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Another well lay beside the root in the country of the giants. It belonged to the giant Mimir. Wisdom and knowledge were contained in the waters of this well, and Mimir guarded it closely. One day Odin decided to seek out Mimir and ask a drink from his well. Odin set out from Asgard and traveled the long journey to Jotunheim and Mimir's Well.

"O Mimir," asked Odin, "I would gain wisdom from the waters that lie in your well. Will you give me leave to drink of it?"

"How greatly," asked Mimir, "Do you desire this wisdom? The price is dear."

"What do you ask?" said Odin.

"If you will leave one of your eyes with me you shall drink of the well," said Mimir. "That is the only price."

And because Odin so greatly desired to be wise he gave his eye in exchange for a drink from Mimir's Well. Henceforth he had but one eye to view the outward world, but his wisdom taught him to see deep into the hearts of men.

— Dorothy Hosford, Thunder of the Gods (1952), Holt, Rinehart and Winston

It wasn't immediately clear to me that Paul would become a revolutionary force in my development. But unlike the other shrinks I'd toyed with, he took seriously his responsibility to improve the quality of my life. And he expected me to stop nursing my wounds and start grappling with some pretty serious human issues.

Once I saw this, the tables were turned. I could no longer treat psychotherapy as a game whose rules I could change in any way that amused me. Suddenly the game was life itself, and my ignorance of its rules was painfully obvious to both Paul and me. Would I be able to keep up with Paul, or would he reject me as Karl had?

"I focus on interpersonal dynamics," Paul explained when I first walked into his office on my 20th birthday. "You know, how things like love and power work themselves out in relationships." That sounded like what I was interested. Judy had already warned me against obsessing about silly things like the "unconscious".

Over the next few weeks, he introduced me to his ideas, but he was careful not to get too technical. To help make subtle distinctions, he would refer to scenes from great literature that he thought I'd be familiar with. One day I remember him digging into a box in his office closet for a tattered copy of the Penguin paperback edition of E. V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey. "Part of this is didactic," he said, explaining why he talked as much about the world as about me and my little problems. But although his conceptual depth was apparent, and though I memorized his ideas quickly enough to recite them back to him on demand, I had no idea how to actually have a conversation with the man. Talking with someone about important things was something I'd never had any experience with, not with my parents, not with my schoolteachers, and not, though no effort was spared, with so much as a single friend.

Paul told me how he had developed Jung's theory of personality types, which said that people were either introverts or extroverts. He liked to call them "yielding" or "assertive" because he didn't like neologisms. Two or three weeks into this he said, "Would you say that you're a yielding or an assertive type?" — more to review what I had learned than to learn anything new about me.

In my college, great ideas were treated like butterflies to be pinned to corkboards in decorative arrangements. The pursuit of truth was an esthetic exercise, not to be taken terribly seriously. I wanted Paul to understand that I could see where he was going with his lesson plan without having to commit to believing a word of it. Since in previous sessions he had already attributed to me qualities he was now calling assertive, I looked at the ceiling and answered, "You want me to say I'm an assertive type. You want me to say that I relate to the world by taking power rather than giving love. You want me to say that I live in the world of the concrete rather than the world of the abstract." I felt I would get a pat on the head for using his technical terms correctly. But he sighed and stared at his notepad.

"So that's what they taught you," he muttered with deep disappointment.

I was crestfallen, seeing immediately what a house of cards my new-found pretense at intellectuality was. Here was a real Socrates who needed my trust if we were going to get anywhere. He needed to "reach" the real me, as he would often say in subsequent conversations, not just play memory games with scholarly factoids that would never be applied to real life. Would I rise to the challenge?

After a few more visits I noticed an open cardboard box near his desk. "My new book is out," he said. He got up, dug out a copy of , and signed it for me. When I got back to college a few weeks later, I opened the book. The dedication read: In June 1945, standing alone in the Marine cemetery on the island of Tinian in the Marianas, I made a promise to carry throughout life a sense of responsibility for doing my full share to bring a better world into existence. Since then I have turned my back more than once on conventional social responsibility and its rewards to search for the kind of life which might lead to the fulfillment of that pledge. The cemetery in Tinian no longer exists. I offer this book to the memory of the men who once lay buried there.

Apart from the altruism this expressed, unusual in scientific (and absent in academic) literature, I was struck by the fact that, like Timothy Leary, Paul seemed to be a counterculture type who had "dropped out, turned on and tuned it." He was an original. As I began reading the book, however, his clearly written treatment seemed unremarkable in its coverage. It seemed too intent on describing aspects of human psychology that are self-evident even to children. Was Paul an anthropologist from Mars, preparing one more dry report for the commisioner? Yet I slowly began to see that this fastidiousness was consistent with a stringent kind of scientific objectivity. Even the simplest scientific principles are worth stating in full, otherwise how can we prevent disagreements based on unstated premises? And as description built upon description, I began to feel electrified. Paul was describing human nature from the ground up in a richer and more comprehensive way than I had ever seen.

In college I had familiarised myself with the theories of half a dozen famous psychologists, but had had trouble relating their discoveries to the problems I had in my own life. Paul outclassed both Freud and Jung in three areas: scientific objectivity, semantic consistency, and enormity of scope. It was Freud's theories especially which seemed fantastic by comparison. Freud's entire theoretical edifice was based on a handful of disturbing case histories. He made his patients lie on a couch facing away from him and then told them to emit random sentences that he could use in coming up with improvised "interpretions" that would astonish and fascinate them. Since gullible people often have money in their pockets, his business boomed. Very few of them realized they were no more than pinned butterflies to him.

In his writings, Freud never presented convincing evidence, but treated his speculations like entertaining post-graduate interpretations of great literature, the actual truth of which was of only secondary importance. He was content to write headline grabbing books, as did Velikovsky, and to make a name for himself with an educated public curious to learn about the new procedure he invented out of thin air called "psychoanalysis". Like previous merchants of magic, he held out false hopes of understanding human problems through gimmicks like dream-interpretation and slips of the tongue. His "unconsious consciousness" could always be blamed for everything any time you fucked up. As far as I could see, the only thing he got right was calling religion "infantile".

Jung took human beings more seriously. He saw that people could do more with their lives than just learn how their unconscious was making them do nutty things. People could enlarge themselves in all kinds of ways, which he described in detail. Their insights and abilities could grow throughout a lifetime. Even people who were prescientific in their world views could grow, after all, and he tried to understand this process by appreciating primitive cultures. But although Jung was bright, he wasn't particularly deep. And he was easily distracted by his own scholastic conceits, sprinkling his writings with untenable fantasies of his own, like racial memory and flying saucers.

Paul's book made Freud seem like an idle rumor mongerer and Jung a well-meaning dodderer. After reading only thirty pages of . I knew I had discovered a top-notch thinker, and definitely someone I could learn from. His ideas were more cogent and more relevant to the inner struggle I was going through than anything being talked about at my college. Although they prided themselves in being supersophisticated guardians of the best in civilization, the teachers I had met at college were in fact utterly conventional in their world views. Their attitudes about pre-marital sex, homosexuality, psychedelic drugs and the moral abomination of long hair on boys were all adopted uncritically from the culture in which they happened to find themselves. That wasn't my idea of intellectuality. It corresponded more to Nietzsche's image of the professors he had encountered in his own youth, "old maids" covered with funeral parlor makeup and lousy with sweet perfume, living in terror lest anyone learn what they actually looked or smelled like.

I made plans to see Paul at Thanksgiving.

When I walked into Paul's office, he seemed very serious. "I've made a decision about you," he said. I didn't know shrinks were allowed to do that. "I'm in love with you. I want to be your new Karl."

I was dumbfounded. I had landed a big fish. But I wasn't at all sure I could swim in Paul's pond. If Karl could send me into a tailspin, Paul could easily end my life.

"And don't worry," he went on. "I'll suck your cock. You won't have to suck mine."

These are words you don't forget.

Now it was my turn to be disappointed. Aside from feeling a bit icky, I also felt just terribly sorry for the old guy. But "Oh, Paul" were the only words that came out of me. It must have felt like a splash of cold water to him. He stood up and moved to the couch, a little further away from me. He looked out the window and spat, "Another queer!", as if that was what I must be thinking. The room grew very quiet.

I went back to school feeling like I'd dodged a bullet. Was Paul a real opportunity to find myself, or would he be my undoing? I thought hard about my ongoing relationship with Judy, who loved me and had nursed me back to health from the brink of suicide but who didn't understand why I wanted to accomplish anything with my life. When we got back together that fall at school, she seemed especially clingy, which now seemed inappropriate. I told her that I had a new more masculine image of myself, based on my visits with Paul. "I like your new image," she said. I really didn't want to give her up, and I especially didn't want to hurt her.

Paul clearly had a lot to teach me, though I couldn't understand at all why he would bother loving me. But I had to find out what this was all about. It seemed to be the key to curing my obsession with Karl and getting back on a healthy path of self-fulfillment. I wrote Paul long letters about the Greek ideal of love between men and said I would see him again at Christmas.

He greeted me with a big warm smile. To change the venue a bit, we went into a second office. This one was Alan's, the man Paul had just broken up with. This was supposed to let us start on a new footing, but new surroundings distract me and I was feeling queasy anyway. Paul tried to show how much in love with me he was. "Can I kiss you??" he said breathlessly. "Okay," I said, bracing myself. He showed his excitement by wagging his tongue like a happy puppy, a frenetic gesture that only magnified my anxiety. Was tongue-wagging a secret signal that had special meaning to homosexuals? Fortunately the kiss only reached my cheek.

I must have mentioned at some point that I was good at billiards because then he said, "We have a pool table downstairs. Would you like to see it?"

"Okay," I said. Why did he want me to see his pool table?, I was feeling increasingly self-conscious and awash with perplexity. Having read Dante, an image of descending into deeper circles of hell popped into my head. How was I ever going to get out of this?

"I know how I can serve you," he said, happily. "You shoot the balls into the pockets, and I'll put them back on the table."

"Okay," I said. I began shooting the balls into the pockets and he began putting them back on the table. It didn't take long for us to see that this wasn't going anywhere. He needed to be effusive and enthusiastic with someone he was in love with, but what I wanted from him was wisdom. I needed to learn how to take control of my life, not how to waste an afternoon smothered in happy frolicking puppy whimpers.

We found ourselves in his office again. The sober Paul had come back, the Paul I liked, the Paul whose brain I needed to pick.

"You're not ready," he explained. "You still feel too much like a little boy in my presence."

What the hell had he expected? Parents expect obedience from their children. Colleges require submission to authority. The man was three times my age. But he was right. I needed to put that behind me now and become a man.

"I'll wait for you," he said. "Take as much time as you need."

I'm 67 now and most people would expect me to be able to tell a coherent narrative of my life, illustrating clear cause and effect connections between events. But this is one of the conceits of the modern age, a form of "civilized" facade that protects us and others from seeing how incomplete we are, how little we ever really understand of our own histories.

I have always tried to take the Socratic approach to such conceits, to always be ready and even eager to find and tear out the roots of ignorance in myself and, when they can tolerate it, my friends. Nothing is ever quite as thrilling to me as to learn something truly deep and meaninful about myself, even if I have to abandon my opinions about everything else.

Towards the end of his life, Paul, who'd needed to abandon 20 years of training in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, said he was never more than a few pages ahead of the class. Rachel says that every 5 years she's had to adopt a completely new world-view. Similarly, I tacitly offer a simple contract to other humans: I try to teach you everything I know that you don't, and you try to teach me everything you know that I don't. That way we both have a chance of winning. Any other approach to communication, particularly the kind of debating that goes on at universities, I find utterly irrelevant and will not indulge. Of course, then the difficult part begins: figuring out who knows what. But at least you're facing a real problem and not just playing a game.

So it is not totally surprising to report that yesterday, June 29, 2014, I believe I learned something that I had never known about myself. How, in fact, I had died at the age of four.

During the last 15 years my mind has softened. I've been able to access what humans call "emotions" more. In sentimental movies, for example, I usually always smirk when you're supposed to cry. At the end of "Love Story" I actually laughed out loud, which did not please my fellow movie-goers. But more recently I have found tears welling up on my face in a way which Star Trek's Mr. Spock would have called "highly illogical". In "Gorillas in the Mist", when Sigourney Weaver as Diane Fossey is buried next to one of her beloved gorillas, tribesmen rearrange the stones encircling the gorilla so that they now encircle both corpses. Why did illogical tears leak all over my my face?

One of my cardiologists thought this softening might be related to the scores of micro-strokes that people my age get without even noticing them. It doesn't really matter. And, although I find it odd, I like being able to feel. I have come around to Fellini's viewpoint: "I adore cheap sentiment!" It harms no one, and helps me feel a solidarity with humans I've never previously felt.

Only during the last year, with increasing physical infirmaties, have I enjoyed the strange experience of watching my body burst into tears. I don't really mind when this happens. It certainly doesn't embarrass me. In fact, I rather enjoy the embarrassment it causes others. Nothing human is alien to me, as Terence said. If it is alien to others, maybe they should just get over themselves.

This happened most recently several weeks ago when a sleepless night caused by an incompentent hospital staff after minor foot surgery triggered a flare-up of gout in my knees. A nurse-practitioner who was assisting my rheumatologist was there when the pain was as bad as it had ever been. The tears poured out of my face and I heard myself muttering "Nobody gives a shit." Later on I tried to find a rational explanation for this universal condemnation, because it was clearly not simply true. Eileen, the nurse practitioner, had done all she possibly could.

Yesterday when I woke up after having another gout relapse and not being able to sleep much, I couldn't stop weeping at my desk. This time I really did try to stop since it was upsetting Rachel, but every time she came over to hug me her touch was painful and made the weeping more uncontrollable, not less. It was now my responsibility to explain to her what was happening otherwise she would become seriously confused.

It's impossible to authenticate "recovered memories", but at that moment I seemed to remember being around four and realizing — once or maybe scores of times, I can't tell — that whenever I was upset I should just weep and never expect sympathy. Given my mother's icy nature, given the fact that she never touched her children except to inflict pain, I suspect this might have been learned from her.

Twenty years ago, a co-worker of mine named Jay lacked a right-hand. The rest of us were always wondering about how this loss might have twisted his emotional development. Finally I just asked him about it. "It's just something I don't have," he said, irritated. "Don't make a big deal out of it." I started to wonder how I would feel if I had been born on a planet where I would be considered a tragic freak because I only had two arms and two legs.

These days mental health workers have a financial interest in making tragedies out of everything, but I don't think they're right to do so. I'm objective enough, for example, to realize that my mother's disdain for children does not make her a monster. She didn't injure or murder children. I think she was going through the mother act only because in those days it was the price you paid for the privelege of having sex. She was conforming. She was being "normal".

Different cultures have different traditions about raising children. If you believe in biological evolution, you're also likely to believe that children are flexible in accepting which of their needs are appropriate and which needs must be forgotten forever. They survive. They don't mourn the parts of them that have died. The souls of children are like planaria worms. When you slice the souls of children, one part is discarded. Nobody keeps statistics on the discarded parts, any more than you can count the number of souls that are dead.

But at the age of four, I knew that in this world I would never have the right to expect sympathy of any kind. Ever. I let this need die, and, after the tears stopped flowing, welcomed the quietude setting into my personality. The more I saw that I would never need anything else from these people ever again, the more I became the person I am.

Surprisingly, aside from this slightly horrific flashback to a little boy deciding to die, other aspects of my childhood were rather pleasant, because even the worst of lives can be at least interesting.

I grew up in the Bronx, in an all-white middle-class housing project called Parkchester that was well-cared for by staff and tenants. Large apartment buildings were geometrically arranged like free-standing brick dominoes on a rectangular grid leaving spaces for several small oval-shaped parks. In aerial photographs it looks like a crossword puzzle. I'm sure the aliens get quite confused when they try to solve it.

My earliest memory is very dreamlike. I almost see myself from above, as is sometimes reported in near-death experiences. My mother is wheeling me in a baby carriage through one of these parks. And for the first time in my life I see in the distance a flood of people going their separate ways. I am unaccountably filled with ecstatic admiration for them and some inner joy for being one of them. Only in later years would the pomp of circus parades and brass bands marching down main street give me a similar if much dampened thrill. Now, of course, I hate mobs of any kind.

Imagine being a dinosaur in a world in which your kind are so untrustworthy that only two or three can safely be within sight of one another at a time. And imagine how thrilled you would be to find a herd that had somehow learned to live in peace. The human species has in fact attained this level of social organization — which is why we're horrified when when anyone commits murder or when developing nations collapse into civil war. We're so used to the peace and harmony that is unique to our kind that we don't appreciate how rare it is in the animal kingdom. Like fish who can't see water, our peacefulness is invisible. We think we live in a violent culture and a war-torn world, when actually the opposite is the case. The only reason our newspapers speak of little but crime and war is because these are now anomalies in stark contrast to the status quo. And we have a right to want to stamp out the last vestiges of these echoes of the distant past.

It's probably common for babies to see intuitively how beautiful their own species is, but when was the last time you saw somebody applaud the hustling and bustling of a busy metropolitan intersection? According to some science fiction interpretations — one of the few useful sources of psychological insight in the otherwise uptight world of modern literature — when the aliens visit they too enjoy this spectacle, as much as we delight in a flock of birds that bursts into the air unexpectedly. In fact, if you're ever at one of these bustling intersections and you spy somebody leaning against a building with a funny grin on his face, he's probably One of Them.

Somehow I have retained this pride in humanity all my life, as well as an inner joy in being counted a member of this noble race. Pride and joy structure my inner identity at its core. When either of them is damaged I'm not myself. It is essential to my mental health, in fact, that I always be in touch with the best in humanity and with the best in myself — even when the people around me are annoyed by the fact that I'm ignoring them and just staring into the distance. I am a connoiseur of human excellence, and hunt for genius in the unlikeliest places. Paul used to say that genius is as common as "pig tracks." That's true, but it gets beaten out of us so fast that most of us never even remember having had it. Some cosmologists think that in the first few moments of its existence the universe expanded very quickly, subsequently slowing down to a much slower rate of expansion. The strength and duration of this "inflationary phase" are critical parameters that influence the clumpiness of the subsequent distribution of matter we see in our telescopes. I think I must have experienced an inflationary phase in my infancy too, because they say I always asked too many questions and made too many demands on everybody around me. To me I was always just being myself, but in all likelihood to others I was a terror, always needing attention and tiring anyone around me by constantly showing off.

I have a photo of me sitting in the center of an absurdly large reading chair, looking straight at the camera like the King of Siam. The core of my personality has not changed since this photo was taken. Everything that has happened to me since has been a result of having this enlarged sense of self. Shrinks warn us that anomalous growth patterns are dangerous, but the good news is that some prodigies can sometimes accomplish great things. It's usually the inability of those around them to accomodate their genius that causes their downfall. Unfortunately, I am not one of those geniuses.

Mammals that have evolved a social life often feel threatened when stared at, since this is what predators do. And I gradually learned that some adults who haven't risen to a more human level of consciousness could also feel threatened by me. But my direct, calm gaze was never predatory. In fact, it was just the opposite. I found people exquisitely interesting, and I wanted to learn as much as possible about them as quickly as I could. Only by knowing them could I become useful.

I believe that the first four years of my life were reasonably happy, and this was no doubt due to two things: having a father that was madly in love with his boy, and having a mother who enjoyed an offspring that was very independent and didn't cling to her. I am glad that I couldn't see the disappointments ahead. This carefree period allowed me to develop an ability to enjoy myself that made possible future periods of what other people would consider lonliness. No matter how lonely I was, I could always find something in which to interest myself, in which to invest my abilities to understand and manipulate those tiny pieces of the world I had dominion over.

My first relationships outside my immediate family were with relatives. These people liked children, but didn't seem to have much to say to us. My father's brother, Harold and his wife, Mercedes, were relatively cold, Northern European types, who thought children should be seen and not heard. I liked them because they seemed honest and decent. My mother's mother, Nana, her sisters, Olga and Yoli and brothers, Jimmy and Mike, were much warmer and liveier. Jimmy and Mike not only liked children, but they felt free to hug them often, and to welcome hugs and chatter in return. They were very open about their ideas about life and, as I grew older, they sometimes seemed rather uneducated. I remember Mike talking to me about numerology one day, not as something he believed in but as something that might be true.

