HEAD CASE : THE SIZE OF THOUGHTS: Essays and Other Lumber,<i> By Nicholson Baker (Random House: $25; 355 pp.)</i>

I suppose that the two things I’ve always resented most about sports are exactly the two things most people watch them for: that desire to know the final score and the moment (the one when I’m invariably looking somewhere else) that proves to be decisive. That’s why I like six-day bike racing. Not only is the end so far off that I can go out to breakfast (several times, in fact) before it arrives, but when I miss a “decisive moment,” I know any sport that has sleep time built into its structure has already absolved me.

Such, in a way, are also the pleasures of reading the essays collected in “The Size of Thoughts” by Nicholson Baker. Like one or more cruise missiles set not on “search and destroy” but on “peruse,” they resist conclusions; they depend not on an occasional moment of charm for their glory but on whole bushel baskets of perceptions, engaging and quirky each and all. In that way, I suppose, these pieces resemble not so much those juggernauts of reason many of us associate with freshmen writing classes or opinion pieces found in news magazines that drive readers to their knees and make them say uncle or aunt, but poems:

“Has anyone yet said publicly how nice it is to write on rubber with a ballpoint pen? The slow, fat, ink-rich line, rolled over a surface at once dense and yielding, makes for a multidimensional experience no single sheet of paper can offer. Right now dozens of Americans are making repetitive scroll-like designs on the soft white door-seals of their refrigerators, or they are directing their pens around the layered side-steppes and toe-bulbs of their sneakers (heads bent, as elders give them advice), or they are marking shiny initials on one of those gigantic, dumb, benevolent erasers (which always bounce in unforeseen directions when dropped, and seem so selfless, so apolitical, so completely uninterested in doing anything besides erasing large mistakes for which they were not responsible). . . .”

Indeed, one of the enjoyments of reading the work displayed here (written over the past 13 years) is seeing the progression from Baker’s early writing, done at a breathtaking 25 or so, to his most recent work, “Lumber.” In his earliest essays, the young writer struggles with ideas, or rather the idea of Ideas. Then, rather quickly as these things go, he gives himself over entirely to the famous dictum of William Carlos Williams, “No ideas but in things” and proceeds to create miraculous strings of objects, which, like those magnified photos of everyday implements--forks or saltshakers--seem to be reinvigorated with menace and wonder, so that, as one of Baker’s heroes, A.E. Housman, put it, “we may delight ourselves in discovering them.”

But these lovely catalogs are only half the story. The rest has to do with Baker’s other predecessor: that great American obsessive, shorn of his howl and his necrophilia, Edgar Allan Poe. Here we have a writer-madman who is willing not just to track down, but absolutely run to earth practically any notion, no matter where it may lead him.

Ever wonder about those nice-looking books we see littering the rooms of tony furniture catalogs? No problem--Baker reads them. What is there about model airplanes we remember as so great? Two hundred and eleven dollars worth of unassembled airplane kits later, Baker offers the entirely true (at least for me) perception that the attraction of those airplanes was never really the finished product--small and glue-smeared and fragile--but the very idea of speed and flight itself. Thus the book examines not only model airplanes and nail clippers but also what it’s like the first time to read one’s work in public, movie projectors, the history of punctuation; it even throws in a recipe for a hot fudge sundae.

The crowning moment of the book, however, is the nearly 150-page essay called “Lumber.” It examines the origins of the phrase “learned lumber,” from Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”: “The Bookful Blockhead, ignorantly read / With Loads of Learned Lumber in his Head.”

Half essay, half database, part hymn to scholarship and part a sendup of same, this leviathan of a study makes it its virtue to become more giddily fogbound the deeper in one goes, and then suddenly, when the end is near, it deposits us on a sunny plain where all we can see is our shadows.

In general, I’m of divided mind when I consider this data-based approach to writing that seems increasingly popular of late and I confess that most of the work I’ve read along these lines doesn’t make me very happy. Baker’s version, however, is different and I like it very much for its stage-whispered awareness of its method. Yet there still may remain (I must add, in the hope of fending off many more demonstrations of the same) a residue of too many evenings spent looking at pictures of other people’s vacations.

Nonetheless, there is good news here. For any of us who have ever read or even longingly gazed at the title of a self-help book, fooling ourselves for a minute with the possibility of reform, Baker reminds us there exists a kind of grace that can come even to the most boorish of us whenever we completely and selflessly pursue our interests, however small (and probably the smaller the better).

There’s a poem called “Wings,” by the Czech poet Miroslav Holub, that I’ve admired for years, and it says close to the same thing:

We have

a map of the universe

for microbes,

we have

a map of a microbe

for the universe.

We have a Grand Master of chess made of electronic circuits.

But above all

we have the ability to sort peas, to cup water in our hands, to seek the

right screw under the sofa for hours.

This gives us wings.

--Translated by George Theiner

It so happens, by the way, I once had the honor of taking Holub on a tour of my backyard in Van Nuys. As the poet stuck his foot into one of the mysterious sinkholes that had recently started to appear in what passed for a lawn and gracefully buckled into a patch of weeds, he beamed a pained smile up at me. “This,” he said, as if just noticing for the first time, “is not an English garden!”

Neither is this fine, surprising, pungent, playful and thought-provoking bouquet of a book.