Each morning Emmett wakes up to ponder life in front of his fire. His thoughts touch on just about everything - from the mortar in his fireplace to the greatest moments he's ever lived - and anything in between. He is gentle, philosophical, a regular homebody with an irregular habit. As life gets more and more hectic and technology-dominated, many of us could benefit from acting as Emmett does and choosing to do the most natural human action of all (besides breathing, I suppose): thinking.
I have separated selected quotes into several categories, each a symbol or theme in A Box of Matches. I hope that they will illuminate Emmett as a character (the book is written in the first person) and show Baker's expertise for finding the amazing in the insignificant. I have presented the quotes (within each section) in the order they appear in the book.
Bear with Emmett. Sometimes he thinks quite metaphorically, as most philosophers do at one time or another. Hopefully his thoughts will help you think too.
The Fire
"The fire is like a cheerful dog that waits by the table as you feed it life-scraps."
***
"But then [the fire] died down again. This happens sometimes. When it does, you must take a moment to appreciate the unburning fire. It’s still hot—it still has the means of its own regeneration."
***
"Think of all the stuff we’ve burned, and it all goes down to this much."
***
"I like looking at these burning logs: they seem like years of life to me. All the particulars are consumed and left as ash, but warm and life-giving as they burn."
Dreams
"You know, I used to have trouble sleeping...For some years I relied on suicidal thoughts to help me go to sleep. By day I’m not a particularly morbid person, but at night I would lie in bed imagining that I was hammering a knitting needle into my hear, or swan-diving off a ledge into a black void at the bottom of which were a dozen sharp, slippery stalagmites."
***
"I have this ability to use bad dreams to wake myself up when I need to be up. I just tell myself a time and a bad dream will come and get me just when I need it to... I have a general theory about bad dreams which I think is revolutionary. My theory is that they are most often simply the result of the body’s need to wake up the mind using the only tools it has available, most often in order to pee...The mind is unconscious, in a near coma, but the body has received reports of a substantial accumulation of hot urine down belowdecks...What is [the brain] to do? It has three options: laughter, arousal, or fear. All three will elevate the heart rate, but the laughter and arousal are...less dependable. Fear it must be, then...[The brain] seizes [an image] at random...and he injects a special fear-chemical into it and lets it go, and suddenly it is a frightening dark-purple pig with murderous eyes."
***
“I slept for fifteen minutes at a time all day, dream-chewing on grisly ground-up pieces of thought...”
Old Ways vs. New Ways (Change)
"Once it was the sleekest and most desirable of black laptops, now it is practically junk."
***
"When I lit the fire this morning, a pompadour styling of flame came forward from underneath and swooped back around a half-detached piece of bark. Right now there is one flame near the front that has a purple underpainting but a strong opacity of yellows and oranges and white: it is flapping like one of those pennants that used to be strung around used-car lots. You don't see those so much anymore: multicolored vinyl triangular flags on cords that hopeful sales managers hung from pole to pole to offer a sense of carnival."
***
"And think of that word, struck, which stores within it the old form of fire lighting: we now swipe a match as we swipe a charge card through a machine that will read its magnetic stripe, whereas once, before matches, we must truly have struck flint."
***
"I even remember how proud I was myself to [be large enough to] touch both ends of the tub. Generations of people grow to a point where they touch both ends of the tub. This is all too much for me."
***
"The ungraspableness of history, which can seem thrilling or frightening depending on your mood, can assert itself at any moment."
***
"I think I may have broken something, but tailbones are like toes, vestiges of tree-dwelling primates. You don’t really need to worry much about whether they’re broken or just bruised."
***
"[My toes] learned this by trial and error, over many years, all by themselves, and now each time I fumble a bar of soap they arch up, on alert, braced for possible impact."
***
"Benny’s Restaurant is gone now: now there is a drugstore on that corner with fake dormer windows in its roof that are lit from inside by recessed fluorescence to create the illusion that there are cozy upstairs bedrooms behind them."
***
"Start building. On Jeopardy, when someone turns out not to be as smart as he thought, and he bets everything and loses, and goes down to nothing while the others are in the thousands, Alex Trebek, the master of ceremonies, will say to him, ‘Start building.’”
***
"Of course the fireplace isn’t my parents’ anymore because when they got their divorce, they sold the house. But that’s all right—the tiles are permanently fixed in my head; when I look up at night I see them in the constellations, surrounded by black grout."
