by A. J. Jacobs
Poe, Edgar Allan
He married his cousin when she was thirteen. Sort of the Jerry Lee Lewis of his day but with more interest in Gothic imagery.
pop quiz
We’re back from Philly, and my mom has sent Julie and me an e-mail. For years, my mom refused to get e-mail, saying she thought it was a waste of time, but now that she’s gotten it, she’s become a frighteningly enthusiastic forwarder of lawyer jokes, Jewish jokes, wacky haiku, and other things with smiley emoticons at the end of them. This e-mail is a collection of trivia called “Think you know everything? Think again.” So admittedly, it’s pretty relevant.
After the Great Red Spot debacle, I’ve been very good recently about refraining from inserting unwanted facts into conversations with Julie. But this time I have license. Julie wants to quiz me. As I lie on the couch, my Britannica resting on my chest, she reads off her Macintosh screen.
“All right. A dime has how many ridges around the edge?”
“Two hundred and forty-four,” I say.
“No. A hundred and eighteen.”
“What did Al Capone’s business card say he did?”
“Phrenologist.”
“No, used furniture dealer.”
“Who invented the words ‘assassination’ and ‘bump’?”
“Well, Assassins were an Islamic sect. They were named for the hashish they smoked to get into a frenzied state before acts of war.”
“No. Shakespeare. What is the longest one-syllable word in the English language?”
“Makalakamakai,” I say. No doubt Alexander Woolcott would have had the exact same answer had this question been asked at the Algonquin—and had “makalakamakai” been a one-syllable word.
“No, ‘screeched.’ Which winter was so cold that Niagara Falls froze over?”
“Nineteen thirty-two,” I say confidently.
“Yes,” says Julie. She looks at me. She seems genuinely impressed, even amazed.
“How did you know that?”
Frankly, I guessed. Pure plucked-from-thin-air speculation. But there is no way I am going to tell Julie that. I am going to take full credit for this one.
“I just know a lot,” I say. “I know so much sometimes I don’t even know how much I know.”
Powhatan
Powhatan was an Indian tribal leader and the father of Pocahontas. I went to Camp Powhatan in Maine for three summers—and until very recently received the Pow-Wow Newsletter, keeping me apprised of such vital information as the construction of a new outhouse facility near Bunk 14—and yet somehow I was able to remain ignorant of the identity of Powhatan himself. This is a little embarrassing. I probably should have paid attention to my history textbook or at least gone to see Disney’s Pocahontas. That might have helped.
Powhatan, says the Britannica, was “a bright and energetic ruler, but he was also noted as being cruel.” This is appropriate, because we campers were both energetic and cruel, as well. But mostly cruel. We were a real bunch of prepubescent schmucks. I’m thinking in particular of our treatment of Rob Blonkin, a frizzy-haired twelve-year-old from upstate New York who suffered from numerous twitches, most notably one involving excessive puckering, which immediately qualified him as our scapegoat (the original scapegoat, of course, was burdened with sins and thrown over a Jerusalem cliff).
We developed several methods of mental torture. In one, we’d go up to Rob and say, very quickly, “Hi, Rob. How you doing, Rob? Bye, Rob”—then walk away. This would leave him sputtering in frustration, still formulating his response of “I’m fine.” In another method—our most sophisticated and evil—we’d sing “All Around the Mulberry Bush” in a particularly menacing manner, which, without fail, caused Rob to burst into tears. No one knew why. It was a Pavlovian thing, I guess; we’d start by growling, “All around,” and by the time we got to “Pop goes the weasel,” Rob’s cheeks were wet.
I’m not proud of this behavior. Those summers were my lowest moments as a moral being. (During the school year, I was more likely to be the one sprouting tears from bullies who were making fun of my acne, of which there are fifty different types, by the way.) I don’t have an excuse. Maybe I was so focused on being the smartest boy in the world. Looking back, maybe I should have tried to be the most moral boy in the world. Maybe I should have said, “Hey, instead of making Blonkin cry, let’s have a bake sale and donate the money to farmers in developing countries.”
