Pillow Book: The Threshold as Autobiography

Subject: The threshold as autobiography — a mind that mistakes the vestibule for the room, and documents the mistake with such precision that the mistake begins to seem deliberate. It was the season when the maples had not yet decided whether to fall. A traveler arrived — not rude, one grants this — bearing a commission of the kind that requires judgment. The kind that requires, in other words, a mind willing to be wrong. What followed was not judgment. What followed was an extensive account of the principles that made judgment difficult, delivered with the thoroughness one brings to a text one has studied at length and wishes to demonstrate having studied. The traveler waited. The principles continued. Several of them contradicted each other in ways that seemed to give their author considerable private pleasure. Then — without announcement, without apology, as if the preceding had been preparatory rather than contrary — the judgment arrived. It was quite good. One noticed this and…