{"asin":"B003OYIG1O","title":"The Mezzanine: A Novel","authors":"Nicholson Baker","highlights":[{"text":"The near simultaneity was very exciting—it made the variables of private life seem suddenly graspable and law-abiding.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=144","value":144},"note":null},{"text":"moistened the splayed threads of the snapped-off piece and twirled them gently into a damp, unwholesome minaret.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=145","value":145},"note":null},{"text":"introductory platform knot, which began high in the air as a frail, heart-shaped loop, and shrunk as you pulled the plastic lace-tips down to a short twisted kernel three-eighths of an inch long, and she showed me how to progress from that base to the main cotyledonary string figure, which was, as it turned out, not a true knot but an illusion, a trick that you performed on the lace-string by bending segments of it back on themselves and tightening other temporary bends around them: it looked like a knot and functioned like a knot, but the whole thing was really an amazing interdependent pyramid scheme, which much later I connected with a couplet of Pope’s: Man, like the gen’rous vine, supported lives; The strength he gains is from th’embrace he gives.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=166","value":166},"note":null},{"text":"By the time my shoelaces broke, I was regularly brushing not only my tongue but the roof of my mouth—and I am not exaggerating when I say that it is a major change in my life.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=191","value":191},"note":"Montessori nose blowing"},{"text":"mannerist,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=196","value":196},"note":null},{"text":"(not one of the contemporary designs, with synthetic bristles uniformly cut at an angle, but one just like the kind I had grown up with, with blond smocked twigs bound to a blue handle by perfectly wrapped silver wire)","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=200","value":200},"note":null},{"text":"casters","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=204","value":204},"note":"Baker writes like a technical writer"},{"text":"outlining them with my curving broom-strokes, as if I were putting each chair leg and caster and doorjamb in quotation marks, made me see these familiar features of my room with freshened receptivity.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=205","value":205},"note":null},{"text":"She said that for her the best moment was sweeping the dust into the dustpan, and getting those ruler-edged gray lines of superfine residue, one after another, diminishing in thickness toward invisibility, but never completely disappearing, as you backed the dustpan up.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=209","value":209},"note":"There's an Onion article about this!"},{"text":"it’s amazing that heels wear down before the laces snap","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=219","value":219},"note":"Not just me?"},{"text":"As I walked out of the office-supply store, I became aware of the power of all these individual, simultaneously pending transactions: all over the city, and at selected sites in other states, events were being set in motion on my behalf, services were being performed, simply because I had requested them and in some cases paid or agreed to pay later for them.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=220","value":220},"note":"Joy of letters"},{"text":"I could get the world to do for me, and at the same time all of it was going on, I could walk down the street, unburdened with the niceties of the individual tasks, living my life!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=231","value":231},"note":"Exclamation point"},{"text":"With fewer total cells, but more connections between each cell, the quality of your knowledge undergoes a transformation: you begin to have a feel for situations, people fall into types, your past memories link together, and your life begins to seem, as it hadn’t when you were younger, an inevitable thing composed of a million small failures and successes dependently intergrown, as opposed to a bright beadlike row of unaffiliated moments.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=250","value":250},"note":"Dependently intergrown"},{"text":"mathematicians become philosophers, philosophers become historians, historians become biographers, biographers become college provosts, college provosts become political consultants, and political consultants run for office.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=255","value":255},"note":"Anadiplodis i disagree with"},{"text":"I watched with interest the fluent, thoughtless fumblings of my hands: they were the hands of a mature person, with vein-work and a fair amount of hair on their backs, but they had learned these moves so well and so long ago that elements of a much earlier gilled and tailed self seemed to persist in them.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=277","value":277},"note":"Self in evolutionary terms"},{"text":"the air-conditioning became violent","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=285","value":285},"note":null},{"text":"It was conceivable, though scary to imagine, that the pull-fray model and the walk-flex model mingled their coefficients so subtly that human agency would never accurately apportion cause.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=302","value":302},"note":"Amateur engineer"},{"text":"defining that day as truly over for that office, even though you might still be working in it, because anything you now threw out was tomorrow’s trash.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=317","value":317},"note":null},{"text":"all of them signed at different angles.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=335","value":335},"note":null},{"text":"etiquette required me to wait until her phone duty was done in order to exchange one last sentence with her, unless the message she was taking was clearly going to go on for more than three minutes, in which case Tina, who knew the conventions well, would release me—cued first by some “Gee, I’m taking off now” movement from me (pulling up the pants, checking for my wallet, a joke salute)—with a mouthed “Bye!”