As always, thinking, he deslumbers, lifts his beknowledged bulk from the etomological bed, from sheets printed with OED entries from Aa to Af. He sits, pondering, ponderous, pushing the contorted mattress even further out of shape as he studies the pillowcase notes, MLA tenth edition format, that support in erudite nocturnal comfort his monstrous mental girth.

To the bathroom he stumbles, hesitating before each strip of wallpaper to peer intently at the annotated articles. Before he reaches the toilet he has memorized two years of Quintessential Quarterly comment and response. He thinks his thinking and the thinking of a thousand others, pissing as he does, twinging over the toilet bowl in a moment of anxiety, wondering, his hand shaking, the urine spraying the notes taped to the bottom of the toilet seat cover, worrying for a second that he cannot separate his thinking from the thinking of others. The confusion dissipates as he shaves, carefully checking the bibliography written in careful hand with stick deodorant on the mirror to remind him of what he thinks, what thinking he thinks that is not the thinking of others. He must be careful, cautious, consummate; the erudition he has could be his own.

He dresses in his gilt-bound Oxford University pressed underwear, in his spotless Harvard pressed shirt, his Harcourt Brace tweed suit, customed tailored with library-reading-table-resistent elbow patches; and he dons his tie, a herringbone design reproduction in miniature of the Canterbury concordance. Dressed, he hunches and hulks to the door, reading the wallpaper, stopping for ten more articles etched in the wood of the threshold, shouting as he reads article six that if he sees one more crayon mark on one more article he will donate the boy to the rare book collection, from whence the boy will never return and where he will suffer the hell of interminable notecard nausea.

The boy cries for milk and his mother; the scholar plods down the sidewalk away from the wailing, grimacing at the thought of another day in a world of ignorance, in a world without endnotes. Sadly, musing with his over-muscled mind, he is, for a moment, too bitter to go on until, serendipitously, a monstrous, cacophonous flatulentic phenomenon flaps his conundrumed cheeks. Signified or signifier? He pauses, sniffs, and for the first time in years, a smile, the smile of a cuckold contemplating connubial countercoup forms on his lipidous lips. The Phonemics of Flatulence: The Textual Significance of Middle English Windbreakage. His pace quickens, his porcine nostrils flare at the odor of an article, one smelling of his own thinking. Head held high, pendulous paunch protruding, he marches toward the University to the cheerful cadence of err-ruu-dition… err-ruu-dition…err-ruu-dition…

* * * * * * * * * *

“Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! …To produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme.” Melville