moments of finding things more or less unendurable; 356,986 blades of grass trodden upon with firm feet;
541,095 vertical lines observed forming deliberate patterns;
672,984 glances thrown at the face of his wristwatch in order to obtain knowledge of the positions of its hands relative to the circumference of the dial;
985,431 approximations of entities discerned on overcast Mondays;
1,762,298 repetitions of events that he found familiar, warming and comfortable;
3,173,902 doubts that his life had yet obtained a meaningful purpose or direction;
4,876,325 streams of bubbles encountered in mid-ascent through tall glasses filled with liquid intended for his refreshment, and for which purpose were being held in his right hand;
5,287,781 things impossible to analyse with absolute precision.
Writings in the Mode of Realism
(1956–1989)
During the course of his life Maximilian completed only one book. This came to be the project that he laboured on more intensively than any other, as he obsessively undertook library researches for each subject that he wrote about. From early on in the life of its composition he decided to call it simply The Book of Essays. Once finished it would be exactly one thousand pages long and would contain precisely one hundred essays, each consisting of exactly ten pages. They were essays about mirrors, pencils, magnets, centipedes, electricity, poker, banjos, silk, eels, make-up, cigars, ears, phenomenology, spaghetti, gin, astrology, string, cacti, karate, ophthalmology, semaphore, cinnamon, tattoos, hoaxes, planetariums, bones, surfing, earrings, ventriloquism, martyrs, whistling, curtains, justice, trombones, gunpowder, hats, swamps, Andorra, vases, adolescence, railways, nylon, shelves, bowling, doubt, glaciers, jumping, triangles, chance, steam, brass, sandals, go-karts, denial, superstition, gas, basements, advertising, truth, trout, bubbles, shadows, typography, lightbulbs, melancholia, plastic, acrobats, assonance, dots, houses, clay, benevolence, canoes, buttons, locusts, bells, apples, synthesizers, backgammon, saliva, bureaucracy, algae, aspirins, cuneiform, paint, magicians, noses, ponds, helicopters, melodrama, yachts, arrows, unicycles, radars, classification, singing, lampshades, serenity, riddles, and essays.
The style of the essays varied greatly. On occasion he would reveal little-known facts about the subject under discussion, assembling concise, truncated histories occasionally spanning several millennia in the course of a paragraph or two. Other attempts at the form would see him forming philosophical interpretations of the “meaning” of a given subject, rather than its material circumstances, employing examples from his own biography and mingling them with arguments that frequently involved a series of wild speculations and abstractions in an attempt to bring common assumptions into doubt. Equally, an essay might focus on a single instance of an object’s manifestation in the world, building a tower of anecdotal surmises from nothing more than the way in which a vase was placed upon a table, or the manner in which a wall had been daubed with its particular shade of paint. Indeed, a few of his essays mentioned their “subjects” only in passing, hiding them within sentences focused on other matters, so that the often ambivalent relationships existing between one thing and another were opened up to potential scrutiny and wonderment. Any possible interpretation of a subject could be included, if only in a brief aside, existing as a stray fact standing at a moderate distance from the central narrative. In the end, Maximilian used so many different approaches to writing that his repertoire began to feel inexhaustible.
He soon became lost in trails of facts, in pages of library volumes teeming with unknown stories of individuals who had managed to instate themselves at the fringes of significance. Etymologies, distant years, Greek myths, quotations attributed to celebrated figures—there was no end to such trivia. A single bibliography could lead to hundreds if not thousands of new texts, which could in turn lead to thousands more. Maximilian would read through these books in perfect happiness for some months, gradually acquiring a mass of material before he was finally ready to commit himself to paper and declare his thoughts on a subject for posterity.
Once such a point had been reached he would seat himself with straight-backed solemnity, at the centre of the British Museum Reading Room, staring at the blank sheets lying before him, attempting to gather his forces and invoke the muses, until he felt that the optimum moment had arrived for unleashing a torrent of words. He would then generally spend the next ten hours writing, barely stopping to rest. After working in this manner for a few days he would scrutinize every word he had written and then destroy nearly all of them. Twenty or even thirty drafts of each essay seemed necessary in order to reach the pitch of perfection that he believed was required; but once a point of termination had been attained, there was no turning back. Every year he wrote three new essays. All of the completed works were stored inside a rectangular rosewood box that he kept at the foot of his bed. Once in the box, he would never again return to the subject of a particular essay, neither in thought nor on paper.
Each essay was a feat that did not have to take place, that might never have come into being were it not for the chance conglomeration of a strange series of events and persons. He always chose his subjects at the beginning of the year, at first relying on one of a number of different methods of selection by chance. It pleased him, at first, for his subjects to be chosen in this way, so that each essay would stand as evidence of the whims of fate dictated to him in a given period. Some years saw him opening obscure manuals at random simply in order to seize upon a particular noun. Other years saw him utilizing a pack of playing cards and a series of dice rolls. On one occasion he asked a bemused pedestrian to name the first three household objects that came to mind. A coincidence, a moment’s flippant thought, could mushroom into hundreds of hours of diligent writing and research, until Maximilian possessed so great an overabundance of knowledge on certain subjects that it came close to being entirely useless. After a few years he was to learn that these aleatoric methods of selecting subjects were not enough to engage him, that he would need to discover suitably inspiring subjects in order to find the will to continue his efforts, as the energy and devotion that were needed to complete an entire essay were always considerable.
With the first essay he wrote, on mirrors, he found himself plunged into a proliferating universe of reflections and doublings, soon realising that he was studying a subject that involved every last single entity that was visible, including the infinity of things only barely perceptible to the human eye. He learnt of many facts; that “catoptromancy” was the name given to acts of divining performed by staring into a mirror; that Pythagoras was a devotee of this art, said to possess a mirror that he held up to the moon before reading the future in it; that the Aztecs had performed human sacrifices to a god named Tezcatlipoca, who had a mirror in place of a right foot and wore a mask containing eyes of reflective pyrite; that the ancient Chinese believed mirrors could be used as a charm to ward off evil spirits; that Louis XIV had owned 563 mirrors; that Asian elephants are capable of recognizing their own features in mirrors but that African elephants are not; that in 1781 the planet Uranus had been discovered by Sir William Herschel after he had built a telescope containing a parabolic mirror measuring six and a half inches in diameter. Ignoring all mention of psychology, his essay gravitated instead toward mysticism, exploring the fantastical realms supposedly contained within the frenzy of reflection. He concluded his essay with a number of bold statements about the “transcendental leaps of perception” possible for the individual who truly apprehends and understands the meaning of mirrors.
Naturally, he next turned his attentions towards the subject of pencils. He focused on the fragile and ephemeral nature of the object, expressing his anger at the common assertion that graphite should be considered inferior to ink because it is usually used to leave mere temporary traces and footnotes rather than indelible markings and incisions. Subsequently, he argued, pencils had been overlooked and
