Looking Through an Old Dictionary

My roommate has the same dictionary from 1979 that my parents had when I was a kid.  American Heritage, with a glossy red cover, and the outside edges of the pages flecked with little pink dots.

I was looking for a word the other day, but I was immediately drawn in by the illustrations and photos on the side of each page, images I hadn't seen since I was a small child, rendered in black and white.  Pictures of Schopenhauer, of Emile Zola, of aardvarks and zebus.  I knew what Zola looked like years before I knew anything about him.

And there were the tables.  The tables of the orthographic pronunciation of the English language, in both IPA and proprietary American Heritage style, and of the derivation of the many languages of the Indo-European family.  Modern Assamese and Manx traced back through Middle High German, Faliscan, Avestan, Umbrian.

But the best was the measurement table.  The image of the table brought back memories of writing on sheets of printer paper that my mother had brought home from work; they still had copy from the Des Moines Register on one side.  I drew out diagrams of machines that had never been invented, pictures of rocket cars and maps of imaginary towns, always using the measurement table as my benchmark.  In my sketches, I endlessly divided length into rods and yards, weight into measurements both avoirdupois and apothecary.

On the right was the table of scientific units.  But I didn't approach it in any kind of scientific way.  This half a page seemed to contain all the mysteries of the adult world.  This was how they controlled everything-- they knew the eldritch rites of the joule and the coulomb, the farad and the candela.  If I was ever to enter the adult world, I would need to be inducted into their mysteries.  My drawings became decorated with meaningless measurements in hertz and ohms, an elaborate nonsense of Greek letters and decimals, all seeming to carry the gravity of profound science.

Remember Back to the Future?  The flux-capacitor?  You've almost certainly heard the words flux and capacitor elsewhere.  How many of you can actually define them?

The important thing isn't the science.  It's the ritual crossing into something that seems like science but is completely meaningless.  That's what I did as a seven year old child.  Without knowing it, I took the chart of scientific measurements approved by an international association, something so technical and positivist, and turned it around, took flight with it, used its symbols as the basis for something completely imaginary.

When I look back through the dictionary, the mystery of it is gone.  It has become a tool-- and not a very good one, it didn't have the word I was looking for-- instead of a totem of grown-up knowledge.

But a trace of that opacity and mysteriousness remains.  The long-dormant memories that are summoned forth are memories of these specific pictures and tables, independent of any underlying meaning.  These images of Schopenhauer and Zola have nothing to do with the Schopenhauer and the Zola that I would go on to read in my twenties.  They are little crystals embedded in the continuum of memory.