In my teenage years, although I stilled preferred my mother's brothers to Harold, I didn't like their tendency to make good-hearted fun of children. Uncle Mike told me one day that he had bought glasses from a magazine ad that let him see through women's clothes. I knew enough by then not to believe him, and my incredulity disappointed him I think.

My first experience of living with strangers was when I was enrolled in a private "pre-school". My father would drive me to what looked like a small apartment building, but which was in fact a school run by several women. The children simply learned to live together for a few hours a day. There were no lessons, only friendly games and simple passtimes. The women expected no more of us than that we be happy, and only got involved to solve problems we couldn't solve ourselves. I felt immensely taken care of, and happier than I would ever again be until many years later. Since my interest in playing the violin hadn't waned, my father joined the Columbia Classical Music Record Club when I was about 12, and once a month we'd receive a beautiful, brand new LP recording of some great masterpiece. I was usually the one to open the package and I'd always lie down on the couch next to the stereo speakers and try to learn the piece. Especially heart-opening were Dvorak's New World Symphony and Brahms' Violin Concerto played by Isaac Stern. These experiences were far more spiritual than anything I could find in my Catholic Church, and lacked all intellectual bagage, since they spoke to my emotions and not to my mind. The end of Brahms' first movement still gets me today — every damn time.

Around this time, having fully realized how much more interesting Manhattan was than the Bronx, I started making Saturday treks on the subway, usually to the conglomeration of bookstore on Fourth Avenue between 14th Street and 8th. But soon I was wandering around Times Square and found the Record Hunter store on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. That place was amazing because anybody could take a record out of its sleeve, put it on a turntable, and listen for as long as he wanted. I also found Sam Goody, which had a great classical music department. There were also lots of stores that sold used and extremely cheap LP's, too. At one of them I found a series of recordings that only cost 75-cents apiece, so I went wild. I had never heard of Palestrina, but I bought a recording of his Missa Papa My uncles liked me and we hugged a lot, which was a great relief compared to the emotional deprivation I experienced at home and didn't even have a name for. But, like other Italian immigrants of that period they liked to prank children. When I asked Uncle Mike one day if the x-ray goggles they sold in the backs of comic books would actually let me see through buildings. "Yes," he said, with a twinkle. "I even had a pair when I was your age that let me see right through women's clothing." The only women I knew were my wrinkly old aunts, so the idea of seeing women's naked skin dampened my enthusiasm considerably, and it was only years later that I realized that he was only pulling my leg. Anyway, no harm done, especially compared to my father's attempts to trick me, which were always for the sole purpose of making me feel foolish and humiliated — and making him feel like a "real man". On my route home from school, I'd often encounter small groups of mean boys who thought it very wise to pick on smaller kids. Since I never boyed to their demands, I would often get punched or worse. Eventually I became curious about why they thought themselves so clever. So I arbitrary chose one of my gentle friends and punched him in the face. He was shocked and hurt. But I felt death enter me. My soul was damaged after that because I couldn't undo the harm I'd done. It was the last time I ever hit anybody.

Later there was pressure from the adult world to learn how to enjoy killing small animals. A lawyer on a farm we were visiting took me and his son out on a hunting exhibition. He made his boy shoot a chipmunk. The animal writhed in agony for awhile before dying. It was disgusting and I never did that again. Later my father told me that he had shot a little bird once and immediately burst into tears with shame. I found this curious since he was very sadistic towards the fish he caught. None of the adults I came into contact as a child seemed to know anything that didn't seem pedestrian and obvious, except for one: my father's boss, Mr. Gerald Doyle, who ran the Bronx Press Review, a rag which didn't employ a single reporter but simply reprinted tidbits from other newspapers. I think of him as a Mr. because he was something of an absent-minded professor who always wore a bow-tie. A man named Gerald might have been someone you could hug and tell jokes to. Mr Doyle was all "business". One weekend he invited our family out to his Long Island retreat and he sat me down for a talk. It seemed like he was testing me. He told me about some of the interesting things he was learning from the books he was reading, for example about about the giant ants that Tacitus or somebody had discovered thousands of years ago. He also told me to read 's Ancient Man, which in the following months I did. Hendrik introduced me to intelligent writing for children and started my earnest collection of both his works and other engaging writing. So I have Mr. Doyle to thank for that. You know, all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was. No, that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that. When I started going to school I wasn't aware that most other kids didn't feel about the humanity the way I did, but I soon learned they were just carbon copies of their zombie parents. And soon my walk to and from school was fraught with violent encounters with local bullies. These tiny warlords always saw me coming. I was the one who refused to bend to their moral code. And no matter how often they beat me up, I would not walk through their territory with my head bowed. Or unbloodied.

But microtyrants were easy to deal with compared to adults. Microtyrants look for kicks and quickly tire of their villainy. Adults mean business. During the first decade of my life, the unhappiness, vindictiveness and sheer stupidity of schoolteachers nearly broke my spirit, and I found myself becoming a moody, resigned trouble maker.

I had loved pre-school because I could play all day, learning all about games and toys, learning how to get along with other kids. Kindergarten also made me comfortable, and I especially liked finger-painting. But in first grade they started messing with our minds in ways that deeply offended me.

These schoolteachers simply didn't believe in education. They weren't interested in our developing informed opinions but cared only to "manufacture consent", in Walter Lippman's phrase. They didn't explain why two plus two equals four, or why B follows A in the alphabet. All they wanted was for us to repeat after them — like parrots. George Washington was the first President. Repeat. The earth revolves around the sun. Repeat. You're nothing but parrots. Repeat. Parrots don't ask questions. Repeat.

As soon as I learned that Santa Claus was a lie, I could see how their game was played. They lulled you into a false sense of security with fairy tales, but eventually they had to spill the beans and you would know just a little more about how the world actually worked. After I saw Bambi, I knew that older bucks were always assigned the task of breaking bad news to the youngsters. I was certain that in a few years, or maybe when I got out of school, some adult male would sit me down and start with, "Dean, everything you've been told so far has been a lie."

But another possibility was that adults didn't know the truth at all but just slowly clothed themselves in the myths popular in their time and place to dull the pain, and that this was why only children could see through the emporer's new clothes. In this case it was the children who would need to write books explaining the world. But since no adult publisher would understand such these books because their mind was too encrusted, these books would never get published and life on earth would remain an inscrutible nightmare for sentient beings. Since all my teachers disliked me, it seemed likely that no adult ever would. Children who are useless become shy and find it difficult to identify or empathize with others. They expect to be disliked by strangers they come into contact with, and because of this they usually are. But when I was a child I made an amazing discovery. I could make friends with animals. If I was afraid of them, they would be afraid of me. But if I liked them, they would like me back. It was a simple act of will to like them. Even humans were surprised by my ability to earn the trust of animals. It seemed to them as if I had a sixth sense and could communicate telepathically. All that was actually happening was that I was finally developing an ability to be close to other living creatures. Most kids achieve this ability with their siblings and parents, only I had bigger — and smaller — fish to fry.

I would practice my secret-ultra-super-powers whenever my family spent a week's vacation on the farm in upstate New York that my parents liked. I would wander off from the humans and try to make friends with any animal I could find. Insects were too hostile, sadly, and amphibians were usually too frightened to realize I was being friendly, but reptiles are a proud race and capable of recognizing obeisance when it is offered them. I especially admired little snakes who would stand their ground and try to fight you off no matter what your weight class.

Patience is your ally when you're trying to make a new friend. Like us, animals are very curious about other creatures, even members of other species, and won't always run away if you approach them respectfully. But you must go slow. No sudden moves. Keep making eye contact. Animals know that eyes are the windows to the soul, and if they see no fear in your eyes they suspect you don't want to hurt them. Sitting down helps, too, because they'll know you can't make a sudden dash at them. But once they're curious, look a bit distracted. Play with the grass at your feet or let your eyes wander towards the horizon. That takes the pressure off them to counter your moves, and soon you may find them meandering closer to you.

Humans, especially those who live on farms, think they're way superior to wild animals and don't approve of their children making friends with them. I once brought back a beautiful snake coiled around my neck who had gotten quite comfortable with me, but Mr. Herring, the farmer, freaked out and started yelling. He told me that it was a poisonous black snake and dangerous because it was moulting and would strike out at anything that moved. He had left out one tiny detail, however. The snake and I were friends. But I put the snake down on the ground anyway, and it scurried off into the underbrush. Another time I brought an injured bat to Mr. Herring, expecting him to call the veterinarian. He told me that he would take care of it and to leave the animal with him. I never saw Mr. Bat again.

It was not always fun to make friends with farm animals, though. They assume a familiarity with humans that is as offensive as the maiden aunt who is sure she knows just how to ingratiate herself with your darling children. As slaves, it should not be surprising that they act slavishly. They have no individuality, no hope for a life of freedom and independence, and they assume you have a slavish personality as well. Herd animals are the worst in this respect, and they're often sickly and smell bad.

The most interesting animals for me were the kittens. They were domesticated, too, but unlike the slavish beasts they were free spirits who had the run of the place and would soon develop an uncompromising ferocity. So I was especially honored when one of the jungle killers would climb into my lap and take a nap. Nor would I budge until it had yawned and wandered off again, even if the dinner bell had rung.

I knew that my animal powers were unique because my father was afraid of wild animals and didn't like to be near them. He did like to take home movies of chickens running around the barnyard after their heads had been cut off, though. As for my mother, they had made the tragic mistake of naming her after a Queen of England, and she thought she could do anything. As a result, she always managed to harm anything that breathed. When I kept anoles, Victoria Regina would regularly pull their tails off in misguided attempts to "pet them". On a freezing cold night, a little bird flew into the enclosed porch of a cottage we were renting, and she decided to save its life. She netted it with a towel and then wrapped a plastic sofa cushion around its immobilized body to keep it warm. Unable to move, by morning it was a block of ice. While befriending a donkey that was tied to a post on a farm we used to stay at, she somehow loosened the rope enough so that as soon as she left the animal got twisted up and strangled itself. She always felt deeply guilty and horribly embarrassed when she hurt animals, but she couldn't learn how not to. There was something wrong with her.

Even city people have an enormous amount of prejudice about animals. Animals don't think, schoolteachers said, only people think. And animals don't have feelings, either. It's too bad that schoolteachers are incapable of thought, otherwise they would see that animals are working things out all the time — and quite earnestly because their lives depend on it. Sometimes their cleverness can surprise you.

One Saturday, trying to get away from the humans, I took a long walk in the park that surrounds the Bronx Zoo. In one thicket, hundreds of yards from civilization, I heard a rustling and spied a small squirrel in the low-hanging branches above me. I watched it, trying to signal my peaceful nature, until it looked back. It was in a frisky mood, though, and eventually jumped away into the forest. I walked slowly towards where it had gone. And there it was again, only a few yards away, staring at me.

"Hello," I said. Animals don't understand English, but it's important to act naturally otherwise they get suspicious. You wouldn't be very comfortable if a squirrel started acting like a human to earn your trust, would you? If you act like other humans they've seen and heard they will sense that you're not trying to put anything over on them. But he leaped away again in a different direction. I followed him slowly, but he always jumped away when I got within a dozen feet. After fifteen minutes of this, it dawned on me that he wasn't just running away from me. He was playing hide and seek.

Eventually I could no longer find him and decided he had grown tired and wandered off. But I looked upwards one last time. When my eyes were staring straight upwards, down with a plop he landed, belly on my nose and claws on my cheek, before springing to the ground and dashing to safety. It was his version of checkmate, and so deftly played that he didn't leave a scratch. He had won the game decisively and didn't need to play anymore, and I didn't see him again.

When you have no friends an interesting thing happens. You invent them. Many kids invent an invisible friend in the sky, who they pray to for the rest of their lives. I was becoming more of a pantheist. Like any ignorant savage I knew in my heart that "every rock and tree and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a name." So I had lots of friends to talk to, and they didn't have to be invisible either. Even today when I startle an animal I say hello because I feel it's only polite. I do this even with the mice who loot my apartment. Then I put out food for them so they won't shred every cardboard box in the pantry. Balsa is a very soft wood that is sold mostly in three-inch by three-foot strips in hobby shops and art supply stores. These strips are 1/32 to 1/2 inches in thickness. Balsa is useful for building small museum diaramas and architectural mock-ups, and is ideal for the small gliders that children love — especially when outfitted with a rubber-band driven propeller.

A boy who lived upstairs named Kenny taught me how to make balsa wood airplanes. Kenny would use an ordinary razor blade to cut a six inch long slice of .25" rod for the fuselage, and use 1/32" strips for the wings and tail. Duco cement would attach everything in no time. An ounce of clay on the nose and you were ready for take off.

My first glider dropped like a stone, but soon I got the hang of it. I was ecstatic to see my gliders become ever more graceful. Every few days we'd get together and build more of them. I built ones with angled wings, double-fuselage jobs, even experimental models that looked like flying saucers. And this simple experience taught me some important things about engineering. Since each glider was flying better than the last even though I was using increasingly unconventional designs, I learned that 1) you didn't need any math to understand aerodynamics, and more importantly, 2) you didn't need to know how to talk about what you were doing in order to know how to do it. Strictly speaking, you didn't even know how to do it in order to do it!

And I knew how to fly them, too. I could launch my champion glider wooshing low to the ground for a hundred feet, make it arch upwards into a stall, bank 180 degrees to the left and wobble a bit, then settle into a straight line back to my outstretched palm. I had no idea how I did this, and that made me really curious. Why did schoolteachers assume we should think before we act? Why did they assume that the only things children could accomplish were reading and writing and obeying schoolteachers? What if the world of things we can do were larger than the world of things we can talk about? What if we should only talk about things after we've done them?

From then on, whenever school was boring, I longed to build and fly airplanes. When I told my mother about this she seemed to sympathize, saying "I always wanted to be a bird." Once in a while a schoolteacher would have pity on me. After making my third grade teacher's life hell for three months, she and I somehow arranged a truce. I was allowed to sit in the back of the class all day with my head buried in a book, and she was allowed to prattle on about things that interested no one but herself. The book I read was The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth. It told the story of a New England chicken who laid a triceratops egg. Thirty years later, over dinner with the author, I would learn that the story was a satire on McCarthyism, and that all of his novels for children tried to show that we need not fear learning more and more about one another in this age of information, because information is just a new tool that in time we will learn to use responsibly.

From then on, if I couldn't find interesting things to get involved with in the world right around me, I was perfectly happy to find them in books. My explorations soon included natural history classics like Maxwell W. Reed's The Earth for Sam, tales from Norse mythology such as Dorothy Hosford's Thunder of the Gods, and Sonia Bleeker's books about American Indian tribes.

Sometimes books could cause problems, though. One day I read about small animals that lived for only one minute, but when I told my parents about them they thought I had made it up. The next time my mother, my sister and I went to the Bronx Zoo — which we did often during the summers — I asked the young lady behind the counter in the book shop what a minute animal was. She said she didn't think anything had so short a lifespan but she was nice enough to call a zoologist who worked at the zoo. But he hadn't heard of any minute animals either. Fortunately I eventually learned about synonyms.

Well, at least there were honey bears. When I was five and my sister one, my mother became so enamoured of the honey bear in the Small Mammal House that she found the curator and asked if she could hold him. So we went behind the scenes and she and I had a chance to cradle the honey bear as he tried to go back to sleep. We repeated this unreasonable request when I was ten and again fifteen, and it was honored each time.

I enjoyed children's poetry, and even committed some simple rhymes to heart. One day, as the other children stared out the window, my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Horowitz, who reminded us once a week that she was the mother of Shari Lewis the puppeteer, let me recite this 1911 treasure by Bert Leston Taylor, a Chicago newspaperman:

Behold the mighty dinosaur
Famous in prehistoric lore,
Not only for his power and strength
But for his intellectual length.
You will observe by these remains
The creature had two sets of brains—
One in his head (the usual place),
The other in his spinal base.
Thus he could reason "A priori"
As well as "A posteriori."
No problem bothered him a bit
He made both head and tail of it.
So wise was he, so wise and solemn,
Each thought filled just a spinal column.
If one brain found the pressure strong
It passed a few ideas along.
If something slipped his forward mind
'Twas rescued by the one behind.
And if in error he was caught
He had a saving afterthought.
As he thought twice before he spoke
He had no judgment to revoke.
Thus he could think without congestion
Upon both sides of every question.
Oh, gaze upon this model beast;
Defunct ten million years at least. As I suffered the usual string of childhood diseases — measles, mumps and chicken pox — I would have nightmares and hallucinations. In one nightmare, I was trapped in a vast matrix of undulating machinery. Giant rolling pins squished me from here to there. I had no control at all but could only observe the strange things going on around me. When I woke up, I grew very alarmed. Why had my mind acted up in this way? Indeed, how was it even possible to project such a crazy scenario for me to experience? If anything we experience can be a hallucination, was there no way to tell the difference? Was this a glimpse behind the facade of what we usually think of as reality into that darker realm where the truth lay? And if we were just cogs in some fantastic machine, then what was the point of it all? Why were we picked to be strapped in to a cosmic roller coaster over which we had no control? Why couldn't we just wink out of existence if we felt like it?

Why, come to think of it, was there something rather than nothing? This was a new kind of question for me, a question demanding not so much an answer as a new way of thinking.

During another nightmare my father had a collection of ships inside bottles, replete with living shipmates. When I awoke, my mother helped me get up to pee. I saw my father sitting at the dining table and burst into tears. "That's the man who puts people into bottles," I cried. Considering the fact that my father was a frustrated intellectual whose idealization of others could only find expression in sadism, this was quite an insight for a delusion to deliver up.

Once was I unable to shake off a hallucination even after I was fully awake. In the dream my father had killed a friendly bear by eating it with a spoon. When I awoke I came over to my father. "Why did you kill the bear?" I cried. He went into the bathroom and closed the door. My delusional nightmares haunted me for months afterwards, but their intellectual consequences were permanent. I took a poll of my peers to see which of them had begun to see that the sum total of our experiences might just be a hallucination designed to distract us from what was really going on. None of them had.

Then I designed thought experiments to determine how well my friends could think. "Suppose you woke up on Venus tomorrow as an octopus, and all your memories of having been a little boy on Earth were replaced by memories of having been an octopus on Venus. How could you figure out that you had been a little boy the day before?" I asked.

"What?" they would answer.

The fact was, you couldn't. The mind is just as unreliable as the body. We trust it out of habit, not because it's reliable but because this is all we know how to do. After I had explained this to them, I asked the next logical question.

"So how do you know right now that yesterday you weren't an octopus on Venus?"

They knew the answer to that one. "Because yesterday I was a little boy here on Earth!"

Thoroughly disgusted, I started telling them that I was a Venutian octopus sent here to spy on them, delighted that there was no way they could prove me wrong. But I couldn't prove myself wrong either. I had no way to think myself out of the possibility that all reality might be a cosmic nightmare that some deity was having because of bad take out.

My mind just wasn't powerful enough to deal with the questions I was asking. I knew I was thinking, but I couldn't look directly at my thoughts, only their shadows. I wondered if I had accidentally been born with the mind of an insect, because every time I tried to inspect my mind or figure out what reality was I felt about as productive as a trapped fly buzzing about at random. I just couldn't figure out this "figuring out" game. What good was a mind if you couldn't use it for anything really interesting?

That's when I gave up being a philosopher and took up depression — a passtime for which I seemed to have a real knack and which didn't require as much effort. The inability to wink in and out of existence was not the only constraint on human existence that seemed arbitrary and unfair. Do you ever notice that in Star Trek when they set their spaceship on a new course it's always to the left or the right of where they're already pointing — never straight up or straight down? Wouldn't it be more natural to experience space the way stars do, where all directions are equally inviting? As I compiled a mental list of our metaphysical disabilities I wondered why we had ever chosen to live on this planet in the first place.

And why did we live in so much filthier a world than cats, who never catch diseases from licking their food off the floor? Why was our eyesight limited to such a narrow band of the spectrum? Why were dogs given a richer world of smells to enjoy than we? We couldn't even fly like the birds! Who the hell set this up? Why were they torturing us?

