The Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker

But I suppose this is often true of moments of life that are remembered as major advances: the discovery is the crucial thing, not its repeated later applications.

So I want now to do two things: to set the escalator to the mezzanine against a clean mental background as something fine and worth my adult time to think about, and to state that while I did draw some large percentage of joy from the continuities that the adult escalator ride established with childhood escalators, I will try not to glide on the reminiscential tone, as if only children had the capacity for wonderment at this great contrivance.

used a lot of earplugs, not only to get to sleep, but also at work, because I had found that the magnified Sensurround sounds of my own jaw and teeth, and the feeling of underwater fullness in my ears, and the muffling of all external noise, even the printing of my own calculator or the sliding of one piece of paper over another, helped me to concentrate. On some days, writing impassioned memos to senior management, I spent the whole morning and afternoon wearing earplugs—wearing them even to the men’s room, and taking only one out to talk on the phone. Lunch hours I never wore them; and possibly this explained why my thoughts had a different kind of upper harmonic during lunch: it wasn’t just the sunlight and the clean glasses, it was also that I heard the world distinctly for the first time since walking to the subway in the morning. (I wore them in the subway, too.) I used Flents Silaflex silicone earplugs.

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