by A. J. Jacobs
parallelism
My aunt Carol is visiting from Connecticut. She’s got a lot of competition, but I had to choose, I’d probably say Carol is the single smartest person to share my DNA. And she’s not just smart—she’s a bona fide intellectual. She’s like those characters in Woody Allen movies who wear turtlenecks and talk about Rilke—except she doesn’t wear turtlenecks and she’s completely unpretentious. Carol studied with Paul de Man and currently holds a job as professor of German literature at Yale. She’s published books on major thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Claude Lévi-Strauss. I haven’t read all her books (sorry Carol) but I do love having them on my bookshelf, since, just like the Britannica, they add much-needed gravitas to my room.
This trip, Carol has given me another serious book: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, which she says is very appropriate to my current life. I’m flattered she thought of me. When I get home, I open it up to the page where Aunt Carol has left a pink Post-it. I begin to read: Sartre’s narrator is at the Paris library. He’s observing a character called the Self-Taught Man, who spends a lot of time in the stacks.
[The Self-Taught Man] has just taken another book from the same shelf, I can make out the title upside-down: The Arrow of Caudebec, A Norman Chronicle by Mlle Julie Lavergne. The Self-Taught Man’s choice of reading always disconcerts me.
Suddenly the names of the authors he last read came back to my mind: Lambert, Langlois, Larbaletrier, Lastex, Lavergne. It is a revelation; I have understood the Self-Taught Man’s method; he teaches himself alphabetically.
It is a revelation to me as well. A fellow adventurer through the alphabet. This is wonderful news! Sartre goes on: “He has passed brutally from the study of coleopterae to the quantum theory, from the work of Tamberlaine to a Catholic pamphlet against Darwinism, he has never been disconcerted for an instant. There is a universe behind and before him.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
I flip forward, skimming. The Self-Taught Man seems like a good guy. He’s for universal love, he admires youth, he’s a humanist. I like him. I wish I could dive into the book and have a conversation with him over some unpasteurized cheese at the café.
I skip to the end of the book. Ah, here’s the Self-Taught Man again, back in the library, where he belongs, with his beloved books. He seems to be having a conversation with two young boys in the library. Huh, what’s this about? Now the Self-Taught Man is putting his hairy hand on the smooth palm of a little brown-haired boy. Uh-oh. Now, writes Sartre, the Self-Taught Man “timidly began to stroke” the boy’s hand.
Jesus H. Christ! The Self-Taught Man is a child molester. This is unbelievable. There’s more.
The Self-Taught Man’s “finger passed slowly, humbly, over the inert flesh…he had closed his eyes, he was smiling. His other hand had disappeared under the table. The boys were not laughing any more, they were both afraid.”
Dammit!
First I read about Bouvard and Pécuchet, two doofuses who blow up their own house. Now comes the Self-Taught Man, who spends his afternoons timidly stroking little boys under the table. I can’t believe the hostility my quest—or similar ventures—engenders from major thinkers. I’m just trying to read the encyclopedia here, people. Just trying to make myself a little smarter. Does that make me a card-carrying member of NAMBLA? What’s next? Is someone going to accuse me of having body parts in my freezer or of selling plutonium to Syria?
I went on the Web. Turns out Sartre used the Self-Taught Man to represent rational humanism, a philosophy he considers bankrupt. What a mean-spirited jackass. Just because he disagrees with a point of view, he links it to pedophilia. Plus, I happen to prefer rational humanism to his absurd Marxist-inflected existentialism.
I called up my aunt to ask if she was implying anything about my sexuality. She said, no, she had read Nausea decades ago and had forgotten about all about the Self-Taught Man’s boy-fondling behavior. Which makes me feel a little better.
“In fact, Henry and I were just talking about your quest,” says Carol. Henry also teaches at Yale, and is also frighteningly smart, the author of dense books about Hegel’s theory of time and Kafka’s theory of the state. “Henry was saying that this is a very American quest. It’s very American and democratic, the idea that you can improve yourself. It’s a noble idea.”
Now I feel a lot better. That’s the first time someone has called me noble. So Sartre can go straight to existential hell.
Paris
The storming of the Bastille was surprisingly lame. When the mob forced open the doors, the prison had been largely unused for years and was scheduled for demolition. It “held on that day only four counterfeiters, two madmen and a young aristocrat who had displeased his father.” Seven people? That barely qualifies as a storm. More like a light drizzle. Couldn’t they have stormed something a little more impressive?
passenger pigeons
These birds—which, judging by the picture, were much better looking than the chunky gray head bobbers that coo and cluck on my windowsill—officially became extinct when the last known representative died, on September 1, 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoo. Humans hunted passenger pigeons into nonexistence. But in the 1800s, there were billions of them. This I know. Way back in the B’s under animal behavior, the Britannica printed a remarkable passage by Audubon that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind. It said:
The air was literally filled with pigeons; the light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots not unlike melting flakes of snow…the people were all in arms…. For a week or more, the population fed on no other flesh than that of pigeons. The atmosphere, during this time, was strongly impregnated with the peculiar odour which emanates from the species…. Let us take a column of one mile in breadth, which is far below the average size, and suppose it passing over us without interruption for three hours, at the rate mentioned above of one mile in the minute. This will give us a parallelogram of 180 miles by 1, covering 180 square miles. Allowing 2 pigeons to the square yard, we have 1,115,136,000 pigeons in one flock.
