The Fermata





"...her aliveness is always something of a revelation to me..."

From the inside flap of the Randomhouse Edition:

Arno Strine likes to stop time and take women's clothes off.
He is hard at work on his autobiography,The Fermata.
It proves in the telling to be a very provocative, funny, and altogether morally confused piece of work.

That's about all the summarization any Nicholson Baker book needs. It's not really about the plot, but about the writing, the words, the insights, and whatever leaves you thinking when you turn over that last page.

Understandably, this book caused a lot of uproar when it was first published. A man removing clothes from helplessly immobile women? It could be a sickening concept. Which makes it all the more important to read this book. Get into the mind of Arno and figure out what makes him believe he can carry out this moral and sociological breach. If you remove a person's clothes to look at them with nothing but the most positive, adulatory feelings, is it wrong? An act of sexual harassment or an act of worship...? You may change your mind after meeting this quirkily candid character.



I have selected quotes that I think illuminate Arno as a character (the book is written in the first person) and that also 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.





Arno Strine



"I don't inquire into origins very often, fearing that too close a scrutiny will damage whatever interior states have given rise to [the Fold], since it is the most important on-going adventure of my life."

***


"There is something very exciting, almost moving, about taking a peek at a woman's driver's license without her knowing."

***


"When I've [temporarily] lost the [Fold] power, I simply exist, I do the minimum I have to do to make a living, because I know that in a sense everything I want to accomplish (and I am a person with ambitions) is infinitely postponable."

***


“[My Fold powers] are the one thing that makes my life worth living.”

***


“I have no sympathy to share for compulsions other than my own—everyone else’s desires are pathetic.”

***


“I know that I could probably make much better use of my gift than I do.”

***


“When I try to imagine defending my actions verbally I find that they are indefensible, and I don’t want to know that. I honestly do not feel as if I have done anything wrong. I have never deliberately caused anyone anguish...I mean well. But I know that meaning well is not any kind of satisfactory defense.”

***


“That word, lust, is too abstract and intransitive and preacherly to apply...to my feelings for [women].”

***


“At...times I become amazed by the power I have: the power to lift my foot off the transcriber pedal at will and halt that sentence...right there for as long as I want in order to think about just where I am in it.”

***


“The daily regiment of microcassettes has kept me unusually sensitive, perhaps, to the editability of the temporal continuum—to the fact that an apparently seamless vocalization may actually elide, glide over, hide whole self-contained vugs of hidden acuity of distraction...within.”

***


“[My problem with remembering names] is compounded by the fact that there is apparently some vulnerability in my countenance that signals to lost people that I should be approached for directions. I have gotten good at sensing the lost....they seem to smell that I’m a temp and must therefore be permanently lonely and lowly...they know that they will feel at ease with me about admitting to being a stranger because I am going to welcome any human contact, any indication that I’m established and not transient....And those lost people are right.”

***


“[Women] take their existence for granted, but I don’t.”

***


“I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness...Loneliness makes you consider other peoples’ lives...dampen irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there.”

***


“I am...imposing my will on [women’s lives], of course—but I want to arrange things so that they discover my imposition, and I want my imposition, however calculated, to have an element of simulated fortuity. I’m captivated by the simple idea of putting something in the path of a woman, so that she can choose to look at it or read it, or on the other hand, choose to walk on by.”

***


“A while back...I became interested in the idea of using the Fold to have a woman encounter my very own words. Too undisciplined to write simply for the pleasure of writing, I nonetheless felt able to write as long as it served some specific sexual end.”

***


“I find that I have to submit to every anecdotal temptation just as it arises, regardless of temporal priority, in order for it, for me, to flower adequately into words.”

***


"I...have forgotten to some extent how much better a woman is when she is not motionless;...her aliveness is always something of a revelation to me..."

***


"It is always a kick to see a woman come alive again after I've paused her for an extended period: she has no way of knowing that an instant of time has just passed that was hugely richer in content than any of the instants that immediately preceded it."

***


"I so much wanted to have inspired a feeling of quickened curiosity in her. To have done just that—to have created an expression of puzzled curiosity in the universe..."

***


"My words hadn't just gone through her mind. I was in her mind."

***


"The last thing in the world I want is to be seen as a threat."

***


“Am I an alienated person? Some who have read this far might say so...And temps are prima facie alienated by virtue of their vocational rootlessness. But I don't see that nasal, sociological-sounding word applying in any useful way to me. I get along well with people. I haven't perhaps done such a good job of establishing my sanity in this sketch of my life...since [my episodes of temporal distortion] always embrace that controlled mental disorder known as sexual arousal, but I’m not by any means a crazy person.”

***


“The only major difference between me and any number of residents of the greater Boston area is that I have been able to invent and make use of several sorts of chrono-clutch. No, there is a difference, I think: I’m arrogant enough to believe, at least to believe sometimes, that the reason I have been chosen over any other contemporary human to receive and develop this chronastic ability (if there is indeed some supernatural temp agency doing the choosing) is maybe that I can be trusted with it—trusted at least not to do any real harm."

***


"Morals depend in part on consequence; consequence on time; since my amoralities flourish and expire entirely in momentary pico-states of timeless inconsequence, the usual rules just don’t have the same prohibitive force. Nobody else should be entitled to take off women's clothes at will, at the snap of a finger or the flip of a switch, but I think I should be, because, for one thing, my curiosity has more love and tolerance in it than other men's does.”

***


“I contend that when I strip a passing woman on the street because her face or body calls out to me, I see more in her than others do. Of course there is plenty of self-deception possible here. But I can't truthfully feel anything but love and gratitude toward a woman when I secretly take off her clothes...Say there is some part of her body that I will see that she isn’t very proud of. In seeing it, I feel the goodness in me blossom—I know that she would be embarrassed about my having seen this feature, whatever it is, and I turn the knowledge of her imputed embarrassment into an upwelling of affection for her vulnerabilities."