Indeed, why be saddled with time and space at all, or matter and energy for that matter? Why had we chosen a universe to exist in, this planet to dwell on, this species to endow with our consciousness? And why did no one seem to know the answers to these questions, or even ask them? The human race seemed like a gang of bank robbers who, once caught, pretended not to remember why they had enterred the bank in the first place. Instead of a transparent ruse, however, our amnesia was real.

Isn't it a miracle, the oddity of consciousness being placed in one body rather than another, in one place and not somewhere else, in one handful of decades rather than in ancient Egypt, or ninth-century Wessex, or Samoa before the missionaries came, or Bulgaria under the Turkish yoke, or the Ob Riber Valley in the days of the woolly mammoths? Billions of consciousnesses silt history full, and every one of them the center of the universe.

— John Updike
Self-Consciousness Once upon a time, thirty thousand years ago there lived a little boy in the Rhine valley. He was a tiny part of nature, a tiny ripple on an endless sea. You too, Sophie, you too are living a tiny part of nature's life. There is no difference between you and that boy. Except that I'm alive now. Yes, but that is precisely what I wanted you to try and imagine. Who will you be in thirty thousand years?

— Jostein Gaarder
Sophie's World

Assuming that my mind did not fly around the galaxy every time I went to sleep, the next question was, why didn't it? There seemed to me no tangible link between mind and body, so why was I imprisoned in the body of one Dean Hannotte, a rather odd person that nobody seemed to like very much? I could just as well have been born into the body of a parrot. Who funnelled me into this particular birth — and this particular death?

When you wanted to hint that somebody wasn't too bright — but in a good way — you asked them, "Where were you when the brains were passed out?" I began to wonder why I hadn't paid attention, why I hadn't asked for a better brain — or why I hadn't started a slave revolt and established a new order of things. But I'd had as little choice in the kind of mind I had been handed as I'd had in the body I seemed to inhabit. The entire situation was absurd, and not one person was taking the trouble to sit down and explain it to me.

I didn't have much hope in getting out of my body, but I began to wonder if I could get out of my mind. I heard on the television once in a while about someone being out of their mind, so I knew it was possible. But I also realized that I was facing one of society's taboos, since people who succeeded in getting out of their minds were usually locked up as quickly as possible. But maybe once you're out of your mind you don't really care about what happens to your body? It occurred to me that it might actually be safer to let other people take charge of your body while you're gone — in case you can't find a new one and need to sneak back into it when no one's looking.

The first clue I found that indicated other people had improved themselves by going out of their minds was when I read Huckleberry Finn at the age of ten. All the mindful, conscientious pillars of society in this book — especially the religious types — are idiots. At one point when Huck is rafting down the river with the escaped slave Jim, a rowboat of white men approach and ask Huck if the man next to him sleeping under a blanket is a negro. Huck is terrified. He knows if he lies he will go to hell. But he cares about Jim. Alright, he thinks, then I'll go to hell! Going out of his mind helps him do the right thing.

There is always something for the superior angels to make known to the inferior.

St. Thomas Aquinas

Although I beheld humanity the way some people revere an invisible friend in the sky, I soon learned that most humans had a different perspective, preferring to draw rigid distinctions between races and nationalities and language groups, between which conflicts are seen as inevitable. When I was six or seven a group of boys was huddled in the schoolyard. Each was disclosing whether he was Jewish or Catholic. Most were Jewish, so when it was my turn I too said I was Jewish.

Months later I asked my mother if that was true and she said, "No, you're Catholic." It saddened me to learn that I was in a minority group, and probably an underprivileged one — so much so that I didn't even ask how I had gotten cheated once again. Later, when my mother started taking me to church on Sundays, I thought that being Catholic might not be so bad. People seemed awed by the weird things priests did, and I found their power intriguing. Another oddity was the huge textbook called the Bible that was in all the pews. Judging from their condition, none of them had ever been read — so what were they doing there? But once I got the gist of Gothic performance art, I liked the implication that some people could be more enlightened than others, and that it was the duty of the enlightened to teach the unenlightened.

It came as a big surprise to learn that my father was not Catholic. Although he was a newspaper advertising saleman whose ability to influence others was limited to huckstering the gullible and bullying the weak, he did seem thoughtful and honest when responding to direct questions that could not be construed to challenge his personal inadequacies. When I asked what his religion was he managed to say with a straight face that he had been raised Episcopalian, but it was clear that he had no use for organized religion. "People turn to religion when they go through too much suffering," he would later tell me. And he never attended any religious service I'm aware of. Although he was utterly lacking in personal ethics, at least he had learned to say no. I told my mother that I wanted to go to after-school religious training. She agreed, but not with the enthusiasm I'd expected. There a whole new magical world opened up to me, a world of angels and devils and ancient stories that had lessons for today. Although not as exciting or plausible as Norse mythology, at least it was my mythology. The nuns taught us that a much better life was in store for us as soon as we were good and dead. I especially liked the story of the little girl who loved praying to God at the altar so much that she stopped eating and died. This was a "good thing" because she went straight to heaven. "It's quite unlikely that any of you are as good as she was," cautioned our nun.

Most of the little boys and girls in these stories became saints to reward them for having obeyed God's commands. I didn't like this. Were they trying to be obediant, or were they looking for a reward? How could you tell? This seemed like shaky ground, theologically speaking — like not knowing what planet you were on yesterday. But at least these stories freed me from taking the real world too seriously, as tales of the afterlife do for believers the world over. Although I had always suspected it, from then on I knew that the things of this world were illusions and that a higher reality existed on some other plane entirely. Although in a few more years I would come to despise organized religions and the superstitions they encourage, this faith in higher purposes inured me against much of the pain I would encounter later in life. And from that day to this I've had nothing but contempt for people who are convinced that all they need to care about is what's in front of their noses. My infatuation with religion ended over a stuffed rabbit. Our nun told us that God answers our prayers, but I wanted to check with a higher authority. "Mom, if I ask God to let my stuffed rabbit talk, will it happen?" At this point most moms will come up with, "God doesn't answer selfish prayers, only ones that benefit the ones you love or that will make you a better person. And it may not be immediately obvious that he has answered your prayers or even heard them, so you must have faith." Not my mom.

In the movie Forbidden Planet, Doctor Morbius shows off his new robot by ordering it to shoot the captain of a visiting spaceship. Robby points at the captain but he can't pull the trigger. In fact he seems to be short-circuiting as sparks fly around the springs, test tubes and gears that pass for a face. "You see, gentlemen," says Morbius. "He's helpless. Locked in a sub-electronic dilemma between my direct order and his own built-in prohibition against harming any rational being." I mention this because the look on my mother's face when I asked her about my rabbit reminded me of Robby's. After staring into outer space for a moment, she said:

"Well, Dean You can try."

That Sunday I went to church, prayed my heart out to my invisible friend in the sky, went home and asked my rabbit to talk. I guess this was the moment at which my infatuation with my mother ground to a halt, too. I wish I could say that mine was the only mother whose thoughtless obediance to unseen authorities outranked any interest in her children's well being, but that would make you laugh. Noticing that I was interested in reading, my father began buying me books to encourage me. On Sundays he would drive the family into Manhattan and visit bookstores in Greenwich Village. My favorite was something called the Paperback Gallery which had thousands upon thousands of different books for sale, all for less than a dollar. I usually could get my father to buy me one each week. He was very strict about "duplication", unfortunately. If I wanted a book on dinosaurs but he knew that I already had another book on dinosaurs, he would say, "You don't need that. It would be duplication."

It was depressing having him decide what I could and couldn't read, so when I was around ten I began making Saturday forays by subway into Manhattan by myself. My weekly allowance was a full dollar, and I knew how to stretch it. Thirty cents would cover the two tokens needed for transportation, and a quarter would buy me a hot dog for lunch, leaving a whopping forty-five cents for capital expenditures. Usually I would spend all day exploring Book Row, the area centering on Fourth Avenue from 8th to 14th streets, within which could be found scores of used bookstores. Many of these stores had bookcases out front with bargain books that were as cheap as five cents. And sometimes I would go to the huge main branch of the New York public library system, a gigantic building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd street. It occupied the eastern third of an entire city block, with the rest given over to Bryant Park — where I would go to eat my hot dog. One spring day as I strolled through the park, a thin man in a Hawaiin shirt around 30 years of age who was leaning against a concrete balustrade said hello. He didn't seem very friendly, just matter of fact, but I said hello anyway.

"What are you doing?" he asked. I didn't see what business it was of his but, looking around me to see if I was safe, I said, "I was visiting the library." He said he liked books too, and had a lot of them back at his apartment. He asked me what kinds of things I liked to do and I said I went fishing with my father. He said that he had lots of pretty fishing lures at his apartment, and photos of fishing trips he had gone on.

"Would you like to go back to my apartment and see my stuff?" he asked. That was enough for me.

"No, thank you," I said and walked out of the park. I was furious. I had to walk three or four blocks before I found a policeman.

"Excuse me," I said. "A man in the park tried to get me to go home with him. I think he should be arrested." The policeman seemed concerned, but not alarmed, and we took a leisurely stroll back to where the man was. He was still there, and now with a friend. I began to wonder if I was being unfair.

"This boy says you tried to get him to go to your apartment," the policeman said.

The man looked me over calmly and said, "I've never seen him in my life."

"Yes you did!" I yelled. "You're lying!" I couldn't wait to give my testimony in the packed courtroom when they threw the book at him.

"You'll have to leave the park," the policeman said. The two men left quietly without saying a word. They knew they were getting off easy. The policeman walked me out of the park to my subway entrance, and I went home. Once on the subway I realized that he had forgotten to take down my telephone number. My career as a crime fighter had suffered a major setback.

I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll GO to hell".

— Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

[I Collect Stuff / I Become an Intellectual]. All my life I have enjoyed possessing small objects so I could learn to use them, to protect them and, if possible, to improve them. It's my version of having a tool shed to bang around in. When the aliens come to lock us up, the first thing they'll write down about me is "likes to collect stuff."

This acquisitiveness lead me into my first foray into independent scholarship. I had found in some seedy Times Square bookshop a business card or bulletin board notice with an address you could write away to for free literature on the "solution to the race problem." It wasn't horse racing that interested me, however, but the idea of getting something for free that would be mine to keep. Several weeks later a business letter arrived from the deep South stuffed with seven or eight mimeographed pages with crossed out typos, spewing hatred for anything Negro and illustrated with out-of-focus and poorly-lit photos of dark-skinned men hanging from trees.

I was thrilled beyond words. I had independently uncovered evidence of a criminal conspiracy. This was even better than getting a Commander Cody secret decoder ring, because this menace was real and right here on Earth under our very noses. I felt like a junior district attorney gathering evidence for a major prosecution. I hid my treasure trove under my mattress so my parents wouldn't find it. Then I had a sobering thought. Since it was illegal to possess pornography, maybe it was illegal to possess racist literature too and I would have to go to jail. This didn't appeal to me because I was too young to appreciate the irony of injustice. Then I remembered what Huck Finn had said. Alright then, I decided, I'll go to jail. But not before my work is complete.

I was delighted that the evidence I was gathering about this social disease I had never even heard of was mine, and mine alone. I could frame my own hypotheses, come to my own conclusions, and act only if and when I was ready to — and never have to worry about being tested by the authorities to see if my thinking was acceptable to them. This time I was the authority. Unfortunately, while I was planning to smash the bad guys, life happened.

My next foray into scholarship occurred one day when I was home with the flu. I memorized the names of the 206 bones in the human body. I was tremendously satisfied with myself because I was sure this information would help me live a much better life in years to come. This foray, like the first, never bore fruit.

My third foray involved algorithms. One rainy afternoon, like a jailed animal pacing in circles, I played with a copy of TV Guide, chosing pages recursively based on various rules I made up. The method I found most curious was:

1. Choose a page at random from the second quarter of the magazine.
2. Multiply the page by two, and go to that page.
3. Run your forefinger under the page to find the page as distant from the beginning as you are from the end.
4. Go back to step 2.

I wrote down the page numbers this produced. Scores of them. And I came to the inescapable conclusion that this sequence of numbers was very curious indeed.

I wrote up my discovery for posterity as . I had become an intellectual. In the fifth grade I started taking group violin lessons with an old drunk who came to my elementary school. He made a half dozen kids play scales for an hour and then collected fifty cents from each of us. It wasn't until years later that I learned that he hadn't even taught us to hold our violins correctly. But he did care about violins. When I showed him the violin I got for Christmas he had a fit. "I told your father not to buy you a lousy cheesebox!"

"My father paid $25 at Macy's!" I said, but I also knew he was right. At least it had a nice red color, and I could get away from my family and their television by hiding in our walk-in closet and squeaking away.

During this period I found more and more adults taking an interest in me, all of whom were friends of the family. Unlike the schoolteachers, they seemed to think I was smart — which probably meant they were stupid, but at least not abysmally so.

"Let them think that," my father said. "You might get something out of it." One day he took me to see a widow who needed to sell her late husband's violin. She was very impressed when I started to play it, and my father told her that he was sure that her husband would want her to give me the violin for free. It didn't work. When she refused to give away the violin for his monkey show, he refused to buy it.

My aunt Margie, who was far more intelligent than anyone in our blue-collar Italian family, and who I later learned had disgraced them all by being a Jew, bought me several violin scores, which I loved because they gave me something to master at my own pace.

Once my family visited an old woman who lived in a remote cabin in upstate New York. She may have been the mother of my father's boss, but I no longer remember. She just thought I was the brightest little thing and told me I should become a doctor. I was astounded to hear that. And even though my father was unhappy when I told him, I secretly planned to follow up on her idea. One day I awoke with a sore ankle. I told my mother but she said it was nothing. Halfway to school the pain was getting worse so I turned back and asked my mother if I could see our family doctor.

"School is more important than lying around in bed all day," she said sternly. I limped as far as the nearest park bench, sat down and tried to stop crying. Finally the pain got so bad that I decided to go back again. This time she summoned the doctor, who later that day told them I had to go to the hospital and be treated for rheumatic fever. For the next thirty days I stayed at Jewish Memorial Hospital, in the upper tip of Manhattan where I had been born, getting massive doses of antibiotics. Jerry Lewis taught me what an independent life looks like. I had already been in the hospital for a few weeks. The children's ward had a dozen kids in it, all coughing and wheezing to show and tell their various contagious diseases. Suddenly I heard a shouted whisper in the hallway: "Jerry Lewis is coming!" Note to aliens: homo sapiens is the only species that shouts whispers.

A few moments later twenty men in overcoats filed into the ward with flashbulbs popping. I huddled under my blanket expecting the worst, but nobody seemed to notice me, preferring to cluster around a very handsome young man and a very cute little girl. But after twenty minutes I noticed Jerry Lewis standing at the foot of my bed all by himself. He stared at me with grave concern and said, "What are you in here for?" His grim demeanor caught me off guard and I was terrified of giving the wrong answer. "I have rheumatic fever," I said.

"I'm sorry to hear that," he said. His face was expressionless and it seemed he was peering deep inside me. We talked for a few more moments about my prognosis before he moved on to the next child.

I was miffed later to learn that when the entourage left, the reporters had filled the beds of the popular boy and girl with a dozen toys and games, while the rest of us got only one each. But the real gift was seeing an example of a man who, though rich and famous, could still care about strangers he had never met, and who had the independence of mind to act on his feelings.

When I came home from the hospital, our family doctor assured me with a smile that there was usually very little damage to the heart valves in cases like this and that I would probably live well into my forties. But I had to promise him that I wouldn't engage in sports or strenuous activities of any kind. Spending ten years in medical school only to die soon after suddenly seemed rather pointless. Times Square today is a sleazy tourist trap engineered to impress the moral majority and their gullible ilk, overcrowded with big budget Broadway musicals, Disney memorabilia stores, and megaplexes that screen Hollywood blockbusters. But in the fifties it was a goldmine for urban anthopologists like me. I wasn't old enough to go to the bars or strip clubs or even the circus side shows, but who would want to when you had the pick of out-of-print record stores where you could buy really cheap classical music LP's and 78's. Plus you had a dozen haunted used book stores which were almost as cavernous as my friends on Book Row. And they had two things Book Row didn't: a section forbidden to children where men could buy black and white photos of women bearing their breasts, and tables piled high with cruddy old magazines. I hung around the forbidden sections because if I was especially crafty I could get a glimpse of tit once in a while over someone's shoulder. When this game was afoot my hair stood on end, even if what I eventually saw didn't actually interest me.

The G-rated magazines were fascinating too and the proprietors let me stand around and read as many as I liked. To this day I have delicious dreams of these intellectual garbage dumps which were my first real home as a child. And if I take a drive in the country and spot a used book store I'll screech to a halt and start inventorying its inventory. As the hours melt away you'll find me as happy as a rat on heroin.

By the 50's the circus side shows had all evaporated. But there were two attractions left that were even better: Ripley's Believe It or Not and, around the corner on Fifth Avenue, the Gilbert Hall of Science. I have always had reading difficulties. I find myself going over a paragraph several times before it registers and I can go on. Sometimes I just obsess on how a sentence can be improved. This may be why I have always been especially fond of cartoons and comic books. The daily "Ripley Believe It or Not" cartoon was a favorite, as was its rival called "Stranger Than it Seems". And every Sunday during the 1964 World's Fair I devoured Arthur Radebaugh's "Closer Than We Think," a color pen-and-ink half-page strip predicting the technological marvels we would all enjoy in the next decade. Even the people looked like improved models. Most non-fiction cartoons were done in charcoal, a genre of which I became a connoiseur. Today I have a special bookcase that houses anthologies of charcoal cartoons, many of them put out by Grosset and Dunlap. Most take the form of encyclopedias, where each entry occupies exactly one page, having titles like Minute Biographies, Minute Sketches of Great Composers, and Minute Stories of the Opera. Another series included Our Presidents At a Glance and Jews At a Glance. The most beautiful charcoals were in Minute Myths, written and illustrated by Marie Schubert. But my favorite is from 1933. Entitled Can It Be Done? by Ray Gross, it illustrates many clever inventions and household time-saving devices which anyone with initiate could go out and build. Many of them are now standard issue.

Non-fiction comic books were a genre all to themselves. The best were issued by Classics Illustrated. They not only printed abridgements of great novels but fat comics about nature and science.

The daily Ripley cartoons that appeared in newspapers were reprinted in cheap paperbacks, and I had three or four of these in my burgeoning collection. The Ripley exhibit on Broadway had a steep ticket price that my father could not afford, but the Gilbert Hall of Science, around the corner on Fifth Avenue, was free.

In 1913 A. C. Gilbert invented the Erector Set, based largely on a British construction kit called Mecca which had been brought out by Frank Hornby in 1900. These were revolutionary hands-on teaching devices by which children could learn basic principles of engineering without needing to do any math at all. Gilbert also sold various models of popular chemistry sets. Since I had both a chemistry set and an erector set, I was already a fan.

Nowadays in Queens there is a Hall of Science which showcases the latest consumer products of major corporations like IBM and AT&T. But the Gilbert Hall of Science was actually about science. There were scores of hands-on working scale models where you could learn about electricity, magnetism, steam engines — even lightning.

Science and technology animate every corner of our society, except our classrooms. Our society lives by the fruits of invention, but does not teach invention.

1941 — A. C. Gilbert opens the Hall of Science in New York on 5th Avenue. It is a palace of science learning, the culmination of Gilbert's vision. It is no mere store. Things work. At the touch of a button, trains move, electromagnets grab iron, ferris wheels turn. It is a palace for active minds and inquisitive hands.

Gilbert understood the minds and hands of his customers. He sold tools for the adventurous and curious child. He sold not to schools, but to individuals. The Hall of Science is less a prototypical classroom, than the forerunner of contemporary science and technology centers. Science requires personal discovery and time in measures schools have yet to understand.

— the Eli Whitney Museum website

It was here that I began to want to build things. And to believe that I could. In second grade I started getting really bored in class. Learning to read and write had been interesting, and I was pretty sure these skills would come in handy some day. But now the schoolteachers started standing around, staring at the ceiling and dilating on any topic that happened to interest them. You could tell their minds operated slowly because they talked slowly, and you could tell that thought was new territory for them because they often got lost in it. They always repeated even the simplest of ideas until you wanted to scream. If they weren't sure of somebody's name or a long word was unfamiliar to them, they'd chalk it up on the blackboard. Sense-memory at work.

