Read Online A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Nicholson Baker
Tags: Contemporary
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the speed of the swirling water, frictionlessly, like a velodrome racer on a victory lap.
What a way to begin the day. You get to know a landscape by painting it; you get to know a dish bywashing it—washing and rinsing it both, and there is a way of rinsing that I have developed over the years that uses less water, a low-flow method. Let some water run into the bottom and then work the dish to create a rotating wave that sloshes centrifugally up to the upper edge of the dish. Then dump that water and fill it again, and spin again. The idea is to remove all traces of soap, because soap tastes bad. And then—and this is a part that some people forget—you should turn the dish over and rinse the underside: for when a dish sits in the sink it can stamp itself onto bits of food and you don’t want those bits going up on the shelf where they will harden. I got the dish settled in the drainer without making any loud clinks, and by that time my coffee was done.
What you do first thing can influence your whole day. If the first thing you do is stump to the computer in your pajamas to check your e-mail, blinking and plucking your proverbs, you’re going to be in a hungry electronic funk all morning. So don’t do it. If you read the paper first thing you’re going to be full of puns and grievances—put that off. For a while I thought that the key to life was to read something from a book first thing. The idea was toreach down, even before I’d fully awakened, to the pile of books by the bed and haul one up and open it. This only works during the months of the year when you wake up in a world that is light enough to make out lines of print, but sometimes even when you open the book and can’t quite read it in the grayness, or greyness, when you see the word that you know is a word hovering there in a granular dance of eye particles, and then you find that if you really stare at it you can read it, and the word is
almost
, the reading of that single word can be as good as reading a whole chapter under normal lighting conditions. Your fingertips are still puffy from sleep, and the corner of the book is the first sharp thing you feel, and you lift it open at random, not knowing what book your hands found, and there is that
almost
slowly coming into semi-focus in the gnat-swarms of dawnlight. It changes your whole day.
But now, see, now, I’ve gone beyond
almost
. Now I read nothing when I wake up, I just put on my bathrobe and come down here. Nothing has happened to me when I sit down in this chair, except that I’ve made coffee and rinsed an apple and, at least on this unusual morning,washed a casserole dish. I am the world, or perhaps the world is a black silk eye mask and I’m wearing it. This whole room warms up from the fire I’ve made: all the surfaces in the room, the picture frames, the Chinese teapot in the shape of a cauliflower, the glass coasters with Claire’s grandmother’s initials on them, the small wicker rocking chair that my father gave to Phoebe when she was four years old—all of it is warming up.
It occurs to me that I haven’t described the fireplace. It isn’t a Rumford fireplace. Rumford was a clever count who figured out, two hundred years ago, how to build fireplaces shallower, so that they would throw more heat into the room. This fireplace is almost a Rumford, but it is an earlier design. It is about a foot and a half deep, with diagonal brick sides. In the fireplace is a cast-iron grate; it is like a small porch or bandstand that holds the logs behind a low railing. There are decorative cast-iron urn shapes on each corner. What happens is that the iron gradually gets hotter, and the row of ornamental uprights in the balcony’s railing radiates the heat out onto my feet. Because the grate holds the logs so steadily, I can put my feet an inch or so away from the flame in perfect comfort;only when the fire has really begun burning hard do I sometimes have to move my chair back.
The first
What a way to begin the day. You get to know a landscape by painting it; you get to know a dish bywashing it—washing and rinsing it both, and there is a way of rinsing that I have developed over the years that uses less water, a low-flow method. Let some water run into the bottom and then work the dish to create a rotating wave that sloshes centrifugally up to the upper edge of the dish. Then dump that water and fill it again, and spin again. The idea is to remove all traces of soap, because soap tastes bad. And then—and this is a part that some people forget—you should turn the dish over and rinse the underside: for when a dish sits in the sink it can stamp itself onto bits of food and you don’t want those bits going up on the shelf where they will harden. I got the dish settled in the drainer without making any loud clinks, and by that time my coffee was done.
What you do first thing can influence your whole day. If the first thing you do is stump to the computer in your pajamas to check your e-mail, blinking and plucking your proverbs, you’re going to be in a hungry electronic funk all morning. So don’t do it. If you read the paper first thing you’re going to be full of puns and grievances—put that off. For a while I thought that the key to life was to read something from a book first thing. The idea was toreach down, even before I’d fully awakened, to the pile of books by the bed and haul one up and open it. This only works during the months of the year when you wake up in a world that is light enough to make out lines of print, but sometimes even when you open the book and can’t quite read it in the grayness, or greyness, when you see the word that you know is a word hovering there in a granular dance of eye particles, and then you find that if you really stare at it you can read it, and the word is
almost
, the reading of that single word can be as good as reading a whole chapter under normal lighting conditions. Your fingertips are still puffy from sleep, and the corner of the book is the first sharp thing you feel, and you lift it open at random, not knowing what book your hands found, and there is that
almost
slowly coming into semi-focus in the gnat-swarms of dawnlight. It changes your whole day.
But now, see, now, I’ve gone beyond
almost
. Now I read nothing when I wake up, I just put on my bathrobe and come down here. Nothing has happened to me when I sit down in this chair, except that I’ve made coffee and rinsed an apple and, at least on this unusual morning,washed a casserole dish. I am the world, or perhaps the world is a black silk eye mask and I’m wearing it. This whole room warms up from the fire I’ve made: all the surfaces in the room, the picture frames, the Chinese teapot in the shape of a cauliflower, the glass coasters with Claire’s grandmother’s initials on them, the small wicker rocking chair that my father gave to Phoebe when she was four years old—all of it is warming up.
It occurs to me that I haven’t described the fireplace. It isn’t a Rumford fireplace. Rumford was a clever count who figured out, two hundred years ago, how to build fireplaces shallower, so that they would throw more heat into the room. This fireplace is almost a Rumford, but it is an earlier design. It is about a foot and a half deep, with diagonal brick sides. In the fireplace is a cast-iron grate; it is like a small porch or bandstand that holds the logs behind a low railing. There are decorative cast-iron urn shapes on each corner. What happens is that the iron gradually gets hotter, and the row of ornamental uprights in the balcony’s railing radiates the heat out onto my feet. Because the grate holds the logs so steadily, I can put my feet an inch or so away from the flame in perfect comfort;only when the fire has really begun burning hard do I sometimes have to move my chair back.
The first
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