***


“It felt good to be making a tape for once, rather than having to transcribe someone else’s.”

***


“I would like now to take a moment to say a little prayerlike thing about my life. I am so very fortunate to have been able to see all the naked women’s breasts I have seen. That’s what it really comes down to. I am just shocked by how lucky I am. No life could be finer than mine.”

***


"Even if I publish this memoir as a book, and someone recognizes herself in it and prosecutes me for relevant sex-offenses...my life will seem to me to have been a good life and I will seem to myself to have been a man who wanted to do no harm and in fact did no harm."



The Fermata



“The Fermata...has been a lifelong distraction. I have wanted to keep it a secret, and as a result it has swallowed up large chunks of my personality.”

***


“In a way you are now in control over whether all the world’s continuing atrocities and tragedies should resume or not [while in the Fold]. You know that as soon as you give the go-ahead to time again [they] will all go forward, and you begin to think that you will in a sense be their cause...I don’t have any power to alter the fact that evils will do their work, only how “soon” they will. As a consequence, I have determined that my Foldouts should in general be short, recreational, and masturbatory, rather than deep or pained.”

***


“I would condemn in the strongest terms anyone else who did what I have done. But the thing is, I did it, I did it, and I know myself, I know that I mean no harm, I mean well. I want simply to know what every woman looks like and feels like. I mean only to appreciate...And since in the Fermata I happen to be able to act on these wants without troubling her—without shaming or frightening her or interrupting what she is doing or thinking, simply by stopping the entire known universe for a few minutes or hours, I feel that what I’m doing isn’t wrong enough for me to override my irresistible desire to do it. In fact, maybe what I’m doing is straightforwardly right and good! I never ogle or leer on sidewalks. The Fold has permitted me to perfect my surreptitiousness. Maybe every single woman I have stripped, if she knew me, if she could know now what my thoughts had been...would want me to have stripped her...and understood her body as it truly deserved to be understood.”

***


“Let me say that I am not a necrophile. The notion has no appeal. Liaisons among the undead are fashionable, but I don’t have a drop of vampiric blood in me...The Fermata allows something to occur that is the exact opposite of the necrophilic ideal: it allows me enough time to take in a particular lived second of one woman’s life, the incremental outcome of so many decisions and misfortunes and delights and griefs, while she is in the very midst of fleetingly bringing it into being. The ability to investigate all aspects of her careless aliveness, where her clothes stretch, her body’s textures, her expression, her smells, the way she happens to be standing or moving, as they were fused in a single total instantaneous female delta-self, is the great lure of the Fold. The Fold allows me to do sexual justice to times when she is fully conscious, but not in the least self-conscious; “stalls”...in the daily fluidity of her life whose specific complex of qualities would have otherwise gone unseen by anyone—unphotographed, uncelebrated, unvalued, unloved. It is their randomness and, often, their very lack of overt sexiness that makes these instants so erotically precious. My sense of sight is infinitely and lovingly promiscuous, and each time I Drop I get another chance to love a chosen body as it really is.”

***


“Why should a life with some unusual metaphysical feature built into it inevitably end in unhappiness and early death? Why should all heroes have some fatal flaw that causes them to overreach and hence to self-destruct? It's too convenient...Is this all a writer thinks a Fold-drop could be about? Putting off death at the last minute?...Where is the life?"

***


"[The people] will read me. Word will spread. The Fermata, my Fermata, the keeper of my secrets, will be a secret no longer."



General Fermational Wisdom



"I know there are thousands of women in the world I could potentially feel love for...But that is the strange thing about what you are expected to do in life—you are supposed to forget that there are hundreds of cities, each one of them full of women, and that it is most unlikely that you have found the perfect one for you. You are just supposed to pick the best one out of the ones you know you can attract, and in fact you do this happily—you feel that the love you direct toward the one you do choose is not arbitrarily bestowed."

***


“Ribs inspire pity and tenderness and the sense that we are all in the same sparred boat.”

***


“It is a great privilege to be present when a person slowly puts his thoughts into words, phrase by phrase, doing the best he can. Because you are traveling right along with him as he forms his sentences, making each word he says appear as a little clump of letters on your screen, being to feel as if you are doing the thinking yourself; you occupy some dark space in the interior of his mind...It isn’t difficult to imagine an erotic aspect in all this.”

***


“Lovers are the only people who will put up with hearing your dreams.”

***


“Reading is...a state of artificially enhanced loneliness.”

***


“I feared that [the doorman] and I were fundamentally different sorts of people (a realization that can be in itself dispiriting, because you want the rest of randomly encountered humanity to be comprehensible)...”

***


"Possibly [my glasses] seemed beautiful to me in part because they were hybrids, existing halfway between knower and known, between what I saw and how I saw. I felt as if I were looking at my own sense of sight, even at myself, when I looked at them."

***


"What else was there in the world besides masturbation? Nothing."

***


"Just before a woman takes a bath, as the water is running, her nudity suddenly releases all of its charged ions of lewdness and becomes wholly artistic: she is naked in order to bathe herself, and bathe is such a smooth-surfaced, wide-voweled, modest word that you can appreciate the particulars of her beauty without any of your own erectile fierceness getting in the way."

***


“No expression is as impassive as a woman’s seen in a rear-view mirror: it has an impassiveness so impartial and comprehensive that it cries out to be surprised.”

***


“All women merit love and constancy. That’s true. All women should be loved by someone good and dependable and honest. I am good, I think, but I am not honest or dependable, so I have to pass lovingly through their lives without their knowing I have been there.”

***


"I guess I had simply forgotten that there is no satisfactory autoerotic substitute for a kiss."



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