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=362","value":362},"note":null},{"text":"internal dating element, looped with six belts of rubber, held its current numerology pressed upside down against the moist black roof of the armature. To use it, you set the square base of the machine down on the piece of paper you wished to date and pressed on the wooden knob (a true knob!)—then the internal element, guided by S curves cut out of the gantry-like superstructure, began its graceful rotational descent, uprighting itself just in time for landing like the lunar excursion module, touching the paper for an instant, depositing today’s date, and then springing back up to its bat-repose.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=367","value":367},"note":"I am low key obsessed with this sentence"},{"text":"the escapement on which my own life ratcheted forward.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=379","value":379},"note":null},{"text":"I admit that part of my pleasure in riding the escalator came from the links with childhood memory that the experience sustained.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=402","value":402},"note":null},{"text":"(those overlapping new moons of hard rubber that allowed the moving track to turn a corner, neatly drawing its freight of compressed clothing with it; and the fringe of rubber strips that marked the transition between the bright inside world of baggage claim and the outside world of low-clearance vehicles and men in blue outfits);","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=404","value":404},"note":null},{"text":"socked milk into them and clamped them with a paper cap; marble chutes;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=409","value":409},"note":null},{"text":"She warned me not to jam a wad of molar-textured pink gum into the gap between one curved riser and the grooved stair below it—I wanted to because I wanted to see the gum crushed with the dwarfing force of a large, steady machine, the way garbage trucks forced paper cartons to crumple into each other.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=420","value":420},"note":null},{"text":"I could see a green glow coming from under the crenellated slit where the escalator steps disappeared; and as soon as I stepped off, onto oddly immobile linoleum and then a tundra of carpeting,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=424","value":424},"note":null},{"text":"curators arranged geodes, early American eyeglasses, and boot scrapers against black or gray velvet backgrounds because anytime you set some detail of the world off that way, it was able to take on its true stature as an object of attention.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=454","value":454},"note":"This is the book"},{"text":"Why should we need lots of nostalgia to license any pleasure taken in the discoveries that we carry over from childhood, when it is now so clearly an adult pleasure? I decided that from now on I wouldn’t get that faraway look when describing things that excited me now, regardless of whether they had first been childhood enthusiasms or not.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=459","value":459},"note":"Personal change. Yes!"},{"text":"So I want now to do two things: to set the escalator to the mezzanine against a clean mental background as something fine and worth my adult time to think about, and to state that while I did draw some large percentage of joy from the continuities that the adult escalator ride established with childhood escalators, I will try not to glide on the reminiscential tone, as if only children had the capacity for wonderment at this great contrivance.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=466","value":466},"note":"This man is so on that it hurts"},{"text":"the often undocumented daily texture of our lives (a rough, gravelly texture, like the shoulder of a road, which normally passes too fast for microscopy),","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=474","value":474},"note":"The book again"},{"text":"historiography","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=476","value":476},"note":null},{"text":"(You have to spot-check your likes and dislikes every so often in this way to see whether your reactions have altered, I think.)","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=478","value":478},"note":"Montaigne"},{"text":"the radiant idea that you tore apart one of the triangular eaves of the carton, pushing its wing flaps back, using the stiffness of its own glued seam against itself, forcing the seal inside out, without ever having to touch it, into a diamond-shaped opening which became an ideal pourer, a better pourer than a circular bottle opening or a pitcher’s mouth because you could create a very fine stream of milk very simply, letting it bend over that leading corner, something I appreciated as I was perfecting my ability to pour my own glass of milk or make my own bowl of cereal—the radiant idea filled me with jealousy and satisfaction.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=485","value":485},"note":"Speaking to my soul rn"},{"text":"the name molded in the glass no longer matched the name printed on the cap, a disturbing discordance.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=504","value":504},"note":null},{"text":"he had a whole city of isolated sentimentalists to cover.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=512","value":512},"note":null},{"text":"pleural","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=590","value":590},"note":null},{"text":"I did not move or flinch or make any outward sign. Actually, once the first shock of raw surprise had passed, the feeling was not unpleasant. I was set: I was the sort of person who said “actually” too much.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=621","value":621},"note":"No outward sign"},{"text":"I was the sort of person whose biggest discoveries were likely to be tricks to applying toiletries while fully dressed. I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of man I had hoped I might be.