improbable things. Assassinated the premier of Hungaryusing oven cleaner and margarine. Held prisoner by talking leopards. Spotted Barry Goldwater spreading banana peels on the
Chappaquiddick bridge. And if they’re telling the truth, you’ve got a great story. The problem is, they’re usually not, and
quite often they themselves don’t know that they’re not. The Three-Minute Mile Principle is a kind of information triage.
It says that you can’t spend too much of your life checking out all kinds of nutball contentions. If somebody shows up claiming
to have run a mile in three minutes, he probably hasn’t.
Should there be a corollary that says, “On the other hand, if you don’t check out the wildest assertions, you’ll miss Watergate;
you’ll spend your career confirming and reconfirming the dull normal”?
No. We don’t need that rule. You go into the newspaper business because you believe or at least hope that the fabulous is
sometimes true, that giants do walk the earth, and that the tip about machine-gun-wielding teenaged dropouts forming a secret
commune at an abandoned marina on the river is real. You tell your editor you’re going to drive down there and check it out,
and she says, “Good,” because she’s the same way. We don’t need any reminder to keep a certain dreamy romanticism alive in
our work. We had fathers who talked to fairies and who claimed to be secret math geniuses, fathers who took their pre-Christmas
paychecks to the racetrack and hoped the kids would remember the year they came back with the best toys ever.
So when it comes to Bob McEnroe vs. Gödel, screw the Three-Minute Mile Principle. Sitting there with that paper in my hand,
I really believe he’s done it. What choice do I have? One-third of my identity, roughly, is bound up in the belief that this
man with the unruly hair and the permanently distracted look, with his head bowed and his eyes sliding over into an unseeable
crack in the universe, this man is an overlooked genius.
Without having to be told, I know that he is worried aboutpiracy. What if someone, somehow, got hold of his proof (or disproof) and claimed it as his or her own? His only hope is
to publish it under his own name, but what journal of mathematics is going to listen to a real estate agent and former Broadway
playwright with no formal education in higher math (his recent incarceration in a psychiatric facility being very much the
cherry on the Crackpot Parfait)? I know also that, in my dad’s mind, this mathematical insight is some kind of souvenir from
his supernatural travels, a pale flower plucked from a path in the underworld or an elf-cake baked by the little people.
The little people. He stays up late, communing with them and (more than I know) tippling. They’re the ones who have him thinking
he’s a math genius.
He needs to get it set in type, published, so that he can prove he was the first to refute Gödel. But if he approaches anyone
with this idea, he’ll be dismissed, he knows, as a crank.
“I have a fiendish plan,” he tells me one night.
“Oh?”
So what’s
your
father up to?
“The bottom rung on most ladders is a cell, a place to lock away those who might do harm if left free to roam. There are different
kinds of cells and they make up a ladder of their own. At the top is the luxury cell, which is set aside for dictators, kings,
and presidents. This story is concerned with a cell at the very bottom. It holds a naked mental patient. His mind has been
in a fugue state for five years. He is incontinent. He is washed by a hose. His food is prepared in chunks like dog food.
He cannot be trusted with a knife or fork.”
These are some notes by my father for his novel
The Nemo Paradox.
My father has never been inclined to do harm, but he knows what it is like to wake up from a coma and find his handsand feet tied to the frame of a hospital bed, to have only the dimmest sense of how
Chappaquiddick bridge. And if they’re telling the truth, you’ve got a great story. The problem is, they’re usually not, and
quite often they themselves don’t know that they’re not. The Three-Minute Mile Principle is a kind of information triage.
It says that you can’t spend too much of your life checking out all kinds of nutball contentions. If somebody shows up claiming
to have run a mile in three minutes, he probably hasn’t.
Should there be a corollary that says, “On the other hand, if you don’t check out the wildest assertions, you’ll miss Watergate;
you’ll spend your career confirming and reconfirming the dull normal”?
No. We don’t need that rule. You go into the newspaper business because you believe or at least hope that the fabulous is
sometimes true, that giants do walk the earth, and that the tip about machine-gun-wielding teenaged dropouts forming a secret
commune at an abandoned marina on the river is real. You tell your editor you’re going to drive down there and check it out,
and she says, “Good,” because she’s the same way. We don’t need any reminder to keep a certain dreamy romanticism alive in
our work. We had fathers who talked to fairies and who claimed to be secret math geniuses, fathers who took their pre-Christmas
paychecks to the racetrack and hoped the kids would remember the year they came back with the best toys ever.
So when it comes to Bob McEnroe vs. Gödel, screw the Three-Minute Mile Principle. Sitting there with that paper in my hand,
I really believe he’s done it. What choice do I have? One-third of my identity, roughly, is bound up in the belief that this
man with the unruly hair and the permanently distracted look, with his head bowed and his eyes sliding over into an unseeable
crack in the universe, this man is an overlooked genius.
Without having to be told, I know that he is worried aboutpiracy. What if someone, somehow, got hold of his proof (or disproof) and claimed it as his or her own? His only hope is
to publish it under his own name, but what journal of mathematics is going to listen to a real estate agent and former Broadway
playwright with no formal education in higher math (his recent incarceration in a psychiatric facility being very much the
cherry on the Crackpot Parfait)? I know also that, in my dad’s mind, this mathematical insight is some kind of souvenir from
his supernatural travels, a pale flower plucked from a path in the underworld or an elf-cake baked by the little people.
The little people. He stays up late, communing with them and (more than I know) tippling. They’re the ones who have him thinking
he’s a math genius.
He needs to get it set in type, published, so that he can prove he was the first to refute Gödel. But if he approaches anyone
with this idea, he’ll be dismissed, he knows, as a crank.
“I have a fiendish plan,” he tells me one night.
“Oh?”
So what’s
your
father up to?
“The bottom rung on most ladders is a cell, a place to lock away those who might do harm if left free to roam. There are different
kinds of cells and they make up a ladder of their own. At the top is the luxury cell, which is set aside for dictators, kings,
and presidents. This story is concerned with a cell at the very bottom. It holds a naked mental patient. His mind has been
in a fugue state for five years. He is incontinent. He is washed by a hose. His food is prepared in chunks like dog food.
He cannot be trusted with a knife or fork.”
These are some notes by my father for his novel
The Nemo Paradox.
My father has never been inclined to do harm, but he knows what it is like to wake up from a coma and find his handsand feet tied to the frame of a hospital bed, to have only the dimmest sense of how
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