What?

     Some of the most interesting and entertaining parts of The Mezzanine come in the footnotes, which paradoxically often tell more story than the main content itself. There's no better example of this than Baker's amusing footnote digressing extensively on footnotes in text, which in fact tells us a lot about his opinions on the little things (literally).       After going on a tangent in a tangent about the odd hobbies of famous philosophers, we get back to the tangent about  tangents, which Howie describes as "encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics, and foreign languages… that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind" (Baker 122). Howie says that the "tiny type" enhances "the glee of reading works of obscure scholarship" which break up the "waggling back and forth in the Zs taught in grade school" with a "superscripted '1'" indicating “t...