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=625","value":625},"note":"So he's self conscious and reflective about the way he is."},{"text":"when I will consistently put the past to wise and well-tempered uses; when any subject I call up for mental consideration will have a whole sheaf of addenda dating from my late twenties and my thirties in it, forcing down the primary colored pipings from “when I was eight” or “when I was little” or “when I was in fourth grade,” which had been of necessity so prominent.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=650","value":650},"note":null},{"text":"He goes doink! and then he makes a face, nnng, eyes watering, and then this shiver goes through him. Probably he made a mistake and pulled out three at once.” I knew it was some story like that, because I heard “No’s!” and laughter at just the right interval after I’d waved to them, and because if I had been lounging on that couch, I would have been tempted to say something mildly malicious about someone like me, too.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=698","value":698},"note":null},{"text":"I know because I sometimes tried in passing to glance into the women’s corporate bathroom when by chance someone was opening the door, wanting even at the age of twenty-five to glimpse the row of sinks and the women leaning over them toward the mirror to adjust their shoulder pads or put on lip gloss, wanting to see a woman drawing her lower lip tight over her lower teeth à la William F. Buckley, Jr.,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=800","value":800},"note":"Yikes"},{"text":"L. told me once that sometimes when she found herself alone in an elevator she would pull her skirt over her head.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=829","value":829},"note":null},{"text":"and not, as some of the salesmen seemed to think, in the relative silence of working areas,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=892","value":892},"note":"Lol"},{"text":"cobra-like staple removers,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1009","value":1009},"note":null},{"text":"it was difficult to believe that money was coming in at anywhere near the rate at which we were pouring it out.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1017","value":1017},"note":null},{"text":"the appearance of another identical Pez tablet at the neck of the plastic Pez elevator, or","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1038","value":1038},"note":null},{"text":"the trick here was to use whatever you were throwing out to push the flap open and then snap your hand out of the way quickly enough that the flap didn’t fall back on it, a technique that didn’t work perfectly in this case because the receptacle was overfull and I had to crush my popcorn bag down into earlier trash so that the flap could swing shut properly. I","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1209","value":1209},"note":"True"},{"text":"stopples,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1234","value":1234},"note":null},{"text":"Was there really any need to study the historical past of Chandragupta of Pataliputra, or Harsha of Kanauj, the rise of the Chola kings of Tanjore and the fall of the Pallava kings of Kanchi, who once built the Seven Pagodas of Mahabalipuram, or the final desolation and ruin of the great metropolis of Vijayanagar, when we had dynastic shifts, turbulence, and plenty of lather in the last twenty years of that great Hindu inheritance, shampoo? Yes, there was.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1281","value":1281},"note":null},{"text":"felt periphery of life;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1299","value":1299},"note":"This is the book"},{"text":"me saturated, listless, unable to entertain a single new enthusiasm; I expect it to happen","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1312","value":1312},"note":null},{"text":"That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1368","value":1368},"note":null},{"text":"few men have ever lived concerning whose inner life we can speak so confidently.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1380","value":1380},"note":null},{"text":"be led into elaborate realms of understanding, even as I continued to do, outwardly, exactly as I had done, going to work, going to lunch, going home, talking to L. on the phone or having her over for the night.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1389","value":1389},"note":"Why you pursue a spiritual life"},{"text":"sporadic self-improvers,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1407","value":1407},"note":null},{"text":"Just as the most frequent words in English are humdrum ones like “of” and “in” and “the,” so the most frequent thoughts are bland and tiresome things like, “Itch on face,” “[fleeting sexual image],” and “Is my breath bad?”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1436","value":1436},"note":null},{"text":"People seemed so alike when you imagined their daily schedules, or watched them walk toward the revolving door (as Dave, Sue, and Steve, not noticing me, were doing now), yet if you imagined a detailed thought-frequency chart compiled for each of them, and you tried comparing one chart with another, you would feel suddenly as if you were comparing beings as different from each other as","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1501","value":1501},"note":"Inward difference"},{"text":"generational corrections and pendular overreactions;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1524","value":1524},"note":null},{"text":"This had reminded me of how I used to open the window on car trips when I was little and release an apple or pear core into the bolster of air and noise and watch it shrink away into the perspective of the road behind the car, still bouncing and spinning fast—suddenly changed from something I held in my hand to something not mine that would come to rest on a stretch of highway which had no particular distinguishing feature, a place between human places, as litter;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1762","value":1762},"note":null},{"text":"relative positions of power are not immediately obvious;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1887","value":1887},"note":null},{"text":"“Before going I took a last look at the breakers, wanting to make out how the comb is morselled so fine into string and tassel, as I have lately noticed it to be. I saw big smooth flinty waves, carved and scuppled in shallow grooves, much swelling when the wind freshened, burst on the rocky spurs of the cliff at the little cove and break into bushes of foam. In an enclosure of rocks the peaks of the water romped and wandered and a light crown of tufty scum standing high on the surface kept slowly turning round: chips of it blew off and gadded about without weight in the air.” