Nostalgia in the Mezzanine

What I find really interesting is Howie’s perception of himself and how he reconciles his adulthood and childhood. Throughout the book, there are many moments in which he expresses mixed feelings about his development. On the one hand, he values the skills and knowledge he learned as a kid more than many things he’s experienced in his adult life. For example, he states “I didn’t retain a single engram of tying a shoe, or a pair of shoes that dated from any later than when I was four or five…” and yet he ranks aspects of shoe-tying as the top three most important discoveries of his life (Baker 16). With his serial attention to detail, a reader would expect him to find new and different mundane skills more significant at different stages of his life. And yet, he remains fixated on these basic skills used for functioning as a human being in American society. Maybe it’s because shoe-tying becomes one of the most intuitive and necessary skills for everyday life. I could understand Howie viewing this task as the most mundane of mundane and thus more intriguing. To him, the fact that the human mind becomes attuned to certain behaviors is astounding. 

Howie also has a confusing inner tension when it comes to reminiscing. He does something akin to feeling nostalgic many times throughout the book but seems also uncomfortable with nostalgia as an idea. In particular on page 39 where he says, “The ‘when I was little’ nostalgia was misleading: it turned something that I was taking seriously as an adult into something soupier, less precise, more falsely exotic , than it really was”(Baker). This passage reveals to me that Howie has disdain for seeing the world like a child. He wants to appreciate his memories in a more rational way that’s more ‘proper’ for an adult. However, throughout the book, he still falls back into his refreshingly childlike wonder of the mundane world. 

Along this thread, I’d like to discuss one more passage. On page 58 Howie declares, “I need simply to detach to continue to think more new thoughts at the same daily rate until I have amassed enough miscellaneous new mature thoughts to outweigh and outvote all of those childish ones..” (Baker). Howie continues with this weird tension of wanting to be closer to childhood but also further away. This may be one of the reasons that the order of events in the book is so jumbled. The very plot structure of the book shows Howie’s difficulty in understanding his current identity and its relevance in a continuum of who he was as a child and who he might be in the future. It also hints at some dissatisfaction with who he currently is. In some ways, this book feels like his therapy session, in which we are meant to be the shrink and attempt to “diagnose” his condition (despite our lack of qualification).