You know that ol' Peanuts cartoon? The one where Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown so that he can kick it? C.B. is reluctant because he's afraid Lucy will pull the ball away at the last second and he'll fall on his can. But somehow, Lucy always convinces him that this time she won't pull the ball away, and C.B. goes to kick the ball and Lucy pulls the ball away, there is C.B. on his can.
That is me, chasing windmills.
Windmills, in this instance, are interminably long books, that despite their interminable length, have an allure, a siren song, a mystique, and a cultish air of mystery that makes me return to them again and again, only to have Lucy pull the football from me, and whoops! Here I am on my can once again.
I am foolishly seduced by these types of books, unable to resist their charms. And yet, unable to commit fully to the relationship. I am thinking about this now because, well, not to beat around the bush, but I've been ensorcelled by one of these windmills. Sitting in a waiting room today, I found myself reading1, for no good reason other than, well, wily charms, Boswell's Life of Johnson. I could say it was because, again and again, I've heard that it is the ultimate biography, and as one who reads a lot of biographies2 who could resist that tag line? But the truth is, I am weak in the knees for these windmills. The Oxford paperback edition on my shelf is 1,402 pages, not counting the index. And on some pages, footnotes consume almost the entire page! I feel faint.
I'll tilt at that windmill for a while. And then I'll start to think to myself: what am I missing by continuing this fruitless quest? There's that Laura Spinney book, Proto on early language that I've wanted to read. Jim Rasenberger just came out with Perfect Coincidence about the friendship of Jefferson and Adams that I've had my eye on. Or there's The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume One by Daniel Kraus, which while long, is not in the category of a windmill.
I've learned to indulge these peccadilloes knowing that the affairs will burn out, the attempts will fail. But the allure of those windmills remain.
Other hills I've tried to climb, other windmills I've tilted at? Well, there's Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace; there's Marlborough: His Life and Times by Winston Churchill; there's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould.
It is the height of irony that one of these windmills of mine would be Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.
But here I am, enchanted at the moment by The Life of Johnson, unable, at the moment, to her aside for something more frivolous, with fewer moving blades, and a less imposing demeanor. Or until Lucy pulls away the football and I am back on my can.