One thing is for sure: if Julie and I ever have a boy, I’m not sending him to an all-male camp. Exclusively male environments lead to trouble. The EB talks about the increased incidence of aggressive behavior in small groups of isolated men, such as polar explorers and prisoners. No doubt about that. Polar explorers, prisoners, and predominantly Jewish summer camps in Maine and Vermont. But I digress. Back to the books.
precedent
I’ve never met someone else who read the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z. There’ve been a couple of people in the same ballpark, reference-book-wise. My mother-in-law, Barbara, for instance, has read almost the entire Manhattan phone book. She loves it. Thinks it should be on Oprah’s book club. She tells me she started to read it when she was a kid visiting her grandparents. They were just over from the old country, spoke no English, and spent their days eating chicken fat and weeping. “So what do kids do when adults are crying?” says Barbara. “They read the phone book, of course.” She says this emphatically, as if it’s a perfectly logical syllogism. Who am I to question it? So ever since childhood, Barbara has devoured a few letters whenever she has some free time. “I learn some very interesting things,” she says. I once asked her what exactly she’s learned. “Well, I learned that a man I know who works with Spike Lee lives in the building next to yours.” That kind of thing.
And every couple of weeks or so, I run into someone who confesses to being an encyclopedia dabbler. One man told me how his mom stashed the Britannica in the kids’ bathroom growing up. She was hoping to fill her children’s minds while they voided other parts of their bodies. Problem was, this guy would remain seated on the toilet reading about Faulkner and flamingos and flounders for hours, while his siblings banged on the door outside and suffered bladder distress.
But these are amateurs. I’ve never met anyone who’s completed the alphabetical marathon that is the great EB. (Incidentally, the modern marathon gets its distance—26 miles and 385 yards—because the British Olympic committee in 1908 wanted it to go from Windsor Castle to the Royal Box in London Stadium.) I’ve never met anyone who has attempted to read every word. I know they’re out there. Or at least they were in the past. George Bernard Shaw read the complete ninth edition at the British Museum. Physicist Richard Feynman consumed an entire set. C. S. Forester—the author of the Horatio Hornblower series—also read the EB. And he read it twice, which I suppose makes him twice as smart as I will ever be. It’s not clear whether Aldous Huxley—the author of Brave New World—read the entire thing, but he carried half-sized volumes with him on trips, calling it the best travel reading around.
These guys were no slouches, and that made me feel good. After polishing off Z, maybe I’ll come up with a revolutionary theorem in astrophysics or at the very least, write a respected nautical novel. But these names were also unsatisfying. I wanted someone living, someone with whom I could swap war stories.
I called the Britannica headquarters and spoke to the publicist Tom Panelas. As you might expect, Tom was the smartest publicist I had ever encountered. In all my years talking to publicists for Paul Reiser and Bruce Willis and the like, I had never heard the adjective “Borgesian.” Tom used it. He also knew all about Huxley’s Britannica habit—and added that Huxley died on November 22, 1963—the exact same day as C. S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy. Good to know.
Tom told me there had been other faithful readers over the years—that’s what we’re called, “faithful readers”—but he didn’t know if any of them were still alive. (He assured me that there isn’t a causal relationship. My
head won’t explode.) He promised to investigate further.
A couple of days later, Tom called with an update. The only other person currently reading the entire Britannica is a guy in a small town in China. He wrote a couple of fan letters awhile back, but the letters are gone, and the EB folks have no way of contacting him. On the other hand, there’s one living American who read the Britannica from A to Z decades ago, when he was a kid. His name is Michael DeBakey. As any fan of surgical breakthroughs knows, DeBakey has since gone on to become a world-famous heart doctor—he implanted the first artificial heart in 1963—and to merit his own four paragraphs in the Britannica.
I phoned up Dr. DeBakey and was surprised when the esteemed ninety-five-year-old physician got on the line. DeBakey has a wonderful Louisiana drawl and a warm way about him. I think I’d feel comfortable having him reroute my aorta, even if he’s seen a few dozen birthdays.
