Free The Way the World Works: Essays by Nicholson Baker Page B

depunctuation with the booming self-importance of Faulkner’s typography. Both were excitingly modern, and yet they pointed in opposite directions. Thought transcription was thrown into a state of uncertainty from which it has not yet recovered. Some went naked—
    I too have done my share of social climbing, he thought, with hauteur to spare, defying the Wasps. (Bellow, Herzog )
    To the gallows I go, she said to herself, and had another large drink. (Drabble, The Realms of Gold )
    —while the post-Faulknerians, such as Tom Clancy, reached for italics, which are punchier:
    Julio stood and shouldered his weapon. There was a slight but annoying tinkle from the metal parts as he did so—the ammo belt, Ding thought. Have to keep that in mind . ( Clear and Present Danger )
    Sometimes, though, those urgent forward diagonals turned out to have a little too much punch, forcing the reader to interpret a shy, fleeting brain-state as if it were roared out in a hoarse whisper:
    He fumbled his latchkey into its slot, thinking: Now she’ll ask me why I lock my door and I’ll mumble and stumble around, looking for an answer, and seem like a fool .
    In roman type, within quotation marks, this thought-quote could easily be Tolstoy; in italics, however, it is from Stephen King’s The Stand, page 516.
    I suppose there’s no single correct method, but I sometimes wish that the old way would come back. I miss the clarity, the lack of fuss, the innocence. So here’s what I propose. Let’s use quotes for spoken dialogue, as usual, and—once in a while, if it makes sense, not excessively—let’s try using them for interior speech as well. Those who feel ambitious could experiment with double quotes for dialogueand single quotes for thought, since part of the problem is that double quotes sometimes look too heavy to fence off delicate interior states. But that distinction isn’t necessary and it may actually cause further confusion—so, no, skip that. If the words in the thought really do have force and punch, by all means use italics, but if they don’t, don’t. And if you would prefer to use only indirect thought-discourse, fine. Just don’t utterly rule out the blameless embrasure of those curlies. Here’s something I came across in Winnie-the-Pooh:
    Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “Inasmuch as which?”—and sometimes he didn’t know what he was thinking about.
    I’m with Eeyore.
    (2002)

Defoe, Truthteller
    I read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year on a train from Boston to New York. That’s the truth. It’s not a very interesting truth, but it’s true. I could say that I read it sitting on a low green couch in the old smoking room of the Cincinnati Palladium, across from a rather glum-looking Henry Kissinger. Or that I found a beat-up Longman’s 1895 edition of Defoe’s Plague Year in a Dumpster near the Recycle-A-Bicycle shop on Pearl Street when I was high on Guinness and roxies, and I opened it and was drawn into its singular, fearful world, and I sat right down in my own vomit and read the book straight through. It would be easy for me to say these things. But if I did, I would be inventing—and, as John Hersey wrote, the sacred rule for the journalist (or the memoirist, or indeed for any nonfiction writer) is: Never Invent. That’s what makes Daniel Defoe, the founder of English journalism, such a thorny shrub. The hoaxers and the embellishers, the fake autobiographers, look on Defoe as a kind of patron saint. Defoe lied a lot. But he also hated his lying habit, at least sometimes. He said the lying made a hole in the heart. About certain events he wanted truth told. Andone event he really cared about was the great plague of 1665, which happened when he was around five years old.
    A Journal of the Plague Year begins quietly, without any apparatus of learnedness. It doesn’t try to connect this recent plague with