accepting dogmas at face value, the Encyclopedia mocks religious orthodoxy while appearing to honor it. Diderot’s most ingenious device, however, was his use of cross-references. The Encyclopedia often gives a straight-forward entry on a topic only then to include cross-references to unrelated articles implying things that could never be said. The entry on “Cannibals,” for instance, gives cross-references to “Communion” and “Eucharist.”
See also:
I invite you, reader, to visit the index to “A Topical Guide to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. —MD
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.
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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.