“When I was a child,” DeBakey says, “my parents allowed us to take one book out of the library every week. I came home one day and said there was a wonderful book at the library—but they wouldn’t lend it to me. My parents said, ‘What is it?’ And I said, ‘It’s the Encyclopaedia Britannica.’ So they bought a set. I was about ten or twelve years old, so it must have been 1919 or so. By the time I went to college, I had finished the whole thing. I had four siblings, and all of us would rush through our lessons so we could get to read the encyclopedia.”
I ask him, as a man who has survived the voyage from A to Z, if he has any advice for me.
“You have a job and a family,” says Dr. DeBakey. “You only have a limited amount of time. The thing you want to do is skip over the topics you aren’t interested in.”
I don’t want to be rude, so I jot down his wisdom and thank him. But my actual reaction is: What? I can’t do that. I’m trying to achieve something here. Trying to finish something consequential—if simultaneously ludicrous—for the first time in my life. I can’t run fourteen miles of marathon, and take a cab through the neighborhoods that don’t appeal. I’ve got to be—as Alex Trebek says—curious about things that don’t interest me.
procrastination
I’m pissed at myself. I just spent forty-five minutes Googling my ex-girlfriends and ex-crushes. That’s just information I don’t need. I don’t need to know that Noel Dawkins is a consultant on an indie movie called Dead Sexy. Or that Rachel Zabar still holds the record for the 1600-meter dash at the Dalton School. Or that Kathleen Murtha—probably not even the Kathleen Murtha I know—wrote a letter of recommendation for a California roofing service. This is an unhealthy addiction, this Google, a waste of my time and brain space. Those forty-five minutes could have been spent any number of ways: reading the Britannica would have been nice, or hanging out with my wife, or maybe sorting our rubber bands by size and color. As Dr. DeBakey points out, I have a limited amount of time. So that’s it: No more inconsequential Googling, I tell myself. Though I know that vow will be unbroken for maybe three days, max.
It’s been a constant battle to dam the data flood that comes with being a 21st-century American. I’m trying to keep my mind relatively free from non-Britannica information, on the Sherlock Holmesian theory that there’s only so much room in the mental attic. And I have made a little progress. I’ve cut way down on the New York Post; no more updates on Kirsten Dunst’s canoodling behavior for me. I trimmed back on my New York Times consumption—only the important articles about world events; no more whimsical stories about the trend for upscale luaus.
Proust, Marcel
It wasn’t a madeleine. In real life, Proust’s memories were sparked by a rusk biscuit, which is basically another name for zweiback toast. He changed it when he wrote Remembrance of Things Past. What’s wrong with zweiback? I’m just guessing, but I smell a corrupt product placement deal with the madeleine industry.
Public school
I was lucky enough to go to a fancy private school. But my dad—he was a pure public school kid. He took the subway every day from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Bronx Science, a public school for gifted children, mostly middle-class Jewish kids at the time.
I know a good amount about my dad’s education after high school. I know about his many, many diplomas. He’s told me how engineering school battered his eyesight with its microscopic charts on steam pressure. He’s told me about how, during law school, he operated some of the earliest computers—the ones with punch cards and vacuum tubes that sprawled over several basketball courts. He even wrote a paper on how computers could influence the legal field, modestly proposing that computers be the judge, jury, and—since they were already electric—executioner. So I know about his college days.
But the high school era—that’s sketchy. So as part of my continuing effort to figure out the origin of my mania for knowledge, I figure it’d be good to get a few more details on my dad’s formative years. The next time I see him—it’s at a benefit thrown by my grandfather—I corner my dad.
My dad, of course, is reluctant to answer seriously. But I press him. “It’s for my encyclopedia project,” I tell him, cryptically. Well, he says, there’s not really much to tell. His favorite subjects were math and science. He had a ducktail haircut.
And how was he as a student? Top 5 percent? Top 10?
He shakes his head. “Oh no. Top seventy-eighth percentile.”
What? Is this a joke?