My thoughts after reading that passage, in no particular order: People are terrible, I can’t believe we killed so many pigeons…Thank God I wasn’t around when that flock was flying overhead—those dung snowflakes sound nasty…Did any of the 1.1 billion pigeons think to himself, I’m really special. I’m not like these other losers?
Well, in somewhat of an order, I guess. Because that last one haunted me especially. Reading about massive numbers of a particular species does that to me. I pride myself that I’m an individual, that I’m unique. But I doubt that a Venusian scientist would be able to distinguish me from the other 5 million Manhattanites who converge on midtown every day to sit in front of computer terminals and talk on the phone. I’m just one member of a huge nonflying flock.
The Britannica points out that passenger pigeon flocks are the second largest social unit in history, topped only by desert locusts. Third place? Modern-day China. Locusts, pigeons, and China: that seems vaguely insulting to the Chinese people, to be classed with locusts and pigeons. But I guess it’s only insulting if you refuse to accept that humans are animals.
patch box
A rectangular box used as a receptacle for beauty patches in the 18th century. Back in the days of Louis XV, says the Britannica, black patches of gummed taffeta were popular with chic women (and men) who wanted to emphasize the beauty and whiteness of their skin. The smart set had plenty of patch designs to choose from. For the understated, there were the simple spots. But the truly fashionable had patches in the shapes of stars, crescents, elaborate animals, insects, or figures. Placement was also important, seeing as these patches had their own language: a patch at the corner of the eye symbolized passion, while one at the middle of the forehead indicated dignity. Women carried their patch boxes with them, in case they wanted to slap on a fresh one during the royal ball.
This is good to know, seeing as I have my very own patch. Apparently I was
born about 250 years too late, since I’ve always thought of it as a big ugly mole, not as a fashionable accessory that enhances the whiteness of my skin. My beauty patch, sadly, isn’t in the shape of a giraffe or spider—just the regular old spot. But it is on my face. It’s on the right side of my nose, which makes me wonder what my patch would symbolize to a courtier in 18th-century France. Probably “Je suis un jackass.”
I love learning the lengths that humans will go to make themselves attractive to potential mates. The French in particular were good at this. In addition to carrying her box of patches, a stylish gal in the court of Louis XIV needed to affix a fontange (tower) to her head. This was a complex wire frame, often in the shape of a fan, that held her hair, along with artificial curls, dangling streamers, ribbon, starched linen, and lace. A huge tower of hair and black splotches on her face—va-va-voom.
Of course, if I’m tempted to feel superior when reading this information, I need only think back to my own attempts at preening in high school. They weren’t pretty. They involved not only several increasingly goopy types of hair gel, which was bad enough, but also something much worse: an ear clip. This was a little silver band that attached to the middle of my ear. The ear clip was for those milquetoasts like me who lacked the backbone to get their ears pierced. It was something you could remove before going to Thanksgiving at Grandma’s, much like the gummy taffeta of the 18th century.
patriotism
We’re out at my parents’ house in East Hampton for July Fourth. I come down to breakfast and announce my big July Fourth fact: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the same day—July 4, 1826, fifty years after the founding of the country. Jefferson died at noon, his last words being, “Is it the Fourth?” Adams died later in the afternoon, his last words being, “Thomas Jefferson still lives.” He was wrong.
Been holding on to that one since the J’s. Feels good to get it off my chest.
perception (of time)
I’m thirty-five years old, which isn’t young, but it won’t qualify me for any special rates at the Boca Raton Denny’s either. Still, it’s old enough that I’ve started to notice something disturbing, a phenomenon my grandparents talk about a lot: time has sped up. The years are vanishing more and more quickly, the calendar days flipping by faster than a falcon in full dive (150 mph).
The Britannica has an explanation for this: elderly people find time shorter because they notice long-accustomed changes less frequently.
I’m not 100 percent sure what this means. Which long-accustomed changes in particular? They notice the daily setting of the sun less frequently? The changing of the seasons? The rhythms of the body? The Buckingham Palace guards? Regardless, I get the gist. Old people adapt to stimuli. To put it bluntly, old people are less perceptive.
I wonder if I can fight this change. Can I stop the acceleration of time by remaining observant? By keeping my mind open to changes and filled with wonder at the world, instead of tuning it out? That would truly be an accomplishment. I vow to try, though I know it’s about as likely as stopping the sunset.
Perry, Matthew
Ever since my banishment from Jeopardy! I’ve been checking the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Web site every day for audition times. There haven’t been any. Just an apology from the producers and a photo of an agonized man who has apparently just lost a lot of money—I guess it’s supposed to be amusing, but it just increases my frustration.
The prime time version—the one with Regis Philbin—has long since been canceled. I’m just trying to get on the syndicated version—the one that runs in the afternoon every day, around Oprah time, and is hosted by a woman named Meredith Vieira, who doesn’t shout nearly as much as Regis.