Thank goodness there were windows, because occasionally you could catch a bird flying past. And, though they didn't grant us the freedom of a zoo animal allowed to pace in circles to avoid going crazy, the hands of the wall clock moved in a reassuringly rhythmic fashion. Thinking about the moving hands helped take my mind off the teachers' problems. What kinds of patterns were possible with the hour hand and the minute hand, I wondered. What time is it when the hands overlap? (Eleven solutions.) What time is it when the hands are pointed in opposite directions? (Eleven solutions.) If clocks use base-twelve arithmetic, why are there only eleven solutions to each of the above problems? Why do 21 of them have to be expressed as fractions? These days no matter where you are in my apartment there is a large reassuring industrial wall clock within view just in case I suffer a sudden flood of schoolteachers intent on boring me to death.

Schoolteachers are quite a jealous lot and get nasty if you forget to pretend how fascinating they are. And they have more clever ways of dealing with you than just yelling and making you stand in the corner. They spread rumors about you. They turn your parents against you. One of my symptoms, they said, was that I couldn't concentrate. Nowadays they use a fancier term: attention deficit disorder. But it's the same lie, based on their need to think they're smarter than you are. Kids are very alert, and their minds are constantly working at top speed. It's not their fault just because they're not impressed with your tired old bullshit.

It was very clear, they told my parents, that their Dean simply wasn't very bright.

Years later I read in Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape that parents like to accuse inquisitive and energetic children of "acting like wild animals," when actually the opposite is the case. Animals lose their interest in learning and exploring as soon as they're fully grown. Humans could, and should, retain their curiosity throughout a lifetime. If the sorts of facts that schoolteachers made us memorize were vacuous, their philosophizing was even worse. Like drug addicts they could not stop waxing eloquent about the virtues of pursuing knowledge "for its own sake." Not knowledge that would help you understand your life, mind you, or knowledge that would let you help other people in their pursuit of happiness. Just go off and memorize the first thousand digits of pi for no reason at all. That'll keep you out of trouble, I could hear them snicker.

Even today, a generation later, scholarship is often a euphemism for a perverse dissociation from life, lacking any redeeming social value. Divorced from the great struggles of history and killing their pain through intellectual masturbation, here we see the wild academic in his natural habitat, the only creature on the planet that manages each day to know, in Will Durant's phrase, "more and more about less and less". One of the things you need to do when you don't like children is to yell at them a lot. This is important if you want to have any peace of mind when you come home from work and want to be left alone. Slapping, punching and even pinching are good, but so is just pretending they don't exist. In combination, these techniques can often suffice to confuse the little guys to death. To be really effective, however, your child has to remember the lessons he's being taught in a way he'll never forget. He has to become permanently resigned to his "fate."

Between the adults not liking me and the kids being in several senses hopeless, around the third grade I totally gave up on the human race. I clearly remember taking a long meandering walk home from school one day, feeling very discouraged, going more and more slowly as it sank in that I wasn't getting anywhere in life. I sat down on a park bench and almost stopped breathing. And here's the real problem with this world. At moments like this you should be able to simply cease existing. Poof. But you can't.

I decided to stop everything and wait for starvation to do the rest — but I knew my parents would find me and, to borrow their favorite expression, make me wish I had never been born. Oh well, it's a nice park bench, I thought, grasping at straws. The next decade would be rife with straws. It never occurred to my parents to teach their children anything about hygiene, let alone health. As long as I wore my miniature business suit when I went out with them, and as long as I was seen and not heard at home, they were happy. Their children were only pets, after all, and their pets furniture.

I know I was bathed once in a while when I was very young, but once I started going to school I was left to my own devices. Eventually I smelled so bad that the other children stared at me. Finally another boy pulled me aside and explained what the problem was, so when I went home I decided to try and figure out how to bathe myself.

When you have to figure these things out for yourself, you don't often arrive at the optimal techniques that people do who have been taught cultural solutions that have evolved over generations of trial and error. So instead of learning the best way to shower, I learned the best way to pull the curtain aside, the best way to adjust the water temperature, the best way to hop in the tub, the best way to soap up, the best way to rinse, and the best way to dry off. Because taking showers is extremely boring, each step became an esthetic ritual, having its own inner logic and momentum which had to be respected if interest was to be maintained and the act completed.

This is why to this day I'm a total failure at household chores. People are amazed at how long it takes me to wash dishes, for example, not realizing that I'm giving a very complicated and highly polished performance — which is one reason I use paper plates whenever possible. Forget cooking; I order in or starve. And when it comes to cleaning up, I subscribe to Quentin Crisp's philosophy: "After four years the dust doesn't get any worse."

I wasn't the only one my parents forgot to teach hygiene to. One day I woke up to hear my sister screaming because her bed was full of blood. Mommy hadn't bothered to tell her about menstruation.

Some children stick pins in their arms or chew razor blades to kill their boredom. I found Q-tips. The provided exquisite pleasure when I used them to scratch my ear canals. But the more I scratched the more they itched, and eventually both ears were clogged with wax, discharge and blood. Sometimes they'd seal up in embarrassing moments, rendering me stone deaf, and I would have to run home for another delicious treatment. When you have to figure out things for yourself, you have to pay attention to every little detail, and usually you get lost in them. As a result, multi-step tasks sometimes take so long that you never finish them. This is why I can never tidy up my desk completely. And even when you do, the final product can be wrong even when the individual steps seemed right. Whenever bits of food would get caught in my sink drain filter, I would pull up the filter and rinse the bits out down the drain. Many years later Judy hit the ceiling when she saw me doing this.

"You think that filter is there so you can pick up bits of food and throw them down the drain??" she asked in mock horror. "It's there so you can prevent food from going down the drain!"

"It just seemed logical at the time," I mumbled to myself. I'm sure I do lots of things like this, but at this late date I know people will just stare at me if I ask them stupid questions, so I don't ask for help. And there's only so many hours in the day to teach myself how the world works so I've adjusted to a low level of competence in most things, but a high level of competence in what I care most about.

But fastidiousness and attention to detail can occasionally pay off, too. It helps me think like a computer, which is why I find computer programming as effortless as mathematics. Computers are the ultimate in autistic children. They are so detail-oriented that they have no higher brain function at all. They're not even as smart as insects, because even insects have the will to survive. A computer will just sit there humming contentedly whether you reach to turn it off or run at it with a steamroller. Both my parents were cold and empty — empty in their hearts and empty in their heads. They seemed to find human contact distasteful and unfortunate. They never hugged or kissed one another. Nor did it ever occur to either of them to have a constructive role in their children's upbringing. Having children was just something you were supposed to do, like going to work or paying the rent. So they fed us and clothed us, but they only touched us to inflict pain. Their punishments weren't reasonably thought out, but always acts of mere violence, an impulsive way of resolving the contradictions within themselves when something we did or said embarrassed their wanting intellects.

As you might expect, their coldness and violence gave me a critical advantage in facing life on an independent basis. Because they were know-nothings, I needed learn nothing from them. Because they were the only parents I knew, I deduced that the rest of mankind was as ignorant as they were and resolved early to educate myself. And although years later I learned that some humans were indeed redeemable, this phase kick-started my belief that important discoveries about psychology were just around the corner and that there was no reason a bright lad like me might not make original contributions to the understanding of human nature.

My father was an intensely sensitive man who was utterly cowed by social roles. He thought the answer to all his problems lay in trying to act more "manly", when actually the truth was just the opposite. "The man wears the pants in the family," he would brag, blissfully unaware that non-sequiturs had no legal standing in my court.

And he always conducted himself the way he thought society expected him to. He wore expensive business suits to impress the people he dealt with, he shook other men's hands with unnecessary vigor, and he laughed in an unconvincing way at jokes he forbade me to repeat. When he went fishing, he would stab fish he caught with a knife to watch them squirm, often chewing on his tongue and suppressing a giggle I can only describe as fiendish. "Aquatic animals suffer from the disadvantage that they cannot scream when in pain, so we find it hard to gauge the degree of their agony. If fish could scream, angling purely for sport would be outlawed without delay." -- Desmond Morris, 'The Animal Contract'.

At Christmas office parties he would get drunk and the dam would burst. By the time he wobbled home he was in just the right frame of mind to prove what a "real man" he was. He seemed to know better than to mess with me, but he had no trouble bullying women, especially if they were little. Once he threw my mother into a walk-in closet, saying, "I want to fuck you — now!" "Not in front of the children!" she gasped. On another occasion he grew impatient with my little sister's tears and, swinging her by one arm, smashed her head into the nearest wall. He seemed quite puzzled when she collapsed into a screaming heap. I wanted to kill him, only I was too small. Each day it was becoming clearer to me that without real power I would never be able to fight the evils of this world.

Usually after he sobered up we would all be expected to act as if nothing had happened. One Saturday we went to a wedding where he got drunk and then harangued us all the way home in the car, extracting a loyalty oath from each of us in turn.

"Dean, do you love me?"

"Yes, Dad."

"Gail, do you love me?"

"Yes, Daddy."

"Mom, do you love me?"

"Of course I do."

Anything to keep his eyes on the road, we thought. By the time we got home we despised him. The next morning he seemed embarrassed by what he had done. I have a vague memory of him asking my mother to forgive him and her saying she didn't know if she could put up with much more of this. Then he came over to where I was playing with my blocks on the floor and, looming over me, said, "You understand, don't you?" I didn't even understand my blocks but I said yes to make him go away. Sometimes saying what dumb people want, even if you don't mean it, at least makes them leave you alone.

Even when he was sober, his conventional masculine image was everything to him. I, on the other hand, was beginning to question the ugliness I saw in most expressions of bravura and machismo. Boxing seemed to me cruel, for example, because men got hurt for no good reason. How could you possibly feel proud of hitting someone in the face, or take pleasure in watching it? One day I decided to ask him about this. He had pulled his reading chair up to the TV to watch the Friday night fights, beer in hand like a real man. When one of the boxers got knocked out I made my move. "Dad," I said. "I was just wondering." I avoided looking directly at him. "Why do you like to watch boxing?"

It would have been kinder to have hit him with a frying pan. His face flushed red and he muttered darkly, "Don't you ever, ever criticize your father." It was only nine o'clock, but he made my mother put me to bed. He thought this a good way to break his child's spirit, but it had just the opposite effect. Realizing that he was a useless ignoramus gave me permission to ask much bigger questions about life than just the ones I had any hope of talking to him about. The next morning I learned that the boxer who was knocked out had died of his injuries but that, sadly, my father was still alive. To educate myself I started dipping into any book about subjects that started with "psych". I didn't know the difference between psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, but it didn't matter. They all talked about people in a way that interested me. And they addressed issues that the adults I knew never, ever talked about. I wondered why our family never consulted any of these experts.

One day I waited until my father seemed reasonably calm and didn't have a drink in his hand. He was sitting at the dining table, my mother puttering in the kitchen, and my sister playing in the bedroom she and I shared. I sat down nonchalantly opposite him. "I have an idea," I said, trying to be as diplomatic as I could. "Why don't we all go see a psychiatrist?" To my amazement, he didn't turn red and he didn't hit me. Instead he said something which actually had content.

"Because it's not a science yet." It seemed that this was a question he had given a great deal of thought to. Hearing his disappointment made it hard for me to vilify him. I now felt sorry for this sensitive man who was interested in the truth but trapped in the worst kind of intimidation known to man.

Despite the depression I felt, some things were becoming clear. People, even rich people, are unhappy the world over, yet they don't talk about why they're happy when they are and why they aren't when they're not. Shrinks talk about lots of important stuff but it isn't scientific so you can't rely on it.

More interesting than math, and more of a boon to mankind than the science of physics, would be a science of people. As a toddler I had regularly watched television shows like Howdy Doodie, Roy Rogers and Wonderama, a Sunday morning children's variety show starring a local celebrity named Sonny Fox that lasted three hours and featured old Saturday morning serials like "Flash Gordon." I loved Buster Brown because on every show he would summon his magical frog by saying, "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggie!" and Midnight the Cat would say, "Nice." But by now I had become too acclimated to my depression to want my spirits lifted by mere entertainment. For the next twenty years I would only tolerate intellectual stimulation. Fortunately, the Bell Telephone Hour fit the bill perfectly. These programs taught science to children and were hosted by Dr. Frank Baxter, a UCLA English professor so likeable that he became the most recognized celebrity egghead of the 60's. And unlike the schoolteachers I'd known, he was friendly, enthusiastic, and didn't go around telling everyone they were stupid. In one of my favorite science fiction movies from the fifties, our hero is exposed to a strange cloud of radiation and starts shrinking. When he gets to be the size of a rat, his distraught but loyal wife lets him live in her old dollhouse. Chased into the cellar by a hungry cat, he gets lost amidst spiders and mouse traps. His wife, believing he has become cat food, boards up the house and leaves. For awhile he lives in a match box and uses a needle as a sword. But the movie is about to end, so, now the size of an ant, he scrambles up to a window sill and rappels down sewing thread into his own backyard. He has become so small that no one will ever find him.

But even as I touched the dry flaking crumbs of nourishment, it was as if my body had ceased to exist. There was no hunger, no longer the terrible fear of shrinking. Again I had the sensation of instinct, of each movement, of each thought tuned to some great directing force. I was continuing to shrink, to become what? the infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God's silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends is man's conception, not nature's. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away, and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too. To God there is no zero. I still exist.

— Jack Arnold's closing soliloquy from "The Incredible Shrinking Man" [1957], a film based on the novel by Richard Matheson

I liked this movie because it doesn't have a happy ending — or a sad one either. His predicament is beyond tragedy and comedy. It's now a journey to find a home, like the one Odysseus made, only in modern terms. Nowadays I realize that these words don't make much sense when you look at them up close, but it's a good example to me of how nonsense that intrigues you can be more of an impetus to explore the world than can facts which put you to sleep. All through elemenary school I used to cry when I did my arithmetic homework. The numbers themselves were easy to think about but the methods by which we were taught to manipulate them were not intrinsically mathematical but instead involved bizarre metaphors about the world of everyday things. To do something even as simple as subtraction we were told to "borrow from your neighbor." I felt like a citizen of 1984 being told that war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. The psychic dissonance was excruciating, and I couldn't hide my grief from my parents. Sadly, here was even more evidence that I was retarded.

But a funny thing happened in the library that summer. I found a book on something called algebra, a topic I'd never heard of but which I found utterly delightful. No silly talk about borrowing from neighbors here. All you had to learn was how to think about unknown quantities, a simple convention where letters of the alphabet stood in for numbers. I read the entire book in one breezy Saturday afternoon. X the Unknown. How cool was that?

When I returned to school in the fall I learned that, unlike elementary school, each subject would be taught by a different teacher and that most of the seventh grade math class would be about algebra. My math teacher, Mr. David, a freckle-faced young man with bad skin, hadn't heard how stupid I was and, because I showed interest in what he was talking about, took me under his wing. He even let me stay after class to ask questions about topics that hadn't been covered in the book I'd read. He said that I already knew everything he intended to teach that year, but he encouraged me to continue my independent studies.

Later that year he assembled a math team, five or six kids who would get together to solve math puzzles once a week and then compete as a team against about eight other schools in the district. In the big meet there were about forty kids and ten teachers and principals in a large room. Some of the puzzles were tricky, so I didn't expect to do well. If anything my only hope was not to embarrass Mr. David. So I was totally fried when they announced that I had gotten all ten questions right, and that the runner up had correctly answered only three.

"Wow," I said, staring into space as Mr. David drove us back to our school, "Think of all the money I'll be able to make as a math teacher."

It was commonly thought that a boy in my class named Stanley would win the Math Medal, which was given to one student a year in each school. He was the pet of all his teachers and would burst into tears whenever he got less than 100 on a test. Who could be more worthy of their approval than a boy that sickened by cultural programming? Besides, I was popular neither with students nor teachers and didn't do well in other subjects. But Mr. David put the fear of God into the chairman of the math department and the medal was given to me. Now I had a real weapon I could use against my parents.

Stanley was a good kid and didn't hold this against me. In fact, we used to talk a lot about math and science during the next few years. But Stanley was a parrot and didn't know how to think things through for himself. Ronald Reagan would later repeat the Russian motto, "Trust, but verify." Stanley trusted but never verified. He didn't know how. And sometimes the things he trusted were actually misinterpretations of the books he read. He didn't really get the distinction between mass and weight, for example. One day we had an argument about whether in outer space it would be easier to move a feather or a locomotive.

"Since neither one weighs anything, you could give either one a gentle tap and it would fly off," he said.

"But the locomotive is more massive, so even if you pushed hard against it, it would only start moving away from you very slowly," I argued. We found the science teacher in the hallway flirting with the music teacher. He thought for a moment and then, trying to sound authoritative, said, "No, I think Stanley's quite right here." I didn't talk to the science teacher much after that.

I began to wonder if I could do well in other subjects besides math. One day the social studies teacher asked us to write an essay on why freedom is important. I had become a bit preoccupied with this question in recent years, as do all involuntary slaves, and put my best ideas into three or four paragraphs. The next day he picked on me to read my essay. When I finished, he said, "What book did you copy that out of?"

"I didn't copy it," I said, starting to get scared.

"Oh, I can tell that you did by the look on your face," he said smugly, "and you'd better tell me the truth because I'll know it whether you do or don't." I started to cry, which proved to him that I had been caught red-handed. He dutifully arranged some punishment for me that allowed him to feel he was returning the universe to a state of order and balance and which enabled him to sleep with a clear conscience. He's probably still sleeping today. The newspaper article was written by my father, who was the advertising manager for the Bronx Press Review. This rag was so nepotistic that anybody who worked there could insert puffery about their friends and family. Talk about journalistic integrity! And naturally, my father got the story wrong. The incorrectly oriented photo showed plants growing downwards, yes, but he should have said that I had seen the original exhibit at the Hall of Invertebrates at the AMNH and knew for a fact which photo was correct.

I loved all the glass models in this exhibit and bought the 35-cent pamphlet about the Rotifera Exhibit to study — which started my collection of AMNH "guide leaflets". My father published his story as soon as we got the letter from Doubleday & Co., the owner of Hanover House, and a few months later we got a copy of their house organ, which carried a more accurate version of the story. One day in elementary school a little girl and I had sat on a bench during play period and taken great delight in just being together. That's okay, someone said. It's puppy love. But as my depression took hold in the ensuing years, the idea of pleasure threatened to unravel all the internal self-controls I had erected to stiffle my sponaneity. When other children were starting to get interested in the opposite sex, I was dreaming about joining a monastery. Sex seemed to turn people into animals, obviously, and I hoped I would never succomb because it would mean no longer pretending to be the robot they wanted me to be.

I was intimidated by girls because they seemed so alive and they so easily interacted with one another. Each one seemed to have dozens of friends. In fact, they seemed like one multi-person organism — a Borg hive. Compared to them I was something that had crawled out from under a rock, and I knew they must hate me for my social awkwardness. But human feelings were beginning to stir with me in spite of myself and I began to think it might be nice to like people. I started having a recurring dream about my parents. We would be dressed up in our Sunday best, like a real family, visiting some kind of exhibition. They would find a big empty glass booth, the kind that sometimes houses stuffed animals in natural history museums. They would open the door, usher me inside, lock the door and walk away. I would scream but no sound would come out. At this point my heart would start pounding wildly and I would wake up in a sweat. As a child I had a real problem learning the rules of engagement. As boys clumped into twos and threes, they seemed to take on the quality of criminal partnerships — stealing bicycles, tossing frogs into fires, finding smaller boys to beat up. Their inhuman nature inspired no love in me and I began to feel like a loner. I made friends with a boy upstairs named Kenny, but he eventually played mean tricks on me which I protested vigorously. Once I demanded an apology and would not leave his apartment until his parents had to physically pick me up and throw me out into the hallway. My world was growing cold and grey. My heart was going into hibernation. Then, as fortune would have it, I found a wonderful source of warmth and knowledge, the children's room of my branch library. Getting my first library card gave me real power. All I needed to do to get a kindly person to explain something to me was to open a book. And I didn't even have to be polite to them, because when I lost interest in what they were saying all I had to do was to close the book. Books about prehistoric animals, tales of the Norse gods and giants, and stories about American Indians were my favorites. It was here, amidst happy, bustling children and overworked librarians who were too busy to pick on me that I began to sense that beyond the rank prison of my pretend family and decadent school system was a much realer, bigger and terribly interesting world in which I might someday find a place of my own. My childhood had been a nightmare from which I was trying to awake. Books kept me sane all through my teenage years. They were the only link to the larger world I wanted to escape into. During this time I lost all taste for merely human contact, preferring the safety and eloquence of the printed word — never realizing how painful it would someday be to rip this scab off my psyche and become human once more.

