The Size Of Thoughts

This problem first came to my attention reading Nicholson Baker's essay on the subject. There appears to be a rigour in his pursuit of the matter, in the way he taps somnambule wisdom, which leaves little hope for me to add anything to his findings. He structures them like this:

• All large thoughts are reluctant.
• Large thoughts are creatures of the shade.
• Large thoughts depend more heavily on small thoughts than you might think.

For a problem which at first glance seems to require physical or geometric methods this seems surprising and somewhat dissatisfactory. On the other hand these lemmata are powerful enough to finish with the idea of thoughts as giant soap-bubbles: The reluctance is there and they need to be shaded from drafts and turbulence, but I cannot see the dependence on small thoughts, on details, neither ornamental nor supporting, so the bubbles must reflect some other quality of the respective thought. Personally lacking the ability to drift into Baker's state of mind to travel to Onetti's Santa María, sources of inspiration which I truly admire, I have to resort to other approaches. One would be to reflect upon the space and the measure implied by the attempt to determine size. Could it be measured in geometrical space, as the great circle distance between two minds sharing the same thought? Or would rather mental space, in the sense of how far apart these two minds are in their usual way of thinking, give a more meaningful environment? I am inclined to believe that some great errors draw their greatness from this latter circumstance. But thoughts? It seems that this one suffers the same fate as Baker's in his essay - it strolls off, losening its tie, leaving you (and me) with a concept that has the texture of deteriorating jellyfish. Interestingly I recently learned that Nabokov's Van Veen is researching on the 'texture of time'. This is a thought that bears all features which would make it qualify as a great thought according to Baker's criteria. Very different in character from Veen himself, the thought is one of the most reluctant I can think of. It comes to us from a place called Desdemonia, a very subtle location, very remote, and brings with it a whole amount of small thoughts nicely braided into it.