Finally, after several weeks, the agonized man face is gone. Auditions! Here in New York! I sign up for a Tuesday night, not knowing what to expect. Coincidentally, an intern at Esquire tried out on Monday night, and when he shuffles in on Tuesday morning, I pump him for details. They aren’t inspiring. He failed, as did almost all of the one hundred hopefuls, and he warns me that the audition quiz will “pound your brain and ego.” So I’m already on edge when I arrive at the ABC studios on the Upper West Side.
I’m not relaxed by the situation there. For forty-five minutes, all of us potential millionaires stand outside the building in the rain.
“This is fun, huh?” I say to the wet woman next to me.
“Yeah,” she says. “This sucks. Final answer.”
We both have a chuckle. She’s wearing loose black clothing and has a middle part in her hair that wouldn’t be out of place at a Renaissance fair. Her face reminds me of an attractive Broom-Hilda, the cartoon witch.
“So what do you do when you’re not trying out for quiz shows?” I ask.
“I’m unemployed right now. That’s why I’m here.”
Jesus. Did I learn nothing from my Mensa experience? Remember: do not ask about occupations at gatherings where above-average IQs are involved. Still, my guilt over the faux pas is tempered by relief, because I have a realization: this middle-parted woman should get my spot. I’m just here to get my ego massaged; she actually needs the money. She’s got utility bills, phone bills, maybe some kids with middle parts. She deserves a chance more than I do—that’s just basic marginal utility economics. So if I lose, I’ll just tell all my friends and family, “Oh, I took a dive for a friend in need.”
And then she takes out her BlackBerry pager. Shit. There goes my excuse. Anyone with a BlackBerry pager isn’t sleeping on vents in Central Park or waiting in line at soup kitchens, unless those soup kitchens are serving twenty-three-dollar bowls of bouillabaisse with sprigs of parsley. Now I’ve got no reason to throw the test. Pressure’s back on.
My BlackBerry-owning friend tells me that this is her second day of trying to audition. Yesterday, the Millionaire folks gave her the wrong time to show up, then treated her with all the dignity of a used napkin. I shake my head. We speculate that they treat us badly because they feel threatened by our intellect. It’s a good feeling—the feeling of being part of an oppressed but brainy minority.
After forty-five minutes of waiting—during which, for some reason, I start mentally reviewing vice presidents on the chance that they will play a major part in the Millionaire quiz (Hubert Humphrey, George Dallas, Charles Warren Fairbanks)—we are ushered into a huge room. The room has posters of actual millionaires—ABC stars like Drew Carey.
The Millionaire helpers pass out the quizzes and the official Who Wants to Be a Millionaire number 2 pencils to the hundred-plus hopefuls. We have eleven minutes to answer thirty multiple choice questions. Now go!
The questions are of midlevel difficulty. They aren’t like the disturbingly simple hundred-dollar questions on the show, the ones like “What color is an orange?” but they also aren’t the million-dollar variety, like “What was the name of Cardinal Richelieu’s pet cockatoo?”
I dive in.
What does not follow a straight path?
(a) the Equator
(b) the Tropic of Cancer
(c) the International Date Line
(d) the meridian
I knew it! I knew it thanks very much to the Britannica, which had a map of the International Date Line taking a jog to the west so that it would avoid the Aleutian Islands. I’m feeling good, feeling cocky.
Which planet cannot be seen with the naked eye?
(a) Mercury
(b) Saturn
(c) Jupiter
(d) Neptune
Again, the Britannica to the rescue. I know my planets. I remember the poor telescope operator Challis whose claim to fame is that he failed to discover Neptune. Neptune’s the tough one to find. Neptune it is.
I zip through the rest. And here’s the weird part: the questions that leave me baffled mostly focus on my former safe haven, pop culture. What country is Latina pop star Shakira from? Not a clue. If I were keeping up with my People magazines instead of burying my nose in the Britannica, I would know.
“So how’d you do?” I ask my unemployed BlackBerry owner.
“Pretty well,” she says. “I didn’t know the one about Captain Matthew Perry.”
“Commodore Matthew Perry,” I correct her.
“Yes, Commodore Perry. I didn’t know which country he opened up to trade.”
“That’d be Japan,” I say, suppressing the urge to pat her on the head. “Did you think it was the Republic of Courtney Cox?” I chuckle.
She doesn’t react.
“Because, you know, the actor on Friends is named Matthew Perry as well,” I say. “And he’s going out with Courtney Cox on the show.”
God, I can be a condescending schmuck. Meanwhile, the other end of our table has become very noisy. A fierce debate has erupted over the question “Which advertising character is known for lying?” The correct answer is fast-talking eighties car salesman Joe Isuzu, but one man is arguing that Madge—the Palmolive lady—was also a stinking liar. Madge refused to admit that her soft hands were the result of submersion in Palmolive. A lie.
But the argument will have to wait. The tests have been graded by Millionaire’s speedy computer. We were each assigned a number—mine is two—and the emcee begins calling out the winners.
“Number three!”
The crowd claps grudgingly for number three, who stands up and takes a deep waist bow.
“Number eighty-six!”
More halfhearted applause.
