My college
roommate, Scott Eberle, recently published a column in Psychology Today
in defense of jigsaw puzzles. He was prompted by a petty and priggish column in
the Washington Post. Its author took a riskily brave stance and condemned
jigsaw puzzles. Not video games, gambling or sniffing glue, mind you. Scott is
a person whose memory makes me smile. He’s one of the smartest, funniest people
I know. For thirty years he has worked for the Strong National Museum of Play
in Rochester, N.Y., where he is now vice president for interpretation, and editor
of The American Journal of Play. In his column, Scott behaves like a gentleman
but pretty well eviscerates the twit’s arguments and condescension: “He is
wrong on three counts,” and so forth.
In 2009,
Scott published Classic Toys of the National Toy Hall of Fame (Running
Press). In 2002, jigsaw puzzles had been inducted into that Hall of Fame. Scott
describes their allure: “Unfinished jigsaw puzzles draw kibitzers like a
magnet. A passerby will see where a stray piece belongs and can’t keep the
secret. The commotion draws others in.” The urge, in other words, is primally human. In “The
Creative Writer,” a lecture he delivered in 1941, now collected in Think, Write,
Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
(2019), Vladimir Nabokov uses an inspired metaphor to help explain inspiration:
“[I]t is
like a jigsaw puzzle that instantly comes together in your brain with the brain
itself unable to observe how and why the pieces fit, and you experience a
shuddering sensation of wild magic, of some inner resurrection, as if a dead
man were revived by a sparkling drug which has been rapidly mixed in your
presence.”
Nabokov is describing
his own sensibility as a writer. Among novelists,
we think of him as the master puzzle-maker and he is, especially in Pale
Fire. But if he were only a puzzle-maker, not the creator of indelible
characters, explorations of moral complexities, and peerless prose, we might consign him to
the back pages of an airline magazine. I read Nabokov to be reminded of the
wonders of the human imagination. In Speak, Memory, he writes of his
mother:
“She loved
all games of skill and gambling. Under her expert hands, the thousand bits of a
jigsaw puzzle gradually formed an English hunting scene: what had seemed to be
the limb of a horse would turn out to belong to an elm and the hitherto
unplaceable piece would snugly fill up a gap in the mottled background,
affording one the delicate thrill of an abstract and yet tactile satisfaction.”
[Watch
Laurel and Hardy’s Me and My Pal (1933), a dissertation on the
psychology of jigsaw puzzles.]
Thanks, for the "Me and My Pal" tip! Still chuckling.
ReplyDeletePrinting today's edition to give to the avid dissectologists who play at my sister's apt building. I regularly kibitz. (And, harass them, with cornball jokes.)