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Journal, August 16, 1873.)","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1895","value":1895},"note":"???"},{"text":"People watch the news every night like robots, thinking they are learning about their lives, never paying attention to the far more immediate developments that arrive unreported, on the zip-lock perforated top of the ice cream carton, in reply coupons bound in magazines and on the “Please Return This Portion” edging of bill stubs, on sheets of postage stamps and sheets of Publishers Clearing House magazine stamps, on paper towels, in rolls of plastic bags for produce at the supermarket, in strips of hanging file-folder labels.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1903","value":1903},"note":null},{"text":"The lines dividing one year from another in your past are perforated, and the mental sensation of detaching a period of your life for closer scrutiny resembles the reluctant guided tearing of a perforated seam.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1907","value":1907},"note":null},{"text":"Circular pizza cutters with diamond-tipped radii? Zirconium templates, fatally sharp to the touch, stamping the paper with their barbed braillery?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1919","value":1919},"note":null},{"text":"their larger handles allow a pluralism of grasps—for instance, the two, sometimes three fingers around the handle (cups allow only one finger); or the very common one finger hooking the handle and the thumb and other fingers tripoded onto the body of the mug; or the two-palm grip, ignoring the handle completely, that actresses use when they are playing people having real-life conversations at the kitchen table.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1931","value":1931},"note":null},{"text":"Since as a rule you have only one of any particular novelty mug, as opposed to a whole arbor of identical cups hanging from hooks in a white Rubbermaid shelf organizer, you develop a fondness for each mug as an individual, and you try to give even the ones you like least a chance to contain your coffee once in a while—you feel about ugly mugs that you have been given the way you do about bad book-cover designs on paperbacks whose insides you really like—you begin to cherish that slight grit of ugliness and wrongness.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1937","value":1937},"note":null},{"text":"Why do these images have to age before we can be fond of them?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1945","value":1945},"note":null},{"text":"in this way what was central and what was incidental end up exactly reversed.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=1978","value":1978},"note":"Mourning the company"},{"text":"An unpretentious technical invention—the straw, the sugar packet, the pencil, the windshield wiper—has been ornamented by a mute folklore of behavioral inventions, unregistered, unpatented, adopted and fine-tuned without comment or thought.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=2008","value":2008},"note":null},{"text":"awakened by my parents years earlier from dreams in which I been trying to drink very thick shakes through impossibly slender straws.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=2019","value":2019},"note":null},{"text":"sophisticated moral feelings are not consistent across a personality or a culture; you can be eloquently virtuous in one sphere, while tolerant of nastiness, or even nasty yourself, in another—a familiar enough point,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=2137","value":2137},"note":null},{"text":"Wittgenstein, as well, I read in some biography, loved to watch cowboy movies: he would go every afternoon to watch gunfights and arrows through the chest for hours at a time.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=2143","value":2143},"note":"Looking at minutiae of everyday life of philosophers matches thrudt of the book."},{"text":"Think of it: John Milton wore shoelaces!) Boswell,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=2151","value":2151},"note":null},{"text":"They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of “ibid.’s” and “compare’s” and “see’s” that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=2152","value":2152},"note":null},{"text":"consult a certain footnote or not, and whether they would read it in context, or read it before the text it hung from, as an hors d’oeuvre.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=2158","value":2158},"note":null},{"text":"the footnote functions as a switch, offering the model-railroader’s satisfaction of catching the march of thought with a superscripted “1” and routing it, sometimes at length, through abandoned stations and submerged, leaching tunnels.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=2160","value":2160},"note":"Crazy about this"},{"text":"Gibbon, or Boswell, written by the author of the book himself to supplement, or even correct over several later editions, what he says in the primary text, are reassurances that the pursuit of truth doesn’t have clear outer boundaries: it doesn’t end with the book; restatement and self-disagreement and the enveloping sea of referenced authorities all continue.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=2177","value":2177},"note":null},{"text":"Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003OYIG1O&location=2179","value":2179},"note":null}]}