Since I couldn't be a boy, I was becoming a book, or at least a citizen of bookland. It wasn't until I was thirteen that I realized that I wasn't the only boy who had to live a fantasy life. In March 1959 my father bought me my first issue of Scientific American, which I devoured from cover to cover. And I was shocked to find that the main article was about me. In "Joey: A 'Mechanical Boy'", Bruno Bettelheim described a boy my age who needed to plug himself into imaginary wall sockets to draw the electricity that was necessary for his survival. The wires were imaginary, too, but, as I saw it, Joey knew that his parents didn't understand that. My take on Joey was that he was putting on an act that so impressed adults that he dusted it off and took it on the road to keep them permanently at bay. I wondered if such an elaborate ruse would work for me as well as it worked for my role model.

My father was all over me, pounding it into me that I had no self-control. If I could pull off becoming a mechanical boy I would achieve a level of self-control beyond his comprehension. But as much as I admired Joey, Bettelheim felt just the opposite. He thought Joey's mind was diseased and should get back in touch with the so-called real world. But what if Joey's way of life gave him more satisfaction than the real world did? I began to suspect that shrinks might be stooges of the status quo, running dogs of the capitalist elite, secret agents of an evil empire. I decided to learn all I could about them, just in case they ever came by with a cure for the mechanical boy named Dean. My local library was a paradise compared to elementary school, but it was the gargantuan American Museum of Natural History which became for me a living embodiment of the civilization I sought. Imagine a building occupying most of a city block filled with displays of everything an educated person might be interested in and annotated with signs that any child could understand. My family would go there every few months on Sunday afternoons, until I was old enough to take the subway and could go any time I wanted. On each visit I had to see the dinosaurs, the hall of insects, the whale, and sometimes the planetarium. Whenever I visited by myself I brought a sketchbook and copied Charles R. Knight's drawings of prehistoric animals. I was thrilled by the gemstones which were always displayed alongside geometric diagrams showing their inner crystalline structure. Who said you couldn't look into the mind of God?

Each visit to the museum would end at the bookshop, which was a museum all by itself. There you could catch glimpses of ideas in various stages of evolution, some brachiating high above you and others still clinging to the rocks. The popular books on science were simply the greatest products of human imagination I could possibly imagine. They tickled my mind in places I never knew existed. I loved charts and diagrams especially, believing them to embody the purest sort of knowledge people could attain. My favorite chart was the endpaper of Bertha Morris Parker's Natural History. It illustrated how living creatures had evolved on Earth, with each branch of the tree of life shown in a different color. I was sure this was a window into all the questions I would ever ask, and wrote to the publisher asking them to prepare a more detailed version for me as soon as possible.

Although my parents took great pains to dress properly and keep their car shiny, I was terribly disappointed to learn that this was not a sign of wealth and that they could not afford to buy me all the books I wanted. I insisted on at least one booklet per visit, but when I couldn't even have that I'd be so unhappy that tears would roll down my cheeks. I made a mental note to make up for this intellectual deprivation some day and, twenty years later, had acquired nearly every book I had ever seen in the bookshop — as well as any book whose title could be read holding a magnifying glass over photos of the bookshop that I would later purchase from the museum's photography department. In junior high I had gotten resigned to enjoy nothing but going to the library and doing my homework. Nowadays, victims of rheumatic fever are encouraged to exercise their weakened heart muscles. But in those days you were told never to exercise and never to engage in sports, so I had started living in my head. Schoolteachers, it should be obvious to you by now, adore depressed children. They're easier to control, and their system-induced autism gives them a greater tolerance for memorizing useless facts. They had duly rewarded my sickness with improved report card scores, which in turn made Frank and Vicki gloat with pride at how well they were doing as parents. I had become so polluted with brainwashing that I easily qualified for the top two high schools in New York: the High School of Science and the High School of Music and Art. These days I wish I had gone to the latter, but the paralyzing shyness that had now entombed my personality made me fear going anywhere I'd have to perform. I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious — for instance, the nuns who never take a bath without wearing a bathrobe all the time. When asked why, since no man can see them, they reply: "Oh, but you forget the good God." Apparently they conceive of the Deity as a Peeping Tom, whose omnipotence enables Him to see through bathroom walls, but who is foiled by bathrobes.

— Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays [1950]

In elementary teachers made us parrot their words so we would remember things. In junior high I suspected that, since all they ever tested was our ability to parrot, perhaps they weren't so interested in education after all. In high school, my suspicions were confirmed.

[Mention Mr. Lee and the Newman Club.]

At Bronx Science I met other victims of the system, their heads bloodied and bowed, waiting for the ovens to open and make ashes of them. These walking dead were oddly intermixed with a horde of totally unremarkable brats whose only distinction was the misfortune of having been born with an IQ they didn't know what to do with. For three years I would hang out with fellow nerds on the Math Team and in the computer class, avoiding any contact with girls and bracing myself for some catastrophe which seemed right around the corner, such as getting less than 100% on some test or homework assignment. Life became a forest of eggshells. We of the dreaded Math Team carried sliderules on our hips and used them to have shootouts to weed out he weak when nobody was looking. Our bible was Bertrand Russell's "Unpopular Essays". Like ourselves, he found Christian piety as pathetic as the bleeting of sheep.

As if to remind us that we were only cogs in a big machine, they made us say the pledge of allegiance every day, which even the dumbest of us hated. Did they really think that by making us say "I will kill a Jew each day" we would go out and do just that? (Hint: Yes, they did.) To help take his mind off the anger he felt during this insulting ritual, my best friend Alan would practice balancing his bassoon case on his head — for which he was secretly applauded by the prisoners and eventually disciplined by the prison guards. Alan was better than math at anyone. We all came to him for insight, including professors from City University who hired him to help with their research. We burst out laughing when the S.A.T. results came back and, of the two, only I got a perfect score on both the math and advanced math tests. How could you not laugh at these people?

It was only many years later that I learned from Isaiah Berlin that the carrot and stick approach to liberal education had had a long and even honorable history: The great eighteenth-century liberals believed that the way to make people live properly is by education and laws, that is to say, by the method of carrots and sticks. The carrot tempts and the stick coerces. Helvétius thought you could reform society by conditioning people to act rightly by means of rewards and punishments, like training dogs and performing seals. The idea is that once they acquire the habit of living as the educator believes to be the right way, all will be well — happiness, harmony, virtue will flourish. But this goes against Kant's idea of human personality and human freedom in which I believe. Moulding human beings like children or animals leads logically to Auguste Comte, Marx and Lenin. Once you know what has to be done, you can do it by persuasion or force and that denies basic human rights — above all of choice — lack of freedom of choice means dehumanization.

&mash; Isaiah Berlin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, 1991, page 71

I never saw The Manchurian Candidate until much later, but all during high school I knew they were brainwashing us to become their running dogs, tools of an evil system. This was confirmed by my reading Summerhill by A. S. Neill. Bertrand Russell had set up a school for precocious teenagers at which sexual activity was tolerated so that frustrations would not distract them from their studies. This way they could focus on mathematics, "which was the main point." Neill took this concept one step further, allowing kids to control practically every aspect of their lives, thereby breeding independence and ambition — virtues detested by most schoolteachers.

Neill's attitude toward life completely debunked the allure of careerism for me. He insisted that schools should be about helping children understand and take control of their own lives, not preparing them to fit into some corporate hierarchy somewhere. Often when I was out for a walk and had nothing better to dream about I would remember the anecdotes he told about several of his favorites students who, long after leaving Summerhill, would admit with a grin that they still weren't quite sure what they wanted to do when they grew up. In fact, they weren't sure that they even wanted to "grow up". It was immediately clear to me that they had the right attitude.

I soon learned that Peter M. Barrie too, and well before Neill, had taught that children who refuse to grow up retain special powers the rest of us have lost. "Do you believe in fairies? Do you?" I believe in fairies.

If I thought I was depressed before, reading Neill made my disappointment with circumstance all the more exquisite. The place I needed to be in actually existed in England, a place which not only empowered children but actually allowed them to taste adult love. Power and love were the food and drink of adults, yet in America they were wholly denied to children to insure that at the age of 21 the girls will get pregnant and the boys will die in car crashes. As Dewey had stressed, education was too much about preparing us to live in some distant future, at which time the right to experience power and love would be granted without warning. Schoolteachers thought they could build great violinists by making us study music scores for twenty years and then handing us violins.

I was not the only unhappy camper at Bronx Science. Aside from the sappy nerds and nerdy saps, there was an intriguing coterie of politically sophisticated and socially advanced kids who I would gradually learn were children of the Old Left. I worshipped this crowd from a distance and felt intensely inferior to each and every one of them. They were sensual and artistic and unafraid to be beautifully dressed and physically affectionate with one another. Unlike the greasers, whose allure was a mixture of crewcuts, bouffant hair styles, loudness and stinky perfume, the girls of this paradise had long silky hair, peasant skirts, beaded necklaces and gypsy earrings. Each glimpse of these creatures would make me ache with fascination and desire. And the boys displayed a genuine comradeship that spoke of an inner integrity I had long ago lost any hope of attaining. If only I could gain admittance to this group, I knew I might learn who I was meant to be.

All of them played guitars, mandolins or banjos — instruments you could sing folk songs along with — and they routinely mocked the latest utterances of right-wing politicians. They were so knowledgeable about the world that most of their observations were expressed in a kind of short hand that sailed right over my head. I didn't think I could ever catch up with these superior beings, but I had to try. I bought a crappy nylon string guitar and stopped getting haircuts.

While I was helping myself to forbidden hopes for a radically different future, the wise administrators of Bronx Science were helping me too. They helped me to report cards with grades expressed not as letters but as percentages — calibrated to five decimal places so that no illusions of human equality could possibly take root in my innocent breast. They tried everything to heat to a fever pitch an artificial drive to compete. To them I was a hound on a fox hunt, thrown a hogtied kit to whet its appetite. Anything to beat Kruschev to the moon, they believed. Their view of science was limited to lab coats — experimenters who served giant evil corporations grinding out new and better versions of napalm. A boy named Karl had been in my 5th and 6th grade elementary school classes. He lived near me, and occasionally we used to play "box ball," a poor cousin of tennis where two sidewalk squares become the tennis court, pinkies substitute for tennis balls, and hands emulate rackets. We had lost touch with each other in junior high school because, thanks to his drive to compete academically, he had skipped a grade. When we met up again at Bronx Science he had somehow become spiritually elevated and morally superior. He took me under his wing and tried to enlighten me, which I found utterly intriguing — giving me lectures about Greek philosophers as we took leisurely strolls home through the Botanical Gardens. When he asked me if I believed in God I said I was much too young to form an opinion about such an important question. He seemed surprised. "That's very wise," he said. This was the first time anybody had taken a personal interest in my intellectual development other than to hand out a test score, and I found it absolutely thrilling.

One time when we were sitting together on the subway, I rested my head on my knees and closed my eyes as I usually did, hugging my zippered loose-leaf like a lab monkey clinging to a wire-frame mother. Karl must have sensed how depressed I was, because without hesitating he put his arm around my shoulder. I admired his independence in cheering me up in this way, risking as he did being made fun of by the ruffians who were always lurking about. And it instantly made me feel a whole lot better about myself — as if I might actually be worthy of human companionship. I came to life like a wilted flower being watered and, from that moment on, felt that Karl held the key to my future happiness.

One day Karl asked me if I ever listened to Pete Seeger. So far I had only listened to classical music. We went up to his family's apartment and he put a record on the turntable.

I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead, for I am dead.

I'm only seven, although I died
In Hiroshima long ago.
I'm seven now, as I was then —
When children die, they do not grow.

My hair was scorched by swirling flame;
My eyes grew dim, my eyes grew blind.
Death came and turned my bones to dust,
And that was scattered by the wind.

I need no fruit, I need no rice.
I need no sweets, or even bread;
I ask for nothing for myself,
For I am dead, for I am dead.

All that I ask is that for peace
You fight today, you fight today.
So that the children of this world
May live and grow and laugh and play.

Nothing about Seeger's voice or banjo playing impressed me, but as I listened intently to the words of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, I found tears rolling down my cheeks. I had been a dead child for years, and I hadn't fought back at all. How trivial my whole life suddenly seemed. I felt ashamed even to be in Karl's presence and went home.

A few weeks later I found the Seeger record in some bargain basic record store near Times Square and brought it home with me. It was playing when my father came home. His face turned red and he turned it off. "Don't ever play this in my house," he growled. "That man is a communist." Like other fathers he emulated, he didn't actually care about sharing useful information or imparting superior values for his children to benefit from. He only cared about obedience. My sister and I had learned long before that pretending to agree with him was usually enough to throw him off the scent. It would even have been pointless to admit that I didn't know what the word "communist" meant. And besides, it was clear to me that the message of this banned song would be just as powerful if Seeger had been a mass murderer.

My father finally did make one attempt to prove to me how righteous he was, however, and to set an example that I could take to heart and emulate. People from the NAACP were picketing a Howard Johnson near the Bronx Zoo, and one Saturday he drove me out there and parked down the street. "Just watch," he said. He made me sit in the car with the doors locked. I couldn't hear a word, but he started a 60-second shouting match with their leader. Finally, he pointed his finger into the man's face, spun on his heels, and marched away. "See?" he said when he got back in the car. "That's how you deal with people like that."

The man was beginning to embarrass me, and I tried to steer my friends away from him. I would sooner have died than follow any of his pathetic examples of pretend morality. That I could so easily see through him must not have escaped his notice, however, because he soon gave up his heroics and went back to his old brooding ways. The rest of us could relax. Karl and I met again after summer vacation, but he had changed. Suddenly he was sadistic and vicious towards me and called me a loser every chance he got, especially when his in-crowd friends could see him doing it. For the next few months he would hide in wait for me, springing out of the shadows and strafing me with the air machine gun he was somehow never without. My depression came back with a vengeance and I cried myself to sleep for the rest of that year. Even though I had never felt love towards Karl and was experiencing a normal string of unrequited crushes on the pretty girls in my purview, the loss of Karl's love hurt beyond words. Every Saturday my father would drive Alan, a friend of mine who was interested in mathematics and classical music, and me to a public library in the Bronx that lent out LP's. For an hour we'd choose the half dozen records we were allowed to borrow at a time, and then went back to my parent's apartment to play them on our stereo system. I soon learned that it was better to chose at random because then I would be more likely to make a new discovery, as I did with Guillaume Lekeu and the Shostakovitch string quartets.

Since my knowledge of the standard concert hall repertoire was not exactly encyclopedic, occasionally there were major discoveries awaiting me there as well. One of these was Toscanini's recording of Beethoven's Ninth.

It would be hard to explain why hearing its last movement for the first time electrified me. How can scratchy sounds make chills run down your spine and goosebumps rise along your arms? Yet it expressed perfectly that joy I had felt as an infant first confronted by a sea of humanity, or the moment when, rehearsing a showtune in a sixth grade school orchestra, I suddenly realized what the purpose of my life would be. [TELL THIS STORY!]

In the school library I found the lyrics from the "Ode to Joy" by Friedrich von Schiller:

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken.
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

It became my mantra for years to come, hummed silently to myself when the world became too worldly. [Steven and Experimental Movies]

A white rabbit is pulled out of a top hat. Because it is an extremely large rabbit, the trick takes many billions of years. All mortals are born at the very tip of the rabbit's fine hairs, where they are in a position to wonder at the impossibility of the trick. But as they grow older they work themselves ever deeper into the fur. And there they stay. They become so comfortable they never risk crawling back up the fragile hairs again. Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink.

"Ladies and gentlemen," they yell, "we are floating in space!" But none of the people down there care.

"What a bunch of troublemakers!" they say. And they keep on chatting: Would you pass the butter, please? How much have our stocks risen today? What is the price of tomatoes? Have you heard that Princess Di is expecting again?

— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World

My search for higher truths found a sympathetic ear in Steven. He would confide in me his secret theories about the afterlife, which fascinated him even more than his math homework. He was convinced, for example, that the mood you were in at the moment of your death would haunt you for all eternity — so it was important to go out with a smile on your face.

Steven was terribly impressed by a gangly high-school drop-out named John who lived in his Queens neighborhood. Only 17, John was already an expert in experimental filmmaking and knew people like Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas. John had told Steven that experimental filmmakers were documenting the search for higher truths in a way never done before. Some of them even had anal sex.

Steven thought that studying their work might be important to our search for truth, so we started taking the subway down to Lafayette Street in the East Village every few weeks to catch the latest batch of trailblazing masterpieces. They certainly were memorable, and made our minds work overtime — the way you do when looking at a "what's wrong with this picture" puzzle.

Naked women's breasts seemed to pop up in a lot of them, which I personally found intensely educational. They weren't "blue" movies, exactly, but at least they weren't "orange" movies — the term of contempt John used for standard Hollywood trash, especially when it had Doris Day in it. Some made repeated and pointed references to the inexorability of death and destruction. One gem I'll never forget consisted entirely of 18 minutes of leader — which gave you plenty of time for the film's meaning to sink in.

A man named Stan Brakhage would prove especially influential in the popular culture of the ensuing decades. A typical Brakhage work might consist of random shots of city traffic intercut with naked children bouncing around on a dirty mattress in soft-focus. John was thrilled by the rumor that Stan's final masterpiece would end with a shot of his beatific face captured by a hand-held camera as he lept off a cliff to his death. How the camera would survive was unclear.

Brakhage's originality was not in content or message, but in novel editing techniques, bringing to the screen a kind of dream language whose technical elaboration could not have been dreamt of by earlier filmmakers. It consisted of confusing intercuts, poor lighting, and half-hearted focusing — lovingly captured by an apparently distracted cameraman using a cheap handheld camera needing repair. These days, lovingly refined, these innovations are used to create million dollar commercials to sell cars, beer and banking services.

Nowadays making fun of these experimental films is as easy as was lampooning Dadaism 50 years ago. Dozens of artistic movements have failed in the last millenium, some of them spectacularly, most ignominiously. But I never make fun of the filmmakers themselves. As unfit to survive as were their creations, as utterly as they appeared unable to grasp any human purpose for art, I still felt that their world was much more attractive to me than the world of my parents and schoolteachers. These were interesting, unconventional people, after all. Most were freedom loving and very bright. They articulated a brand of non-political social criticism that was revolutionary to me. Even if they were vain and wasted time grinding out pretend art, I loved speaking with them and listening to their odd views. They were my best friends and they didn't even know it.

During the years to come, it would become increasingly clear to me that the world is full of talented and bright people who fail to create anything of lasting importance to others but who nevertheless lead interesting and occasionally instructive lives because they insist on demarcating themselves from social convention. These are the people with whom I have increasingly chosen to share my life. Unlike conventional people who settle down early in life, forget their dreams and wait to die, people who are true to their human potential are alive for the duration. They ask questions. They change their minds. Their lives are clumps of froth riding the crests of ocean waves, occasionally born aloft by a gust of wind to land on a new perch and view new wonders, while the great ocean underneath them slumbers on unaware. When I graduated high school in the summer of 1964, my father had a surprise for us. He took us to a seafood restaurant on City Island for lunch. To my chagrin, he embarked on a carefully rehearsed lecture about how all my success in high school had been due to his support, his encouragement and his tireless bill-paying. But high school had been a total disaster for me, and I'd had enough.

"All you ever gave me were material things," I reminded him, gently. His oration came to a screeching halt.

"Didn't you see the love that was behind those things?" he asked, stupefied. What was it doing hiding behind them, I wondered. But I just looked down at my plate. I wanted out of there.

The meal was consumed in angry silence. Somehow in marching to his car he managed to rip the new suit he had bought for his celebration. When we got home he threw himself on the couch with his back to us. I thought he was going to cry and then come to his senses and slit my throat. I couldn't deal with these people any longer and went out for a very long walk. If only there had been somewhere to run away to.

