The Childish Theories of Howie

     One of the first days that we discussed The Mezzanine in class, we came upon the passage where Howie describes eight major "advances" he considers fundamentally changed his life. His eighth point is about brain cell death, and he lays out his theories on how and why it occurs. He introduces the topic by saying, 

    "One weekend I confessed to my mother on the phone that I had been worrying that over the past six months especially, my brain wattage had dimmed perceptibly. […] “It's true," she said, "that your individual braincells are dying, but the ones that stay grow more and more connections, and those connections keep branching out over the years[...]" This observation was exceedingly helpful. In a week or two following her news that connections continued to proliferate in the midst of neural carnage, I formed several related theories:..."

    This, and the theories that follow, especially caught my interest because they were based in nearly nothing but his own speculation and a very surface-level talk with his mother, yet still were very extensive and confidently displayed. He spends two pages explaining his theories on the topic, throughout which I wanted to throw a (preferably heavy) book on neuroscience at him and beg him to please just do some research instead of rambling about his own baseless assumptions. In class as we discussed I joked that Howie should just “Google it”, referring to his long rant about braincells, instead of writing down whatever sounded right to him. Mr. Mitchell countered that Google wasn’t around for him to access back then, but that if Howie had lived in modern times he would likely be a fan.

I thought then that it would have been nearly as easy for Howie, in his own time period, to visit a library, and it confused me as to why he had not – clearly he’d spent hours if not days working out his theories, should he not be interested enough in the topic? And yet for some reason he took no more input on his beliefs, whether by presenting them to others or by reading more on the topic. But of course, that would be far from the Howie way. His speculation that occupies the book is so deeply internal that it’s silly to even question why he doesn’t try to search for the real truth on any topic, as he’ll always find it more fascinating to see what his own mind can produce.

It brings us back to the childish way he looks at the world, from the way that he hyper focuses on small and inconsequential tasks and objects, to the way that he reminisces about childhood nearly every step of his day, and to his inability to see with a lens broader than his own limited experience. He can only find interest facts and ideas that appeal to him and the way he wants to view his life, as shown when his sixth month long depression of worrying about braincell death, even convinced that his cognition “dimmed perceptibly” lifts immediately after his mother’s (speculative and metaphorical) reassurance.

And while I may have missed some deep hidden metaphor in his section on braincell death, when he reminisces about milk deliveries or straws, he pushes such a specific narrative on every decision he thinks was made by the companies, down to attempting to analyze the chemical makeup of straws, that it’s still clear he pours out every odd theory and assumption he has with no regard for the big picture, or in fact the truth. And likewise during his interactions with coworkers during lunch breaks or in the bathroom, he so strongly projects his own assessment of the situations that it’s impossible to be sure of what really took place, and what he only confidently assumed about others’ inner thoughts from what he saw.

While at first I was frustrating reading pages upon pages of Howie’s thoughts that seemed to be grounded in nothing, his childlike obsession with everything, and the unfamiliar experience of reading about normal interactions through the eyes of someone so consumed with his own speculation got to be amusing and even had a sort of charm to it. In the end, contrary to Mr. Mitchells prediction, I believe that if Howie had lived in modern times, googling any fact that comes to mind would actually, so to speak, ruin the fun for him, and limit the joy his own imagination brings him.