A metacognitive escalator ride

Reading a crazy little book for my Objects Lit class: The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. A better title would be, The 135 Page Escalator Ride. I suppose that would be too forthright, now wouldn't it?

Actually, I've already read 70 pages and I'm not even sure if the main character has stepped onto the escalator yet. So perhaps, 135 Pages of Reflection Before Getting on the Escalator and While Riding. Or we could just stick with The Mezzanine, since that is the man's final destination.

I can already tell how this book will fit into the object theory we've been reading this quarter... discussions will be interesting tomorrow. For most, I can see how reading this novel would become extremely obnoxious. I quite enjoy it. As I was finishing up tonight's readings, I finally realized why I like reading pages of one man's thoughts:

1. I like the idea of knowing someone' s every thought (Invasion of privacy? Yes. Completely intriguing, even more so.)
2. I am ridiculously similar to this character. (Does this make my slightly crazy? Read the book and form your own opinion.)

At the beginning, he thinks about how he likes to keep one hand open so that it can touch or reach out to anything he passes by: "It seemed that I always liked to have one hand free when I was walking, even when I had several things to carry: I liked to be able to slap my hand fondly down on the top of a green mailmen-only mailbox, or bounce lightly against the the steel support for traffic lights, both because the pleasure of touching these cold, dusty surfaces with the springy muscle on the side of my palm was intrinsically good, and because I liked other people to see me as a guy in a tie yet carefree and casual enough to be doing what kids do when they drag a stick over the black uprights of cast-iron fence" (Baker 7-8).

Lately I've noticed that I do exactly this. Trail my fingers across the wire fence, the orange construction barrier, the flora, the trees, the books in the book cases. Reaching out to touch a flower. To knock on a tree á la Mona from An Invisible Sign of My Own. Then I read this passage, this precise description of my actions. Instant love.

Reading this book is quite interesting. You have one character who is thinking, the entire time. And often times, he is thinking about his own thinking. Then you have the reader, thinking about the man who is thinking and sometimes thinking about his own thinking. And then to make matters worse, sometimes as a reader, you think about your own thinking about the man who is thinking, and then thinking about his own thinking. Metacognitive party!!!