nothing is a big book

After reading a big book by Georges Perec, he feels ready for a small book by Georges Perec and takes up the small book and finds it's bigger than it looks.

In it, the small book, Perec spends three days in three different cafe's on the Place Saint-Sulpice, Paris, recording in a notebook everything meeting his field of vision, noting, as he put it, "what happens when nothing happens."

Of course, nothing ever really happens as a young father once explained to a child who, when asked what he did at school that day, answered, "nothing."

"It's very difficult to do nothing," the father said. "A Buddhist might spend his or her life attempting to achieve nothingness."

"What's a Buddhist?", the child asked.

Perec's small book is titled An Attempt At Exhausting a Place in Paris. It begins on page 1 and ends on page 40. The last four sentences read, Four children. A dog. A little ray of sun. The 96. It is two o'clock. The 96 refers to one of the many bus lines that cross the Place Saint-Sulpice.

The book catalogs only what the eye sees and the eye sees, to quote Rudyard Kipling, that 'transportation is civilization', so numerous are the cars, buses, bikes and the comings and goings of everything bi-ped. The small book can be read in less than a hour.

Perec's large book is Life a User's Manual and requires days, if not weeks, of committed reading.