I was not the son he had wanted. But I was in a desperate fight to find out who I was, and couldn't stop to worry about him. The war for civilization, which I was waging even if I didn't know it, is not about comforting those whose lives are already over, even when one of them happens to be your father. If I could not make him happy, at least I could stop making him miserable. Two months later I packed my bags and left for college, never to return.

Going away to a college was a completely disoriented and disturbing experience. I didn't know how to go about making friends, mostly for the simple reason that I knew I didn't deserve any and didn't try. I was visibly "out of it" and uncomfortable, especially with the more perceptive of my classmates who didn't buy my poker-face. Fortunately, I soon met a sophomore named Danny who took me under his wing and showed a special interest in keeping me in one piece. I was very grateful that he had found me. My high school friends Alan and Steve had also tried to help me to, with no success. Danny was a bit more resourceful, however.

"I'm going to introduce you to the school psychologist," he said.

"I can't afford to see a doctor," I said.

"No, no, no," he said. "Judy is a student. She's a junior, but actually she's three years older than the other juniors, and her father is a psychologist. She just likes helping people."

I didn't have anything to lose, and the mission of psychotherapists fascinated me, so I agreed to meet her. One sunny day, around noon, I sat outside her dorm, waiting for her to come out. Finally the door opened and a cute girl emerged, sucking on a straw sticking out of a soda can. She looked up, saw me immediately, and gave a totally engaging "double take", a look that expressed a suprise and delight and that was utterly generous and utterly undeserved. I immediately felt comfortable and emotionally safe, even though I knew that this was probably how she treated all her "patients".

"Danny said you wanted to talk to me," she said, beaming with delight. I told her that, aside from being totally miserable in every way humanly possible, I had read enough Freud to know that I didn't yet have access to my unconscious, and therefor would have no way to struggle out of the quicksand I was drowning in.

She looked quite concerned, and said that Freud's theories had never been proven, and that I would do better ignoring them and doing things that would make me happy in the here and now, whatever they turned out to be. "Play ping pong, play tennis, play soccer," she suggested. "Have friends." Actually, I liked ping pong and billiards although I'd spent little time on either. "Sleep with lots of girls."

I didn't even hear that last suggestion. I didn't know how to deal with girls who were awake, much less those who were asleep. "But I don't just want to have fun," I said. "Too many of the people here are just wasting time. I want to find something important to do with my life."

"You're not going to do that if you're miserable. Satisfy your animal needs first, then think about 'higher purposes'."

"How can I do that if I can't access my unconscious?" I asked, confused.

"Forget the unconscious," she said, firmly. "It doesn't exist. Your life is out here, in front of you, with people."

I liked the fact that she was firm, and I felt much better about myself after talking with her. She had worked some magic on me that I couldn't understand. When Danny bumped into me he said, "So, how do you feel now?"

"Judy made me feel great!" I said. He was delighted. I'm sure he reported back to her. I felt Judy had given me an assignment and I had god damn better do my homework.

I spent the rest of the year struggling with the standard philosophical reading assignments that were utterly impossible for children like me to wrap their minds around, and making friends with a few girls who didn't like me but seemed willing to consider me a potential breadwinner if the price was right. I indulged their curiosity because it seemed bizaare that anybody would be attracted to me on any level. I also thought I should learn some proper techniques for "making out" in case somebody might actually want to have sex with me someday. Whenever I saw Judy I waved and smiled to her, and she waved and smiled back. I never saw her with anything that looked like a boyfriend, but I assumed that a junior who was three years older than the other juniors would have quite a grown-up sex life, maybe even with multiple partners.

When summer came, I had nothing to do except feel unbearably uncomfortable around my parents, so I decided to explore psychological counseling a bit more. One day I took a bus to a nearby hospital and told them I needed to see a psychologist because I might be crazy. Within an hour I was talking to a young psychiatrist who seemed interested in helping me. I noticed him looking at one of my hands, the fingers of which were picking at a crease in my pants. When you have no way of releasing energy, you pinch yourself, clench your fists, and sometimes even pick up a razor. Animals in tiny cages pace in circles.

"I'd like to invite you to join my group," the nice doctor said. "You can come as often as you like, and leave when you know longer need it." Once again, I didn't have anything to lose, so I said yes.

The group was mostly housewives, about 20 of them. They went around introducing themselves, and eventually got around to me. I came up with the usual lame excuses for considering myself "sick". I don't remember the doctor saying much, but one of the housewives seemed interested in me and said, "You need a girlfriend, that's all. She'll make you happy."

If my parents or a schoolteacher had said something like this, I would have shivered with horror. A girl friend? Seriously? But coming from a complete stranger who had no vested interest in reducing me to her level, this theory seemed at least worth investigating.

When I went back to college I was now a sophomore and there were lots of freshman girls to be curious about and try to impress. I learned to drink cheap port wine and to tolerate innebriation even though I would throw up within a few hours. I started going to parties and dancing, usually wearing a colorful, fluffy orange scarf around my neck to distract them from the ugliness of my face. Dancing in the 60's was a pretty asocial sport — you just hopped up and down to crap music, never touching one another. Sometimes you danced with a girl, sometimes with yourself. I think I would have liked slow dancing where you were at least allowed to hold a girl in your arms, but ironically that was now out of fashion with hippies.

Once in a while I bumped into Judy. She was nice to me, but I was shy and didn't feel qualified to waste any of her time. Once, though, after a meal of popcorn, I got very drunk and found myself at a party in one of the dorms on a couch next to her, and somehow we were kissing! It just seemed like something you were supposed to do at a party, even though we didn't really have anything to say to one another. I was too desparate to follow Steve Martin's advice. "I think a person should get to know someone and even be in love with them before you use and degrade them."

— Steve Martin

A few months later, Judy found me outside the dining hall after lunchtime. She seemed as if she wanted to tell me something. "Why were you crying at that party?" she said. "I wasn't crying," I said, hoping that was the truth. "You're face tasted salty," she explained. "Oh! I was eating popcorn!" She laughed at the explanation. Then she said, "So how's your love-life?".

"Oh, I'm never going to have one of those," I said, embarrassed. "No girl in her right mind would want to do that with me."

She thought for a minute and then said, very sympathetically and with her usually amazing generosity, "I'll sleep with you."

I was shocked. I had heard of sexual surrogates, but I didn't know much about this practice. Still, the idea of having an older, wiser woman "teach me the ropes" seemed like an awfully generous thing for her to do, especially since I didn't have anything at all to give her in return. But what was there to lose? I didn't even know if it was even legal for unmarried couples to copulate, but I agreed to consider her offer.

During the week, I began thinking of everything that might go wrong. Would the smell make me sick? Would she try to make me please her in repulsive ways? Would I get a disease and die?

"I won't know what to do," I warned her the next time we met. "In fact, I might freeze up and not even be able to do anything." I was sending her signals that I wanted to chicken out.

This was the first time she seemed really annoyed by my overthinking. "Stop it," she said simply, trying desparately to maintain her warmth for me. She was right to do this, and I felt ashamed for being such a whimp. I decided for the first time in my life to try to curb this very bad habit. And I decided to sleep with her.

She was a camera buff and had access to the school's dark room. One day she called me on the campus phone and invited me to learn how to develop film. I was really starting to just like being in her company so I went. After she processed some of her negatives she came over to me and gently put my hands on her breasts. I had never done that before and had been disgusted by my father's interest in breasts — but this was Judy. It wasn't sexually arousing — that association was to be learned over time. But what was moving was her granting me permission to be intimate, her trusting me. I don't know if I did a "good job" of fondling her breasts, but over time we found ourselves being more playful. I think I enjoyed our playground antics and verbal jousting more than our tentative physical intimacies, but what was really growing on me was just our friendship, the fact that we kept coming back for more. This was real. I wasn't just pressing my face to the window of a donut shop this time.

During the next month she waited for her father to be out of town so we could sleep together at their apartment. Having agreed upon a secret plan gave us a reason to talk more. I learned that she had been "home-schooled", and that explained why she was nothing like the other girls. She was completely gentle and "present". Schooled girls were brash, competetive, and always looking over their shoulders. Boys were potential money earners to them and little else. Here was a true wild child, someone whose parents had spared her the systematic abuse called public education. By studying her I hoped to understand the whole the Summerhill philosophy better. And it made me intensely curious about her parents. Because Judy had not been subjected to a violent and abusive public school system, she retained a sensitivity and gentleness that was a revelation to me. She did not try to be what other people wanted her to be. Instead, all she cared about was communicating with the people in her life. And she always got to the point as quickly as possible. Like the children of Summerhill, she had no need to polish her speech patterns to be acceptible to teachers, either. If the language of the street worked, that's what she used.

I learned that her mother was an alcoholic who had abandoned her children years before. I couldn't imagine the pain Judy must have felt, but it seemed evident that she must have had extraordinary strength to come out of it as the saintly young woman she now was. She was, she is, one of the few saintly persons I've ever had the privilege to meet.

Her father Abbott was short, fat, and had a red face and nose. Although I didn't much care for him as a person, he was a great raconteur and pub crawler who was fascinated with the politically powerful. He put so much of himself into his story-telling that sometimes he seemed to be just thinking out loud, arguing with himself over, say, whether Roosevelt should have allowed Pearl Harbor to be attacked to rouse Americans from their slumber. He seemed to have an endless fund of insider knowledge about recent history that only someone directly involved might have attained.

I found it distrubing to learn that, although a militant right-winger vehemently in favor of the War in Vietnam, Abbott agreed with Stalin that ordinary people should sacrifice their lives to the wishes of the "great leaders" who directed, and who claimed to understand, history. I didn't think I'd ever want to sacrifice my life to satisfy the whims of someone I didn't even know, and I began to appreciate the arguments of those who said it was foolish to "give your life for your country" or to believe Jingoist slogans like "My country, right or wrong." Maybe my country should give its life to me, I thought. Later on I would develop contempt for Supreme Court decisions that put the wishes of the "founding fathers" over those of living men, and began wondering what these fools would do once we were living in a world that the "founding fathers" could never even have begun to understand.

Abbott was always drunk, and always very self-indulgent. Besides politics, the other subject Abbott was interested in was nutty shrinks. One day while driving Judy and me somewhere he told us about an elderly psychiatrist in Chicago who fell in love with one of his patients, a teenage boy, and gave up everything to pursue the boy to all the way to New York City. I was glad I had given up on shrinks and would never find myself in such an ugly predicament.

I decided that Judy was a genius because she always knew how to say things in such a direct way that her listener's obsessive tendencies would be elegantly side-stepped. When she spoke with people she always seemed to know how they would react beforehand, and to craft her utterances accordingly. I was smart, according to the schoolteachers, because I could make simple things complicated. Just was smart, according to me, because she could make complicated things simple. That to me, has continued to be a working definition of genius.

Here's an example. She was always trying to encourage me to be more confident in myself, always trying to "build me up", in the parlance of the day. So one day she confided that another girl had asked her in hushed awe, "How did you get Hannotte??" This seemed unbelievable, but I trusted her enough to keep listening. "Oh, I'm just nice to him," she answered. Somehow she had managed to package volumes of psychological insight into the word "nice".

Another time I was trying to understand why she liked being with me and she said, "We fit!" I would spend several years parsing the various layers of meaning she had packed into the word "fit". But basically she meant that when I did something she felt something and when she did something I felt something. We were close.

I knew I had no right to ask her about her other lovers, but I thought it might be okay to ask how she had lost her virginity since I'd seen people do that in movies. "It was a big gorilla named Mike that I met in Florida," she said. "I fell in love with him and I wanted him to just go ahead and do anything he wanted to me. God, it really, really hurt."

"But it was worth it," she added, as if trying to convince herself. I had no right to comment, and I didn't.

"I still don't know what I did wrong," she continued, "but I got dumped." It was obvious she was still carrying a torch for him, still expecting him to come back to her.

Finally, one weekend Abbott was out of town. There was no way I could avoid my trial and conviction. Fortunately, Judy wanted to go slow. We took our clothes off in complete darkness. She pulled my hands to her breasts and told me to feel them.

"We're going to lie next to one another, and I want you to jerk off," she said. This must be so disgusting for her, I thought, but I obeyed her because I just wanted to learn anything she was willing to teach me. Anything at all. It took me a while to cum, but we quickly fell asleep afterwards. I knew it would be wimpish to apologize, so I didn't.

The next weekend Abbott was still out of town and she said we were going to "go all the way". We both got undressed, this time with the lights on. I got a hardon and positioned myself between her legs. There was a strange smell in the room, but I realized after a few more visits that this was just the stale clothes lying around. The moved frequently, for some reason, and their apartments were always totally messy.

After about 15 minutes I felt a little spasm. "I think I came a little," I said, hoping we could stop. She didn't say anything but gave me a little hug and we again fell asleep.

So far the best part was just feeling close to her. I had never experienced anything like that. It was what I looked forward to. I wished that we could just spend a long time taking long walks arm in arm, but she had more ambitious goals for me than that. From that point on, we slept together every weekend. Soon, it no longer mattered if Abbott was around. Maybe she'd had a talk with him. And it quickly got better and better. I learned what to do and my penis learned what to feel. My orgasms became stronger and she seemed to enjoy it more and more.

One time we were in bed together, on a cot actually, and Abbott walked in. I thought she would freak out, but instead she just looked up at him and said, "Look what I have to put up with!"

"Disgusting," he said, sympathizing with her disappointment. There was something really weird going on. She could have just told him to leave, after all. But I realized that they were sharing an inside joke and meant that I wasn't showing enough skin. I took my t-shirt off, and Abbott went back to his room. Was Abbott a homosexual? I had seen enough of those on campus and didn't want to be leered at by degenerates.

The more Judy and I slept together, the more we learned how to do it "right". Not more complicated, as was being advocated by trendy books like "The Joy of Sex", but actually more simple. One evening we had sex twice, the second time lasting much longer. When I withdrew she admitted that it had hurt a little.

"God, I'm sorry!" I gasped. "I'll never do that again, I promise!" She beamed up at me, suppressed a giggle, and said, "But it hurt so nice!" Very slowly, I learned that she enjoyed teasing me, perhaps to make me more of a "man" — whether I wanted to be that or not.

I was becoming terribly fond of her. I really wanted to tell her that I loved her. But when the moment came I chickened out and just said "I love your body."

"Aww, thanks," she said, not even looking up from her textbook. I felt like a jerk. I was a jerk.

In the winter of 1966, she and Abbott had moved to a new place. She had cleaned out a musty basement room and thrown a couple of used mattresses on the floor so we could have some privacy. I went to see her and she seemed devastated. I don't remember now if she told me or her sister Suzie did, but she had found an item from the back pages of the New York Times saying the love of her life had just gotten married. She didn't want to talk about it, and she wanted to have sex anyway. I always tried to follow her lead in these things. People have a right to structure their relationships any way they choose and I was the student, not the teacher. But I began to suspect that I was never going to be anything but second best for her — which was odd because she had never even told me I could expect that much.

One weekend I came over early and begged to have sex with her. "It'll only take 5 minutes," I promised. She gave me a hug and a smile and said, "I need to finish my homework first." I begged some more, but finally just went back to my dorm room which was only a few blocks away. Two hours later, feeling thoroughly ashamed of myself, I slinked back to her place.

I said, "I'm so sorry, Judy. I won't ever do that again." I almost started crying. "Don't ever let me hurt you."

As I turned around to jump backwards into bed, the reassuring words "I love you," came out of her, as if she was giving in to something that finally seemed inevitable. Suddenly her hands flew up to her face and covered her mouth. She had now betrayed Mike. He would never forgive her. She might as well have committed suicide.

She turned away from me to go to sleep, and, although I thought it was very inappropriate, she had given me carte blanch in sexual matters so I pushed my hardon between her legs just to see if she wanted to fool around a little.

"Oh, you want to do it that way?" said, smiling. She pushed herself into me and I found my way inside her. I knew I was being utterly selfish, so when I came I just closed my eyes and tried to figure out what variation on "I'm sorry" I should come up with this time. She looked back at me with a grin and said, "Thank you." I was flabbergasted. It blasted the guilt right out of me, and I held her close to me as we both sank into deep sleep.

In our jaded 21-st century, many kids would describe my relationship with Judy as "just sex". We were just "fuck buddies" or "friends with benefits." Believe me when I tell you that anybody who can reduce human intimacy to such disparaging categories has never known real intimacy. Judy and I were teaching each other how to be close to another person. Sex was just an ingredient nature provided to help and encourage us towards this deeper goal.

Judy and I were together for the rest of that school year. During my summer vacation I quickly got a temp job at the famous J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency so as to stay far away from my parents. Another young man named Sam As a character in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy wonders when philosophers threaten to go on strike, "Exactly who will that inconvenience?" When I went to St. John's I thought I would just read a lot and once in awhile listen to some old philosopher rattle on about stuff. But we were required to participate in two evening seminars each week. I found the ancient Greek philosophers, which we focused on in the first year, suggestive but more difficult to master than the effortless way in which I had always consumed mathematics. Sometimes I didn't even finish the readings, and even when I did I hadn't the slightest interest in talking about them with anyone. I had turned down going to the High School of Music and Art because I didn't want to perform for schoolteachers, and here I was being asked to pretend to want to talk about important things with schoolteachers I didn't like and students I didn't know. So these seminars were invariably an exercise in excruciating self-consciousness for me. And it seemed pretty obvious that most of what the kids said was just to prove that they had done their homework. For most of them these were only pretend conversations. When you caught up with these kids after the seminars they never talked about great books, and when they did it sounded completely different from anything you might have heard in seminar.

One evening just after the seminar began both my ears suddenly clogged up from wax and blood. I looked around helplessly and, to my horror, found everyone staring at me. Finally the boy to my right opened my book and, just loud enough for me to hear, whispered, "Mr. Bart wants you to read this passage aloud." I read aloud until he grabbed my arm and whispered, "You're going too far!" After a few more minutes of confusion they seemed to give up on me, and I found some peace of mind developing a mathematical proof that I didn't exist.

The next day I asked the school nurse if they had ear doctors in Annapolis like they did in New York. Once I got the right salve to apply, my ear infection and the hearing obstruction it caused slowly healed. After a year at St. John's I finally screwed up the courage to write to Karl at Columbia. He wrote back right away and said he felt sorry about what he'd done but that I should understand that he was very confused at the time. I was glad he responded, but I felt as if a murderer was annoyed because I wasn't showing him enough compassion. I tried my best to believe in Karl again, and even invited him to a party I threw during the next summer vacation. But my mind froze up in his presence and we never connected again.

Years later, my friend Laurie told me that she had met Karl at the camp she had spent a few summers at in upstate New York, at which children had been introduced to the brilliant philosophical discoveries of Mr. Stalin. Had Karl learned from this training that inferiors like me need to be exterminated in the interest of the class struggle? I don't know, but I see now that he wasn't nearly as independent a thinker as I'd hoped, but more of a true believer who needed great men to do his thinking for him. vanished from the face of the earth. Judy, anybody can be a doctor. No they can't. And anyway, the world has more than enough doctors already. No it doesn't. You can't win against arguments like these. But, in Christopher Hitchens' classic retort, you can't lose either. One day I was listening to a fugue from WTC II that had trills. On one trill a bird outside my window happened to chirp. It immediately struck me that music partly mimics the sounds of nature. Pieces called "tone poems" are especially good at this. -->>

"Mimer," said Odin, going up to him boldly, "let me drink of the waters of wisdom."

"Truly, Odin," answered Mimer, "it is a great treasure that you seek, and one which many have sought before, but who, when they knew the price of it, turned back."

Then replied Odin, "I would give my right hand for wisdom willingly."

"Nay," answered Mimer, "it is not your right hand, but your right eye you must give."

Odin was very sorry when he heard the words of Mimer, and yet he did not deem the price too great; for plucking out his right eye, and casting it from him, he received in return a draught of the fathomless deep. As Odin gave back the horn into Mimer's hand he felt as if there were a fountain of wisdom springing up with him — an inward light; for which you may be sure he never grudged having given his perishable eye. Now, also, he knew what it was necessary for him to do in order to become a really noble Asa, and that was to push on to the extreme edge of the earth itself and peep over into Niflheim. Odin knew it was precisely that he must do; and precisely that he did.

