He soon became lost in trails of facts, in pages of library volumes teeming with unknown stories of individuals who had managed to instate themselves at the fringes of significance. Etymologies, distant years, Greek myths, quotations attributed to celebrated figures—there was no end to such trivia. A single bibliography could lead to hundreds if not thousands of new texts, which could in turn lead to thousands more. Maximilian would read through these books in perfect happiness for some months, gradually acquiring a mass of material before he was finally ready to commit himself to paper and declare his thoughts on a subject for posterity.
Once such a point had been reached he would seat himself with straight-backed solemnity, at the centre of the British Museum Reading Room, staring at the blank sheets lying before him, attempting to gather his forces and invoke the muses, until he felt that the optimum moment had arrived for unleashing a torrent of words. He would then generally spend the next ten hours writing, barely stopping to rest. After working in this manner for a few days he would scrutinize every word he had written and then destroy nearly all of them. Twenty or even thirty drafts of each essay seemed necessary in order to reach the pitch of perfection that he believed was required; but once a point of termination had been attained, there was no turning back. Every year he wrote three new essays. All of the completed works were stored inside a rectangular rosewood box that he kept at the foot of his bed. Once in the box, he would never again return to the subject of a particular essay, neither in thought nor on paper.
Each essay was a feat that did not have to take place, that might never have come into being were it not for the chance conglomeration of a strange series of events and persons. He always chose his subjects at the beginning of the year, at first relying on one of a number of different methods of selection by chance. It pleased him, at first, for his subjects to be chosen in this way, so that each essay would stand as evidence of the whims of fate dictated to him in a given period. Some years saw him opening obscure manuals at random simply in order to seize upon a particular noun. Other years saw him utilizing a pack of playing cards and a series of dice rolls. On one occasion he asked a bemused pedestrian to name the first three household objects that came to mind. A coincidence, a moment’s flippant thought, could mushroom into hundreds of hours of diligent writing and research, until Maximilian possessed so great an overabundance of knowledge on certain subjects that it came close to being entirely useless. After a few years he was to learn that these aleatoric methods of selecting subjects were not enough to engage him, that he would need to discover suitably inspiring subjects in order to find the will to continue his efforts, as the energy and devotion that were needed to complete an entire essay were always considerable.
With the first essay he wrote, on mirrors, he found himself plunged into a proliferating universe of reflections and doublings, soon realising that he was studying a subject that involved every last single entity that was visible, including the infinity of things only barely perceptible to the human eye. He learnt of many facts; that “catoptromancy” was the name given to acts of divining performed by staring into a mirror; that Pythagoras was a devotee of this art, said to possess a mirror that he held up to the moon before reading the future in it; that the Aztecs had performed human sacrifices to a god named Tezcatlipoca, who had a mirror in place of a right foot and wore a mask containing eyes of reflective pyrite; that the ancient Chinese believed mirrors could be used as a charm to ward off evil spirits; that Louis XIV had owned 563 mirrors; that Asian elephants are capable of recognizing their own features in mirrors but that African elephants are not; that in 1781 the planet Uranus had been discovered by Sir William Herschel after he had built a telescope containing a parabolic mirror measuring six and a half inches in diameter. Ignoring all mention of psychology, his essay gravitated instead toward mysticism, exploring the fantastical realms supposedly contained within the frenzy of reflection. He concluded his essay with a number of bold statements about the “transcendental leaps of perception” possible for the individual who truly apprehends and understands the meaning of mirrors.
Naturally, he next turned his attentions towards the subject of pencils. He focused on the fragile and ephemeral nature of the object, expressing his anger at the common assertion that graphite should be considered inferior to ink because it is usually used to leave mere temporary traces and footnotes rather than indelible markings and incisions. Subsequently, he argued, pencils had been overlooked and taken for granted by society, which only rarely gave them the credit they undoubtedly deserved. He was at pains to point out how complicated the act of making a pencil was, citing the fact that a single modern pencil goes through about one hundred and twenty-five separate manufacturing processes before being put onto the market. Discussing the early history of the pencil, he told his prospective readers that for hundreds of years there had only been a single mine in all of Europe where graphite of a suitable quality for making pencils could be found. This was at the Borrowdale estate, in Cumber-land, a resource that had been so precious it was frequently subject to thievery and was for many years protected at all times by a steward armed with two blunderbusses.
In the autumn he undertook a sustained consideration of magnets. Firstly, he discussed the origins of the word “magnet,” its probable emergence from Greco-Roman antiquity, specifically from a town in what was then known as “Asia Minor,” named “Magnesia ad Sipylum,” standing adjacent to Mount Sipylus, the source of the ores which were used to create the first magnets, objects that originally bore the name magnetes, later evolving into magnitis. Next, he discussed individuals of the Victorian period who had claimed to live within bodies that possessed magnetic properties, so that they could make spoons, irons, and kettles stick to their outstretched limbs. Additionally, he outlined the theories of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, later known as Paracelsus (although both names were pseudonyms) a man who was a physician, botanist, alchemist, and astrologer who wandered relentlessly throughout Europe in the early sixteenth century. He had proposed the theory that magnets possessed magical healing properties, believing that magnetic forces could “draw out” diseases from the body. Maximilian’s essay was founded on a great deal of conjecture.
In writing the essays, he wished to be continuously uncovering new layers of reality so that he might always have new ways in which to experience his everyday life. Each topic he took up hid a multitude of stories, and in the course of his research he would discover some of them, rooting them out from the murk of obscurity before depositing them into the deeper obscurity of his unknown manuscript, where they were destined to reside, neglected, for many years to come. Working on the essays fed his limitless curiosity for facts, and for encyclopaedic classifications of the world.
He believed that it was sufficient to produce a single book during the course of a lifetime. If anyone managed to write a single work of any lasting interest they would have succeeded in embellishing their existence with a little meaning, even if the work were to remain relatively obscure. In some ways he supposed that it might be preferable for every author to be restricted to the writing of a single book, as this would perhaps focus each author’s mind upon the importance of the task being undertaken. Surely far fewer minor works would be written under such conditions, and there might be far greater variety, with less insistence upon the dictates of genre. Perhaps every book would then become interesting simply because it was a document of how a given individual had chosen to express his or her lifetime within lines of print. Maximilian thought that if this had been instated as one of the cardinal rules of literature many centuries previously, then perhaps the entire course of the development of civilisation might have been different. Egotism, competition, and hierarchy might have been replaced with a sense of sharing and equality, at least within the confines of the literary realm.
He learnt so many things. He learnt that the first go-kart was invented by Art Ingels, in California, in 1956; that the tallest species of cactus is Pachycereus pringlei, which has been known to grow up to 19.2 metres tall; that the oldest known canoe is from the village of Pesse in the Netherlands and was constructed at some point between 8200 and 7600 BC; that the word “telephone” is derived from the Greek tele (far) and phone (voice); that in 1874 the daily newspaper the