(nichols)On Baker

"Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes." 

Marcus Aurelius, short for Marcus Aurelius Annius Catilius Severus Antoninus Augustus with a Caesar thrown in somewhere given that he was a Roman emperor, was first and foremost a Stoic philosopher, which, and please forgive my crude summary, meant that he repressed most if not all emotions to achieve intellectual perfection; in the modern era, we would have called him antisocial. Given this background, one can almost forgive Aurelius's depressing account of life. Spending most of your impressive life purposefully shunning personal enjoyment and sensory pleasures would give anyone the impression that life is nothing more than a bore.

Howie on the other hand is damn cheerful that it hurts to pick up The Mezzanine on a gloomy day. His enthusiasm for everything that crosses his path and his remarkable ability to convey that to the reader make me equally nauseous and envious. Here is a guy with a curiosity that didn't just kill the cat - it suffocated whales - and life seems to shimmer off of him as naturally as breathing. The fact that he's even in close proximity with a book authored by Stoic should be labeled as a paradox; there is a fundamental, universal, and atomical difference between him and Aurelius a galaxy wide and a black hole deep.

In fact, The Mezzanine seems like a complete refutation of Meditations. Even on a surface level, the contrast between the titles is almost comical: whereas "meditations" ring out with austereness and grandeur, there is something light and vivacious about "mezzanine." Where Aurelius counsels against indulging in sensory affections, Howie is not afraid to pause and examine every ordinary object, always managing to marvel over something worthwhile hidden in the simplicity. Yet although Baker never advises anyone to follow Howie's mode of living, no one can help but smile at the happiness his character exudes. Look, Baker seems to say, I took a lunch hour that occurred years ago and made a sort-of-novel out of it! Don't praise me, he would protest, try it yourself! Had Aurelius ever picked up The Mezzanine, there is no doubt on my mind that he would have had it banned and its author burned.