We begin with a desire to describe, to render, to capture even a bit of the world. We wish to stand in the way of time. We wish to gain a little information about things. We wish to understand the make-up and the connection of events. But first we must make things stand still. We must lift things from their world of things and find a place for them in the realm of thought. We must represent. I take my example from an extraordinary and beautiful book by Danilo Kiš.

Late in the morning on summer days, my mother would come into the room softly, carrying that tray of hers. The tray was beginning to lose its nickelized glaze. Along the edges where its level surface bent upward slightly to form a raised rim, traces of its former splendor were still present in flaky patches of nickel that looked like tin foil pressed out under the fingernails. The narrow, flat rim ended in an oval trough that bent downward and was banged in and misshapen. Tiny decorative protuberances—a whole chain of little metallic grapes—had been impressed on the upper edge of the rim. Anyone holding the tray (usually my mother) was bound to feel at least three or four of these semicylindrical protuberances, like Braille letters, under the flesh of the thumb. Right there, around those grapes, ringlike layers of grease had collected, barely visible, like shadows cast by little cupolas. These small rings, the color of dirt under fingernails, were remnants of coffee grounds, cod-liver oil, honey, sherbet. Thin crescents on the smooth, shiny surface of the tray showed where glasses had just been removed.¹

This tray is not handed to us on a tray, all its elements in order coexistent, communal, clean of commentary. Rather the tray is broken apart and strung out, the glaze preceding its surface, the flaky patches on the raised rim as much in front of its frieze of metal grapes as the soup is in advance of the fish. Our reading runs in loops of understanding as we gather a phrase together and then carry it on through the sentence like a package under our arm. The complexity, character, the length, the chronology of every quality's occurrence is carefully regulated by the writer. It is true that in "real life," as we continue so foolishly to call it, our experience of the tray would have many serial characteristics. We turn the tray over in our hands, for instance: first front, then back. We look here, then there. We try this, then that. Taste the sherbet; run our finger along the tray's rim; look through the curtains, through the window's haze at the lawn escaping toward the trees. How ideal language is for that. Meet Gertrude. Meet Ophelia. Meet Maud. Put on the left shoe, drop the right. But the tray is not entirely present, even in this recital of bits and pieces. I remember there was a maker's mark on the back of the real one, crudely indented, as if stepped on. The boy for whom honey and cod-liver oil are being brought cares only for its bearing surface, where a teaspoon might rest along with the jars. We have all the tray we need, for it is a tray we hold in our heads, and not in our hands. We think not only to the nickelized tray, but through the details of its development. The odd sound of the word 'nickelized' stands in for the nickelization itself. We watch a thought in the process of composing itself. No "real-life" tray does that. It does so, furthermore, largely in terms of visual details. The tray is touched but once. It is not a thing we're thinking, with its molecules and secret laws, but a perception, a perception remembered.²
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¹Danilo Kiš, Garden, Ashes (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975). The book opens with this passage. The translation is by William J. Hannaher.
²The recursive character of reading is almost impossible to represent. The first sentence of our specimen "reads" something like this: Late in the morning, late in the morning on summer days, my mother, late in the morning on summer days, would come into the room softly, late in the morning on summer days, my mother would be carrying that tray of hers, late in the morning on summer days, when my mother would come into the room, softly, with that tray.

^{- William H. Gass, "Representation and the War for Reality," Habitations of the Word: Essays - pp. 80-1}