***
"...I enjoy it, and I still pay some of the charge accounts that have work expenses on them. Also I put on the stamps. I suppose common practices will change soon and become electronic, just as now we’re no longer sent our canceled checks but rather little scanned pictures of our checks."
Stillness (contentment) vs. Work
"You have to make a fire in the dark: it must become its own source of light."
***
"Good morning, it's 4:52 a.m., and I'm very glad to be conscious when nobody else is conscious. To get to this point, where I am the sole node of wakefulness at the heart of the sleeping world, takes a fair amount of preparatory work."
***
"The thing that is so great about sitting here in the early morning is that it doesn’t matter what I did all yesterday: my mind only connects with fire-thoughts."
***
"'You’ve got to get cold to get warm,' Phoebe said. Now that is the truth. That is so true about so many things...It’s true with money and love. You’ve got to save to have something to spend. Think of how hard it is to ask out a person you like. In my case, Claire asked me...Still, her lips were cold, but her tongue was warm."
***
"Passing me by, passing me by. Life is...I planned to write a book for my son....the adventures of a cellulose kitchen sponge that somehow in the manufacturing is made with a bit of real sea sponge in it, giving it sentient powers...Then Nickelodeon came up with a show about a sponge. My idea was instantly dead: my son would think I was merely copying a TV Show. Nickelodeon had acted, I had only planned to act."
***
"That’s what I want—a lungful of storm."
***
"I used to be amused by those men who get to work at six-thirty, “bright and early”—but they’re right: you want to be doing things when the world is still quiet; the quietness and uncrowdedness is your fuel."
Existence and Death
"It’s like death, which is also becoming harder and harder for me to understand. How could someone you know and remember so well be dead? My grandmother, for instance. I can’t believe that she is dead. I don’t mean that I believe in a hereafterly world, I don’t. But it does seem puzzling to me that she is not living."
***
"I suddenly imagined this aged man turning from a living human being to a skull and bones—and I was amazed in the same way that I’m amazed when the leaves fall and we’re left with skeletal trees every year. Really I’m glad my grandparents were cremated. I don’t like the idea that their skulls would be around somewhere. Better and more dignified for them to be completely parceled out."
***
"It turned out that the man below us had died. I thought, I don’t want to write a murder mystery with a plot like a machine; I don’t want a corpse lying there pushing a little imaginary world into gear."
***
"Why does [our pet duck] exist? We as a family exist to be nice to the duck, and the duck exists to puzzle us."
Miscellaneous
"What you do first thing can influence your whole day. If 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...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....the word is almost, the reading of that single word can be as good as reading a whole chapter under normal lighting conditions...There is that word almost slowly coming into semi-focus in the gnat swarms of dawn light. It changes your whole day. But now, see, now, I’ve gone beyond almost. Now I read nothing when I wake up...Nothing has happened to me and I sit down in this chair...I am the world, or perhaps the world is a black silk eye mask and I’m wearing it."
***
"At times, when I sit here, a long series of daytime thoughts will pass through me—thoughts connected with work or, say, with town politics. That's all right—let those thoughts pass through you. You hear them coming, like a freight train with the whistle and the dinging; they take several minutes to go by, and then they're gone. Remember that it's very early in the morning—early, early, early, early. Sometimes the stars are thrillingly sharp when I first get up and stand at the window on the landing of the stairs: private needle-holes of exactitude in the stygian diorama. Orion's belt is the only constellation that I recognize easily. The apportioning of stars into constellations is unnecessary: their anonymity enhances the sense of infinitude."
***
"Why are things so beautiful? I don’t know. That’s a good question. Isn’t it pleasing when you ask a question of a person, a teacher, or a speaker, and he or she says, That’s a good question. Don’t you feel good when that happens?"
***
"I looked at my son...and I wanted to make low animal noises, growlings, of love for him."
***
"The only real achievement of a sickness is the creation of a fever. The rest is dross."
***
"The moon is everywhere—it’s impossible to say what color it is."
***
"When I opened it again and was more careful to center the plunger over the mouth of the drain, I got real results...I knew that without chemicals, without rooting snakes, with only strength and cunning, I had made that water move...Later there was even a brief vortex, like a rainbow after a storm."
***
"I want to take care of the world."
Check the Links section for more about Nicholson Baker and his works.
