Thoughts on Howie's Eight Developments

When I read Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine one thought in particular stood out to me when I first came across it: Howie describing his Eight Advances in life. Most people would say that their biggest advances in life were when they graduated, started dating, married, or made some important decision. In sharp contrast, Howie's advances are things like shoe-tying, learning to brush his tongue, discovering that sweeping is fun, and (most intriguingly) deciding that brain cells ought to die. When I saw this, I had a reaction just like Howie's later in the book.

"Wrong, wrong, wrong!" I cried. "Destructive and unhelpful and misguided and completely untrue--but harmless, even agreeably sobering..."

My curiosity very much piqued by this assertation so utterly opposed to my own beliefs, I continued reading, hearing his rationals for the other seven advances. At the end of the next chapter, he finally explained his reasoning.

(a) We begin, perhaps, with a brain that is much to crowded with pure processing capacity, and therefore the death of the brain cells is part of a planned and necessary winnowing that precedes the move upward to higher levels of intelligence...[m]athematicians need all of those spare neurons, and their careers falter when the neurons do, but the rest of us should be thankful for their disappearance, for it makes room for experience...

(b) Used with care, substances that harm neural tissue, such as alcohol, can aid intelligence: you corrode the chromium, giggly, crossword puzzle-solving parts of your mind with pain and poison, forcing the neurons to take responsibility for themselves and those around them, toughening themselves against the accelerated wear of these artificial solvents...

(c) The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible...when your brain loses its spare capacity...you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well...

(d) Individual ideas are injured along with the links over which they travel. As they are dismembered and remembered...they become subtler...

 This tangent was the most memorable in the book for me because I disagreed with it so strongly. All of his arguments for the death of neurons are extremely subjective and disregard the fact that neurons provide the processing power for everything we do, not just computations and mathematics. Destroying neurons limits one's faculties in those areas, certainly, but it also cripples one in fundamental abilities such as learning and remembering anything. Seeing these obviously wrong ruminations (although, to be fair, perhaps they weren't as obvious in 1986) was a great suprise to me, as Howie had seemed incredibly literate and well-informed up until that point.

However, I eventually decided that I like this passage because it gives Howie a little more depth as a character. By having Howie hypothesize even about things he clearly has little knowledge of and come to incorrect conclusions, Baker is showing us that Howie is willing to think about things that he hasn't researched in depth. In my mind, this makes him a more creative and thus more 'interesting' person, even if the passage made me stop reading.