“No. I was in the seventy-eighth percentile.”
“How’d that happen?”
“I had a rule. I only did homework on the subway to and from school. If I didn’t finish it on the subway, it never got done.”
This was a weird revelation. My dad as a slacker. It’s strange to discover your dad’s flaws, even if they’re small and forty-five years old. Somehow, it makes his twenty-four books seem less intimidating. Even slow starters like my dad can end up accomplishing great things.
Puccini
Julie convinced me to go to the theater. I try to go to the theater about once per Juglar cycle (the eight-year financial cycle of global recession). The genre just doesn’t appeal to me. I grew up on movies and TV, so whenever I’m at a Broadway show, I keep waiting for the director to cut to a new scene. Where’s the montage? Where’s the extreme close-up featuring the actor’s huge, unblinking eyes? Instead, I’m looking at the exact same sawed-in-half house for an entire excruciating hour.
But Julie tells me that if I’m trying to become smarter, I should engage in some highbrow cultural activities. And she’s right. So I found myself sitting in my red faux velvet seat at the Broadway production of the opera La Bohème, waiting for the show to start.
“So is it what you expected?” says Julie.
“What?”
“The inside of a Broadway theater.”
“I have been to a couple of shows before.”
“Now, remember, there won’t be any previews. It’s just going to start right in.”
“Okay, okay. Very good.”
“And no yelling at the screen,” she said. “Because these are live actors, and they can hear you.”
Mercifully, the lights go down and the show begins. It’s not a bad show. The plot line is okay—a love story with a little consumption thrown in. But now, a couple of weeks later, as I read about La Bohème’s composer, Giacomo Puccini, I’ve become less impressed. The problem is, Puccini’s life contained more high drama and surprising twists than his operas. Why didn’t Puccini just write some librettos out of his diary? Here’s what he could have put to music:
In the 1880s, says the Britannica, Puccini caused a scandal when he fled from his Italian hometown of Lucca with a married woman named Elvira. His affair with Elvira— whom he eventually married—was juicy, but it was only Act I. In 1908, “Elvira unexpectedly became jealous of Doria Manfredi, a young servant from the village who had been employed for several years by the Puccinis. She drove Doria from the house, threatening to kill her. Subsequently, the servant girl poisoned herself, and her parents had the bod
y examined by a physician, who declared her a virgin. The Manfredis brought charges against Elvira for persecution and calumny, creating one of the most famous scandals of the day.” Elvira, says the EB, was found guilty, but Puccini paid off Doria’s parents to keep Elvira out of prison. After that, Puccini’s marriage was “in name only.”
Murder threats, poison, adultery, trial, young servant girls—what more do you want? That’s one lesson the Britannica drives home every day: truth is better than fiction.
punctuation
The Greek interrogation mark became the English semicolon. Bizarre, no;
Pythagoras
Here I encountered one of the quirkiest men in the encyclopedia. He seemed so harmless—the inventor of the perfectly rational geometric theorem that bears his name. But not counting his admirable work with triangles, Pythagoras was a complete and total wacko. He founded a religious brotherhood in ancient Greece—and by religious brotherhood, I mean a fringe cult. According to the encyclopedia, members of the brotherhood were told to “refrain from speaking about the holy, wear white clothes, observe sexual purity, not touch beans, and so forth.”
That’s what it said: do not touch beans. The Britannica offered no explanation for this edict, which it listed as if it was just another run-of-the-mill commandment, along the lines of “Do not kill your parents.” It didn’t say whether that meant all beans, or just certain beans like kidney or pinto. Just those four words. Sometimes I’m inspired to venture into non-Britannica sources to clarify a point—but in the case of no-bean-touching, I decided to accept it and move on.
Legumes aside, Pythagoras also had a complex set of beliefs about the spiritual qualities of mathematics and the holy attributes of certain numbers. The brotherhood was way into math. Fanatically so. The brothers allegedly drowned one of their members because he pointed out the existence of irrational numbers, which didn’t jibe with the Pythagorean worldview.