Nine nights and days this brave Asa hung over Niflheim pondering. More brave and more wise he turned away from it than when he came. It is true that he sighed often on his road thence to Jötunheim; but is it not always thus that wisdom and strength come to us weeping?

— A. and E. Keary, The Heroes of Asgard In the summer of 1966 I took a temporary job as a file clerk at the Walter J. Thompson advertising agency in midtown. A friendly young man named Sam and I stood over bins of file folders into which we stuffed invoices and other detritis of a failed civilization. Naturally we chatted the whole day. I told him what silly asses I thought shrinks were.

"Not all of them," he said. "I'm seeing a fantastic guy named Paul Rosenfels. He likes young people. And he won't come down on you just because you're anti-establishment. He's kind of anti-establishment himself." I was intrigued enough to see if this guy was as easy to mind fuck as all the other shrinks had been.

I walked up the steps to his brownstone on the North side of Washington Square and rang his buzzer. A jolly old man appeared with muttonchop sideburns, wearing a white shirt with a narrow black tie.

"You must be Dean," he said, warmly. He ushered me into his office, which overlooked Waverly Place, and offered me a large chair adjacent to his desk. "Why have you come to see me?" he asked.

"I don't have any reason in particular," I said, and then I decided to tell the truth. "It's just that I've been thinking of becoming a psychotherapist myself and I wanted to see what it was like." He seemed to like that.

"I can tell you for starters that you're more honest than most of them," he said. This surprised me. Were psychotherapists supposed to be critical of other psychotherapists? Looking at the expression on my face made Paul elaborate.

"Most of them don't understand anything out of the ordinary," he went on. "They gather up ideas from the standard textbooks and dispense them like human candy machines. You'll push a button and they'll come out with something that sounds like insight but turns out to have no nutritional value. I call these 'push button insights'. And all they really study are average, normal people — people with no ambition other than to 'succeed'."

He said the word 'succeed' with a sneer. So far Paul was passing all my tests with flying colors. A shrink who hated shrinks was someone worth investigating.

"The psychotherapists I've met didn't seem to be very smart," I admitted, "or at least able to understand a person like me. I'm interested in something more than just making money and raising a family, in being normal. I'm interested in what makes a person feel beautiful inside. That's why I come down to Greenwich Village. You see all kinds of people here who carry themselves with grace and self-assurance and a kind of lighthearted integrity that's hard to describe if you haven't seen it for yourself."

"That's why I'm here, too," Paul said. "This is where the creative people come."

"It's amazing that you can sense the beautiful people from just a glance," I went on. "It's something about the way they carry themselves — their musculature even."

Paul then asked about my relationships. He seemed to be looking for problems he could help me with. I told him about painful crushes I'd had with high school girls who didn't even know I existed. "That was your idealizing phase," he offered, implying that I would soon leave that all behind. At least he had names for this shit.

Then I said the person I most wanted to talk with him about was named Karl. "Karl was my best friend in high school. Something really special happened between us, but then ." I tried to tell Paul how beautiful my life suddenly seemed when Karl had tried to teach me about a higher way of being alive, but I suddenly choked up. My voice trailed off and I felt tears welling up. Paul looked down at his notepad.

"What's the problem?" he said, ending the chitchat. I took a deep breath and him how good Karl had been to me at first but how cruel he had quickly become. I thought Paul would tell me to suck it up and get a girlfriend, like the other mental health types had insisted. But instead he said, "Karl wasn't ready. And neither were you. You were only sixteen. You can't make this work when you're only sixteen."

It was the first time anyone had ever believed that what I had wanted with Karl was legitimate.

Paul never liked to see his patients ruminate about the past. When I wanted to talk more about Karl, for no particular reason other than that I was still obsessed with him, he became exasperated.

"Karl didn't make it!" he insisted. The idea that Karl was not actually ahead of me, but had fallen behind and failed in his exploration of life, was shocking to me, and not the least because I couldn't imagine how Paul could possibly know such things with such certainty. The cynical side of me thought that he was basing his judgment on the fact that he had a fighting chance of making me a homosexual and no chance of so liberating Karl, but I think I'm sure it was more than that.

Years later, when someone asked him why his interpretations were so accurate, he simply said, "Well, either you have it or you don't." Time and time again I have heard creative people fail to explain why they're so good at what they do. But I think the answer is the same for all of us. Trying to be good changes you. If you keep at it you not only develop new skills, but new ways of perceiving the world, of being in the world. After spending 20 years becoming somebody, it's no longer easy to trace the thousands of little steps that brought you to where you are. And no shortcuts to hand your students that they can carry around in their wallets. I found out that Paul knew how to play chess so I bought a cheap plastic set and challenged him. He wasn't great. For example, early in the game he said in frustration, "Oh, it's always hard to get both bishops into play." I was surprised that such tiny obstacles frustrated him, but he finally got through the exercise. When I started writing down the moves so I could feed his performance into some supercomputer of the future to learn whether he was actually an as I had expected all along, he said, "Oh, don't do that. You'll never remember all the moves." I knew there was going to be trouble if I disobeyed this authoritarian demand so I waited till he was out of the room and then wrote down all the moves. That was the first and last game we ever played. Paul explained that his writings were going to be source books for other writers to use, but that they would never be popular with the general public. I thought of Newton's Principia and Einstein's 1905 papers. He said I might be the first writer to bring his ideas to the attention of the educated public, similar to the kind of intellectual journalism that Arthur Koestler did so well. This was a thrilling vision for me, and my brain became riveted to the idea of eventually achieving it.

In order to achieve my goal, I would have to master two utterly different subject areas: 1) how Paul's mind worked, and 2) how the average educated human's mind works, and then figure out how to network the two. Of the two, the first would be easier. I was living with the man, after all, and had only two books to learn. How the average person thinks about life, however, was an intractable topic that had always defeated me. People seemed so confused. Some of them appeared not even to think. Many who were brilliant at little things, like brain surgery, were complete idiots at big things, like being good to others. At the little things they were perfectionists, yet at the big things they were satisfied with whatever mediocre adjustments their time and place defined as normal.

If you want to demonstrate for yourself the fact that even intelligent people are satisfied with psychological chaos, ask the average person who thinks he's seeing a terrific therapist what school of psychology his therapist subscribes to. Most of them will give you a perfectly blank stare. Some people will walk into any house of worship as long as it gets them out of the cold, but that doesn't make them theologians.

I told Paul I was eager to learn his ideas better, and spent the next two months carefully studying his books, writing down scores of pairs of analogs on three by five index cards that I kept in a metal box. I would underline every other sentence, it seemed, and on the next reading find myself underlining all the sentences I had missed on the first pass.

Once I had memorized a hundred or so analogs, I tried to discuss them with Paul. But all I had done was create a schematic diagram in my mind. I hadn't rubbed shoulders, let alone noses, with human nature as it exists in the wild. Paul concluded that all my reading had done was to make me more obsessive, to escape into a world of abstractions rather than the concrete world that would show me who I was. He showed me a little word puzzle in the newspaper that turned out to be more difficult than I expected. I kept staring at it until he said, "See? You don't use ideas. Ideas use you."

He thought I needed to go into what he called an enlistment — to live for awhile almost as an animal would, avoiding all escapist intellectuality and focusing only on developing my personal power by elaborating social skills.

Paul was not a good man. He was a man who talked a lot and who desperately wanted to be good. Achieving goodness was for him as easy as a gorilla's reaching high "C" on a tuba. Why then did I choose him over Judy?

If the story of the Garden of Eden has any meaning for me it is this. Anyone can be good the way Adam and Eve were. If goodness just flows out of you effortlessly then, in a sense, you play no real part in it. We don't pat each other on the back for breathing, after all. No act of goodness, in that case, bears your signature. Once thrown out of the Garden, however, we were given a special responsibility: to personally manage our goodness: to understand it and to control it. To ask ourselves why a particular act might be good before doing it and, most importantly, to experience shame and guilt when we get it wrong.

If you look at early anthropological films of Eskimos living in igloos or South American Indians in steaming jungles, they often look amazingly happy in a pure and simple way that they rest of us never achieve. Compare photos of "happy savages" in the pages of National Geographic with photos of scholars and politicians, taken in the nineteenth century before the public relations people taught them to smile for the camera, and you'll see what I mean. But although the happiness of simple people who live far away from the complexities of modern civilization is perfectly real, it is also perfectly unreliable. It is a state of lovely childlike innocence that is inevitably ruined by any temptation from without offered by civilization, and any temptation from within to engender social progress. Our life is a constant struggle to attain good and resist evil, but pre-civilized people haven't the strength or wisdom for either. Because they are men and not children, this innocence is inherently unstable. As Margaret Mead said in one of her last lectures, "Just ask them if they want your damned pots and pans."

In a way, I too was an innocent savage when I met Paul. And once contaminated by the best in him, I could not turn back. At that moment I became prey to the worst in him. I might have been perfectly and innocently happy living with Judy as long as I didn't try to accomplish anything with my life except enjoy the satisfactions of the moment. But that could never have been enough. Some men always need to be reaching for more. More giving and more getting, even when this leads to tragedy. I wanted the destiny of a free man, not a pampered pet. Right and truth are all around us. Great system builders are often happy to use the tools and building blocks created by those who came before them. A large part of their job is to generalize, extend, and develop clearer semantics concerning what we already know.

One of the reasons I liked Paul from the start was because many of the things he said were things I already knew but which very few others did. It was as if we shared a terrible secret, a utopianism garnered not by choice but by the requirements of logic. And while he deserves credit for systematizing the truth that was gathered up by others before him, many of his most striking insights were first offered by others. This is the price we pay for having been born after Plato. Gases expand to fill the space they occupy. So do I. During the first year after leaving St. John's I had grown in significant ways. I had learned to expect to be treated as an adult and how to cause problems for those who didn't. I had learned to take responsibility for my first apartment and to enjoy having dominion over it. In all my adult interactions I was learning how to negotiate for my best self-interests, no longer as a child but as a free man.

At the age of sixty Paul had plenty to be gassy about too. But he was too much a five hundred pound gorilla for me to know how to negotiate with, so I more or less took whatever I got and kept my mouth shut. One day I brought home an issue of Mad Magazine, whose silliness I had often tried and failed to learn how to appreciate. Paul flipped through it, found something to take offense at, and said grimly, "You're not to bring this magazine into my house." He walked back into his kitchen and shut the door behind him.

Suddenly I felt I was back home again, under the thumb of a tyrannical father who would demand that everyone within earshot respect his neurotic overreactions to commonplace occurences. It didn't occur to me to ask Paul what had offended him, what exactly banishing a magazine might accomplish, or why indeed I should have to obey him at all when the stated purpose of our relationship was for me to learn how to take control of my world. It did, however, occur to me to move out. The first thing Paul did was to give me a new vocabulary with which to think about my problems. According to him, having survived a depressing childhood, my basically masculine nature was overlaid with passivity, resignation, masochism and self-pity. Paul decided we needed to clean house. He said I was like Joseph Conrad, who had been crushed by an unrequited love affair and needed to go to sea for twenty years to get it out of his system. Or a man who has been bullied all through school and needs to enlist in the French Foreign Legion to regain his self-confidence. He contrasted this heightened engagement with the way feminines withdraw from the world into monastic retreats. He said that creative people had used enlistments and retreats for untold centuries to pull back from the marketplace of daily life and regain their sense of self. It reminded me of what I had tried to achieve by getting involved in religion, only religion is for feminine people and I needed something more concrete.

The point of an enlistment is to get you used to feeling like a winner. Winning is everything, in fact, at least in this context. So, during the next six months, and in some ways for many years after, I focused on manipulating the concrete world, including the tangible side of human beings. And I found that I was good at this, and comfortable too, because I had always been good at taking care of my various collections of concrete objects. Personal power is nothing to fear if you have a conscience, but a conscience without personal power leads to despair because you'll want to change things for the better but can't.

For awhile I just enjoyed hanging out on St. Mark's Place, a circus of hippies, homeless people, and the tourists who loved them. I'd find some perch to sit on — the top of a staircase or a clean trash can — and preen my feathers, waiting for someone to notice me. In my mind I was King of the East Village, only this wasn't a delusion or an expression of vanity. It was a mental exercise, as strenuous as anything you might do in a gym, but requiring intellectual strength rather than physical. I called it psychocalisthenics.

It was my duty, as regent-in-training, to supervise only the more trivial interactions that took place between my subjects. I would ask them what time it was, or tell them the time. I would ask them for change of a dollar, or give them change. I would ask them if it was going to rain, or tell them the forecast I had heard. It was a simple assignment, but that was the point — to keep me in manipulation-mode so I wouldn't worry about thermonuclear war or how depressed I was or any of a hundred other things over which I had no immediate control.

I patrolled Central Park, too, a nation of free citizens yearning to relax their predefined social roles, and made scores of transitory contacts with strangers as if I were Diane Fosse playing gorilla. I forced myself to be out in the open, in the midst of things, wherever the action was — even when inside I would as soon have curled up with a children's book in some hole in the ground.

Over the weeks that Paul left me alone to my enlistment, I started feeling a lot better about myself — or at least a lot less bad. On the other hand, my new world was nothing like the world Paul lived in, so a lot of the times we didn't have much to talk about. We lived together and he fed me, but other than that I was like a stray cat who would go back into the yard to resume utterly feline pursuits. But Paul was on his own too, and we used these "spaces in our relationship", as Kahlil Gibran used to call them, for resolutely constructive purposes. Paul had started a new book, in fact. He was going to come out of the closet and write about homosexuality. I now felt ready to embark on a study of Paul's system. I told him that I didn't want to make him teach me his ideas orally since he had already gone to the trouble to write two books on the subject. So for the next few months we toned done the communication and I spent my afternoons in my apartment reading what he had already written. It soon became clear to me that he had achieved a remarkable synthesis — a rich and detailed description of human nature fully informed by the discoveries of past centures yet lacking any of the special technical language that you might find in someone like Hegel. In fact, Hegel, Kant and Spinoza now seemed to me nitpickers who had missed the big picture.

The idea of polarity was the lynchpin of his system. Not just polarity between extroverts and introverts, though, but polarity at all levels of biological organization. At the neurological level, for example, organisms need to receive information about their environment so they can control aspects of it. It would be a mistake to think that one comes before the other, though, and Paul always saw each side of a polarity as enriching the other in real time. Each function supports the other like invisible scaffolding. Information points the individual to opportunities upon which to act, for example, but action uncovers new information, and the cycle repeats. Neither comes before the other, either logically or historically, any more than do chicken and egg. All organisms, even one-celled bacteria, are constantly exploring the world in this two-handed way. In Paul's terminology, sensory and motor organs provide receptive and expressive capabilities which allow the organism to comprehend and control its world.

It amazed me to see that, once Paul had chosen a particular term for an idea, he always stuck to it. He told me that a big problem with developing a science of human nature had been the intrinsic confusion caused by inconsistencies between the vocabularies used by various philosophers. He thought that we would have come much further in the effort to bring together various traditions of human insight if they all used a common terminology. A big part of his work was precisely in coming up with a univeral language to describe human nature, a kind of psychological esperanto. I quickly realized that in order to talk to him about his system a good way to start would be to memorize his terms and use them very precisely. And it was something I knew I could be good at, even if I wasn't a philosopher. I even started compiling a list of his analogs — paired terms that describe each aspect of polarity — on three by five index cards, which I kept in a small metal box that became very precious to me over the next few years.

After neurological polarity you can see that, as you start to ascend the tree of life, individuals begin specializing into male and female to permit the transfer of genetic material on which evolution is based. Since individuals usually compete with one another for resources, the first technique for mating was something of a hit and run affair. The female fish lays the egg and runs away. The male fish squirts sperm on them and runs away. This was not exactly reliable, given egg cases and ocean currents, so reptiles invented copulation, a tricky procedure requiring the individuals to lay down their arms long enough to do you know what. In mammals an even greater amnesty developed in order to protect and nurture the young during adolescence. In most mammals the male specialized in dominance to become good at protecting the family, while the female specialized in submission to become good at nurturing. Peace and harmony within the family was facilitated by what Paul termed celebration and sex.

I understood what sex was, but this definition of celebration was a bit hard for me to get my mind around. Another striking feature of Paul's work is how he went beyond the usual psychoanalytical obsessions with neurotic feeling and described power, both in its creative and delinquent aspects. He told me that psychoanalysts had been very self-indulgent and usually liked to write about introverted intellectuals like themselves. They gave little notice to people who were different from them, other than to denigrate them as "narcissistic personalities". The popular media like to pair sex and violence as twin evils, but the real polarity according to Paul is between sex and celebration — and they aren't evil.

The basic idea was that sex, at least the way humans enjoy it, originates with intensity of feeling in the female that leads the male into healthy pleasure-seeking. Celebration, according to Paul, originates with excess energy in the male which leads the female into what you might call healthy party-going. Each partner gives the other a chance to escape from the weight of their own polarity and briefly experience the rewards of the other personality type, but in a way that doesn't undermine their basic sense of self.

So far what Paul had done was to explain what everyone knows in terms consistent with his view of the polarities underlying all biological processes. But now he sided with Jung and hundreds of other thinkers throughout history who saw that a different sort of polarity even existed within the male and female populations. In other words, a human male could be dominant or submissive, as could a human female. You could see how these traits were formalized, first in the social roles of the warrior and shaman, and later in the roles of the soldier and priest and the parallel institutions of the enlistment and the retreat. Contributions to the species as a whole arose in the historical era in the form of that storehouse of knowledge and ability called civilization. A lifelong devotion to the search for truth that can replace magical thinking, or the reaching for right that can supplant miraculous behavior, is the mark of the creative individual. Here again Paul was very careful to use the term creative to mean something very specific. He didn't think any old finger-painting had anything necessarily to do with creativity. To be creative you had to advance civilization itself — at least in some small way.

Paul claimed that during the rise of civilization gender polarity between the male and the female became overshadowed by the psychological polarity between soldiers and priests, and later between men of action and thinkers, who brought into being mastery and insight that could be shared with others. This non-gender polarity is expressed in family life in the relationship between the father and son, and between mother and daughter. And that means that sons identify with their mothers, and daughters with their fathers. Social roles are still influenced by gender polarity, but are less important to creative individuals. A girl might dress like her mother, for example, but she'll pick up her attitudes toward life from her dad.

Here is the first hint of why Paul thought homosexuality central to civilized living. It was a simple consequence of non-gender polarity. If the polarized relationship between father and mother was carried on between father and son, celebrative and sexual aspects would bleed through as well, even if they were driven underground by social prohibition. And this also gave a scientific account of why gender roles were failing miserably in enlightened areas of the world. Men no longer wanted to be "real men" and women no longer wanted to be "real women". They just wanted to be themselves. Once I had a basic grasp on this wonderful new system that Paul had created, I wanted to get some experience in going out into the world and seeing what effect I might have upon it. I still felt extremely self-conscious around people, though. And many of them simply repulsed me in a way that I couldn't, and wouldn't, hide. But I screwed up my courage and decided to be part of a group again — or pretend to, anyway. I joined the Gay Activist Alliance, a focal point for radical homosexuals which owned the best clubhouse you could imagine, an abandoned firehouse in Soho. And I immediately felt comfortable there. What was great about the GAA was the joyful chaos of the place. Each of these people was crazier than the next, yet they all thought they were superstars because they were in a liberation movement. As I came out of my shell, I noticed something very wonderful about gay people. Even though I wasn't at all sure I was a homosexual, not one of them every questioned my qualifications. If I was there, then I was accepted as a brother. I didn't even have to say I was gay, though I was growing comfortable doing that. How many social groups have that lenient an admissions policy? These odd people accepted me more earnestly and completely than anyone ever had, maybe because they sensed that I was undoubtedly odd myself. And I grew increasingly comfortable in opening up to them. Unlike priests and academics who, like spiders, lie in wait for you to say something wrong so they can criticize you and feel superior, these people were more interested in adoring my physique and forgiving me for talking so much when I could be flirting with them. Well, at least it was an improvement. And, naturally, I wasn't the only intellectual there. You found lots of them attending the talk groups, so I quickly found myself on the Talk Group Committee. I avoided the political committees, which were all about blaming straight people for everything.

