ONE-SENTENCE STORY

by Ben Greenman

The books on the shelf looked as if they were scattered haphazardly when in fact they were subject to a complex principle of arrangement with an equally complex history, one that the young man sitting in the next room watching TV would have been delighted to explain: how he had been approached by his father, a writer, who preempted concern over the rather wild and desperate look in his eyes by announcing that he needed help taking control of the books that had accumulated over a lifetime of reading and rereading; how the young man had responded to his father’s request not by rushing into the other room to sort and shelve but rather by thinking long and hard about how books were consumed, usually while he was sitting in the next room watching TV (this provided him with a fruitful comparison—other media, of course, came forward invisibly, via airwaves or electrical wires, and did not encounter difficulties resulting from their use or misuse of space); how he devised a plan for sorting and shelving, one that did not index the volumes by author or by title or even by subject but by frequency of use and, just as importantly, by size, to prevent the smaller specimens in back from being permanently concealed by the larger ones in front; how he took a break between shows to play around with a few shelves and determine if his ideas about visual access and clean sight lines were valid; and most strikingly, how he quickly learned that they were, how his initial assumption that his tentative plan would be revised once implemented, sanded into a different shape by multiple rounds of trial and error, was gainsaid by the facts of the matter, to the point where his first hasty implementation of his plan was also the final implementation, this despite his father’s protestations that the task was not complete in the least and that the young man had not only failed to do what had been asked of him but had in fact introduced more chaos, an argument that was repeated with the same wild and desperate look in his eyes that could not, even as it became wilder and more desperate, dislodge either the young man’s confidence in his system or the tenacity of his true interest, which involved sitting in the next room, watching TV.