We used the term talk group rather than discussion group to make them seem more friendly and less academic, which was more than okay by me. Richard, the committee chairman, was fond of me, even if he made it clear that my ability to think was not exactly my best quality. I was considered cute in those days, and no one with as little confidence as I had would ever reject the attentions of cute hounds just because they were shallow. And I was not threatened by the emotional confusions of promiscuity either, because I wasn't sexually attracted to any of them. And this was okay because I was in no hurry to develop my sexuality while I was in an enlistment.

All during that first year with Paul I learned more and more. No longer about great books and dead white men, but about myself, my new friends, and my new world. And these friends learned a little about the new ideas I had gotten from Paul, at least as well as they could considering my limited communication skills. But no matter how hard I tried, they just couldn't get past their knee-jerk reactions to the words masculine and feminine. "Hey, that's sexist, man", was the usual response. To them this seemed like more of the sort of gobbledygook that psychiatrists like to coin, and they were in no mood for it. So one of the social skills I picked up in this period was how to protect people from ideas they weren't ready for, and how to protect myself from being disappointed in them for failing to be electrified by hearing about the greatest scientific synthesis of the modern age. The trick was to become very indifferent to their ignorance, almost as if in that moment you yourself forget these wonderful ideas that have illuminated so much. Paul began questioning whether I belonged with a group of people so lacking in intellectual ambition, but I decided that, as long as I had any skills to acquire by hanging around them, I would stay there and keep my mouth shut. And I could always draft rhetorical manifestos like that they could rally around, even if they were vague and propagandistic. As a gay liberationist, I was on a mission from God. But playing soldier is easy when no one around you is in on the game. One day at lunch I was reading a book in the corporate cafeteria when a shy young girl sat down opposite me. After a few moments she gathered up her courage and said, "Hello. What are you reading?"

I hadn't asked for this intrusion. This wasn't part of my secret mission. Without looking up I said firmly, "I'm trying to read." That sounded about right. But then I looked up anyway. The look on her face told me that I had upset her, and quite unnecessarily. She quickly looked down at her plate and, after a few minutes, moved to another table.

Adhering to the right, apparently, was not going to be as simple as it sounded. For years afterwards I felt horrible about what I'd done to this lonely child who had only wanted a kind word. Only recently have I come to realize that everyone needs to learn how to deal with jerks, and that I had provided her with a useful object lesson. I am no longer so vain as to think I dealt her a crippling blow, nor so cold that I can't forgive a young man foolishly engaging in heroics in all the wrong places just because he needs to impress a new lover. One night on the news they showed an aging Leopold Stokowski receiving an award. Instead of thanking them, he harangued his audience about world peace. "We've got to stop killing one another!" he shouted.

"Oh wow," said Paul, glowing with admiration. "He really told 'em. I guess you get to a certain age, and you just don't care any more what people are going to say." He always loved it when people with seemingly pedestrian careers found the courage to take a stand. I was thinking about Beethoven one day while I was having coffee with Paul.

"My world is the world of greatness," I said. "Plato, Beethoven, Goethe — these are the people I care about. The run of the mill mediocrities you meet every day on the street — who cares what they think, or even if they do?" Social critics like Gore Vidal can often make a name for themselves simply by sneering at the incompetence and stupidity of great men. Paul never sneered in print or in public, but at home with me he perfected the art of damning with faint praise. "Eugene O'Neill was a wonderful writer," I remember him saying one day when we were watching "Long Day's Journey Into Night" on television. "Too bad he had nothing to write about." Then he would look at me and laugh, like any three year old boy who had invented a very clever thing to say. It wasn't what he would have told O'Neill in therapy, exactly, but there was a lot of truth in it. I was not just the polar opposite of Paul Rosenfels. I was a student of his, but he was not a follower of mine. But like Marx and Engels, Stein and Toklas, Roosevelt and Hopkins and other famously lopsided couples, our lives and our personalities became increasingly interdigitated over time. I found Paul's idea that we should be lovers repulsive not so much because of his gender as his age and his role in my life. There was something fishy about a doctor who would prescribe having sex with him. If I was ever going to agree to this, I decided, there would have to be something pretty tremendous in it for me. There was, but I wouldn't know that for another few years. By the time I moved in with Paul he had been alone for a long time and quite set in his ways. I found him to be a bit cranky, actually. But there was no turning back, at least not yet. I needed to know what homosexuality was all about and I didn't care what I had to go through to find out. When I showed Paul the promotional letter I had drafted for the new book, he grabbed the typewritten pages from me and read them with a worried look on his face. But by the end the furrows left his brow and he grudgingly nodded. "I think we can use this." It became the jacket copy for the first edition.

Crisis is not new in human history, but the crisis of our age has assumed unprecedented proportions. Material abundance is everywhere, but spiritual peace is still the blessing of the few. Crisis speaks to us in the passion of the revolutionary, in the suffering of the neurotic, in the complaint of the critic and in the defiance of the delinquent. It also gains expression in the lives of the creative personalities of our time who forge new values and fashion new meanings.

This book examines the crisis of our age and illuminates the role that creative men and women must assume in resolving it. The author offers no panaceas, no quick and easy solutions, no echo of past dogmas. He believes we must begin to understand human nature in all its forms, yet he advocates no return to traditional concepts of man's nature, for their rigidity stifles the very creativity which alone holds promise of releasing man from the imprisoning web of commonly held psychological pseudo-truths.

Homosexuality in its broadest sense emerges as the key to this creative struggle, particularly the growing relationship between fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters. The principle of polarization, as defined and elaborated by the author, operating above and beyond the conventional transactions of life, explains human beings as psychologically masculine and psychologically feminine regardless of gender. This principle of development, which is not found in the animal world, amounts to a new kind of vibration in the universe and accounts for the rise of civilization. The implications of this theory are worked out in probing detail with a simplicity and clarity that is unique in psychological literature.

On a scientific level this book is offered as the record of a monumental discovery comparable to the Newtonian revolution in physics, yet it is written as a guide to living for all who are independent enough to seek out the rewards which come from understanding it. Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process is the offering of a brilliant physician who has given a lifetime of thought and analysis to his subject. It stands as an astonishing answer to the hopes and fears of a troubled world.

Other attempts to write for him would not be so successful. I wrote an essay on vanity and, having studied the Greek classics at St. John's, alluded to Aristotle's idea that people could have secondary natures. I used the phrase "second nature" in quotes to indicate that I was borrowing someone else's concept. Paul took one look at that quoted phrase, grabbed a black magic marker, and drew a large X through the entire page. "I never quotation marks," he mumbled to himself.

The violence of this act upset me, and not merely because I had typed each page several times before being satisfied with the final product — and without keeping a carbon. Paul stopped reading the essay, went into the kitchen and shut the door behind him, leaving me to wipe off my tears.

I had no idea what had angered him, but when I thought about it later I realized it must have been something so trivial as the use of quotation marks. You won't find them anywhere in his books. And hadn't he told me that he was a very ignorant man when it came to the history of western thought? I'm sure now he was never aware of anything Aristotle had ever said.

Once I realized how useless Paul could be as a critic I vowed never again to show my drafts to him. I never did. He never saw anything I wrote for the Ninth Street Center Journal until after it was in print. When I did some journalistic writing for the Gay News I waited months before mentioning it to him. A cold look came over him when he realized that I had not sought his approval before doing this, and he started digging a forefinger into his nostril, which he always did when aggression was restrained by shame. But by then I knew how to be firm with him, and he knew better than to try to punish me for my independence. Slowly but surely I was winning my war against his aggression and my passivity, a war that would only end in his death. Paul was not always sanguine about the future of the human race. He knew too much. And sometimes current events really got to him. He was appalled at how quickly Margaret Thacker chose to go to war during the Falklands crisis. One day I was explaining to him how wonderful it would be to encounter extraterrestrials because they could help us in so many ways and he interrupted, saying, "Yeah? How do you know they're not like us?" Not all of the things Paul said to me were carefully explained or intended to invite discussion. Many were little more than angry outbursts, like when he said, "You like dinosaurs because you don't have to know what they're feeling!" In the sixties and seventies homosexuality was still horrifying to normal people. But they liked buddy movies as much as ever, and sometimes even the most overt allusions to gay life flew silently under their radar. How else could a popular children's television program have regularly shown two inseparable male puppets living together and sleeping in the same bed? But we have the genius of Jim Henson to thank for letting Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie have real personalities, too. Masculine Ernie, always laughing in a goofy way, and feminine Bert, always getting his panties in a twist over his mate's outrages, were the perfect marriage of recklessness and helplessness. Jung invented the terms extrovert and introvert, yet he didn't see that opposites attract. In Two Essays on Analytic Psychology he offers a thought experiment that proves that opposite types don't get along. Imagine two boys taking a walk in the forest. Suddenly they come upon a castle. The extrovert is thrilled. "Let's climb up to the parapets and look for skeletons," he says. But the introvert pulls back in fear. "You go right ahead," he says, "but I'm going home." Extroverts and introverts live in different worlds having very little in common, says Jung.

Since for Freud all social dynamics are based on the love feelings that grow out of sexuality, while for Adler they're based on the power to overcome inferiority, Jung is justly to be credited with having seen that it might be useful to assume that some personalities are based on power while others are based on love. But when it came to describing how opposite personalities relate to one another, Jung "fucked it up" according to Paul

What Jung didn't see was that, while extroverts and introverts do tend to be interested in different things, they're perfectly capable of collaborating when it is their interest to do so. And since each comes at reality from a different direction they can bring complimentary resources to its exploration. They can become profoundly important to one another, in fact, not in the sense of needing to share every moment in one another's company, but in the sense of needing one another to lead fuller, richer lives.

To repeat Jung's experiment in a 21st century laboratory, let us concede that Hans and Franz do indeed split up for the rest of the afternoon. But later Hans regales his friend with a thrilling and exaggerated account of how the river looks from twenty feet up in the air and the bone fragments he thinks he saw in the fireplace. Franz is enchanted and tells his friend all he's learned about the castle from the internet, including a two-hundred year old mystery that has never been solved. Hans, his curiosity piqued, and Franz, his courage bolstered, go back the next day, have a great time, and write up their discoveries in the town newspaper. Twenty years later, in fact, the Hans and Franz travel guides are still required reading for the EU tourist trade.

To their lasting credit, Europeans never took Freud very seriously. But Americans, with our love for spiritualism, theosophy and Christian Science, adopted him like one of our own. America has made important contributions to western thought in the form of pragmatism. The humanistic tradition in Chicago and the Great Books movement have raised the bar for educational standards. But the common man has not latched on to these footholds. As far as hip Americans are concerned, Deepak Chopra is about as far out as they like to get. It turned out that Paul had had lots of famous patients which he only rarely spoke about. Thomas Szasz had been a student, but Paul didn't like the fact the Szasz spent so much time "talking to his patients about how they wiped their ass," as he put it. He told me that Leo Szillard, one of the inventors of the atomic bomb, and Bela Lugosi, a heroin addict, had been patients. A few years ago my friend Laurie told me that Paul and Bela had even been lovers. Paul's demands that I dominate him were driving me crazy. I had problems of my own, after all. So I gradually learned to stand up to him instead — him and all his bullshit. These moments horrified him. Who did I think I was? How could I betray him after all he'd done for me? But slowly I learned to ignore his anger and anxiety, to ride out the frenzied condemnations. I became an earthquake surfer, ignoring the literal text of our social contract and focusing on whatever mid-course correction I needed to make.

We still had strong needs to be in each other's lives no matter what, for reasons which, although obscure, had to be accepted. So we made the most out of elemental moments where we could enjoy the simple pleasures of life — a well-cooked meal, a stupid TV program, a shopping expedition to Macy's. On this level we learned to become tolerant of one another and to accept the fact that more ambitious accommodations would have to wait. Paul didn't believe that art could teach new ideas. He liked plays that simply held the mirror up to life. He liked Tennessee Williams' "Small Craft Warnings", which played one year on Fourth Street. In one scene a doctor is praised for his love of humanity. "I hate humanity," he sneers. "I only care about people I can help."

"That's just how I feel," said Paul later, smiling. Our minds are not as flexible as we would like to think. Nothing we learn can ever be unlearned, for example, it can only be put into parentheses. For those of us who grow up with parents, every man we meet is a variation of the man our father was, and likewise for mom. In my dreams I often confuse my father with Paul. Paul and my mother getting divorced is a common motif. When I first met Paul it took forever to realize that, although he was the same type of person that my father was, he had developed in a very different direction. Because we don't pay careful enough attention to them, the defensive behaviors we develop in childhood manage to trip us up all through life, sometimes in ways that can even cause lovers to break up. As Paul used to say, shaking his head, "Life really fucks people up."

But after reeling with horror at some tragedy or other, Paul would also recite a line from one of the hundreds of poems he had memorized when he was a boy. "We must not mourn those who are gone while so many more must come to be."

He had a similar line about the tragedies we manage to survive and limp away from. "He scoffs at wounds who never felt the sword." Years later I would tell people at the Center to bear their wounds proudly, for they are the true medals that prove you have fought bravely and well in the greatest war mankind has ever waged. After the debacle with Bill I stayed away from the Center for two years. There was enough of a throng now that it more or less ran itself, and I needed to live in a world of children's books to heal. Children's books always have happy endings.

But my mind was not asleep during this period, and when I ran my first talk group after this long enlistment, I decided that the subject should be a little more challenging than the usual "gay is good" crap. The room was packed that night as I explained that, in order for masculines and feminines to live in worlds that shared points of contact, masculines had to be a little feminine and feminines had to be a little masculine — as the classic yin yang symbol implied. But it was crucial to see that this was not a matter of compromising the personality. Trying to embody too much of the opposite type led to obsessive, compulsive, passive, aggressive and other distortions of the personality. The enrichment had to be completely two-dimensional. A masculine's feminine component had to be something he could pick and up put down without any loss of identity, and similarly for a feminine. To my surprise, they ate it up, and later that week I started getting good reviews. "Everybody's talking about your topic," Jurgen said. "They're calling it secondary polarity."

But we couldn't always keep the semantics clean. People still thought that power was a dirty word and started saying that, where feminines love, masculines care. This was a development I didn't care for, but I didn't want to be drawn into debates with people who hadn't done their intellectual homework in the first place. Would they ever learn to be "psychologically correct"? To paraphrase William Safire when asked whether sloppiness in grammar was caused by ignorance or apathy, I didn't know and I didn't care. Paul understood power and love as the only two ways by which we relate to the world. We possess the world and we love the world, and different people specialize in one or the other.

Some of his students tried to simplify this idea and say that you either possess the world or love the world, but not both. But everyone, in fact every biological entity, needs to control his environment as well as receive information from it. So it's more accurate to say that masculines develop mastery all by themselves but are dependent on feminines for understanding, while feminines develop understanding all by themselves but are dependent on masculines for mastery. Anyone can learn to manipulate the concrete by imitating others, in other words, but discovering novel forms of manipulation requires not only a lifetime of labor, but a specialization of the character itself.

There are several popular misconceptions about power in the wild world, just as there are about love. Sometimes power is seen as a kind of deadly sin, as uncontrollable as lust, which, once-unleashed, barges through all ethical inhibitions to achieve its wrong-doing. Lord Acton, a British historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, said, "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." George Bernard Shaw retorted, "Power does corrupt men; but fools, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power." And fifty years later Adlai Stevenson would have the last word, "Power corrupts but lack of power corrupts absolutely." Paul liked to use Black Power as an example of constructive power. If you talk to people who advocate "power to the people" you'll soon realize that power is essential to any serious human undertaking.

Another misconception about power it to think it turns people into control freaks. People who find themselves ordering things to a greater extent than necessary are being obsessive, not powerful. Everything has to conform to some picture in their mind, whether that picture is in the interest of the things being manipulated or not.

A famous misconception about love is to confuse it with ragdoll submission. Paul used to say that people who complain about how much in love they are with some bastard who doesn't appreciate them haven't yet learned that it isn't love until it's good for the other person. Love starts with a feeling, yes, but unless it ends in service it becomes self-indulgent.

I must have heard Paul say a hundred times, "If being in love is not good for the other person, you're not doing it right." For many years the only plaque in Paul's office, given him by Laurie Bell, displayed a quote by Joyce Cary that said "Love doesn't grow on trees like apples. You have to build it, step by step. It's all work, work, work."

The same cautions apply to power. Winning elections is not power. It's simply an action. Only when you see that what you have been put in charge of has benefited does it deserve to be called power. Until the other person starts benefiting from your power, you're not doing it right.

Freud's idea of the id, and the insane wars of the twentieth century, are some of the phenomena responsible for misconceptions about power. According to Freud, underneath our polite exteriors lies a ferocious drive to kill our fathers and fuck our mothers. But this kind of savagery exists nowhere in nature, in fact. Anyone who has owned a kitten knows they are a lazy race that kills because nature has equipped them with no other way to survive. Thanks for seeing the best in us, Sigmund. When I told Paul that, in the movie Forbidden Planet, a superior civilization on a distant planet had been destroyed when they accidentally released the "monsters from the id", he laughed and said, "That's just where the ideas of Freud belong. In science fiction."

The good news is that deep in his heart the common man knows what power is for. Even Hollywood movies know what power looks like in the hands of heroic figures. It's only the experts and talking heads that always have something bad to say about it.

Power and love, as Paul saw them, are not tools you pick up and lay aside. They are ways of being in the world, modes of personal development. An individual exercise of power or love may fail, but what you learn from each failure propels you forward along the growth process. For example, In the film "Harold and Maude", Maude understood well that Harold needed to be in love to be whole, and that the success or failure of any one love affair was incidental, not essential. When she's dying, Harold is in utter despair, thinking his life will end with hers. "But I love you," he wails.

"That's wonderful, Harold," she says, already way ahead of him. "Go out and love some more."

Power and love are all-consuming modes of being in the world. Energy and tension, which make possible our control of the environment and our acquiring information about it, are present in both psychological types, but they are used in different ways. Power begins in action and ends in feeling, for example. Love begins in feeling and ends in action. When power is nothing but action it becomes reckless and opportunistic. When love is nothing but feeling it becomes helpless and cynical.

But the imbalance can go the other way too. When a masculine is all feeling you get an obsessive control freak. When a feminine is all action you get a compulsive busybody.

There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.

— Erich Fromm

Fromm might have added, "There is no value to life except the value man gives his life through the love of others." Before the Center opened, a 40-year-old man named Lee had taken an interest in Paul's ideas and, with the help of his friend Doug showed Paul a videotape he had made at one of Lee's discussion groups. It showed Lee berating the more timid people and lecturing them drily about their pasts without first learning anything about them, as if he were reading tea leaves or casting horoscopes. When Jurgen asked, "How does it feel to see a group of people discussing your ideas?" Paul shook his head sadly and said, "I didn't see any ideas of mine there."

When I opened the Ninth Street Center, Lee eventually dropped by, usually accompanied by one or two of his followers. But it was clear to me from the outset that he assumed that, after my crew had fixed up the place, he would be running it with Paul's blessing. Since Lee had been the first person to run groups at least ostensibly based on Paul's insights, we both wanted to keep him in the fold, to keep him "eating out of our hands". Once we went up to Doug's to have lunch with them. After we ate, they plied us with drinks, put on some ? Lee records, and started being silly. Paul and I were there for serious purposes, unfortunately, and didn't want to be forced to "loosen up".

"Boy, you two can't ever just relax, can you?" Lee asked disaprovingly.

"I'll relax when I'm dead," Paul said, throwing down his napkin. The lunch was over.

After a few more months, when his takeover of the Center didn't happen, Lee's growing opposition to me helped Paul to see that his interest in power was largely to serve his own vanity rather than to help human beings. When Paul refused to belittle my efforts, Lee became insanely jealous and stormed out of Paul's office in a rage, never to speak to Paul or any of the rest of us ever again. This was a great relief to Paul since Lee talked a great game but didn't know how to play it.

Once Lee and his coterie of fawning sycophants were gone from our lives, the Center settled into being a much more serious and friendly place for independent creative people to explore their human potential. Paul really came alive then and left his earlier depression for good. His renaissance is discussed at length in my book of conversations entitled .

I've no doubt that when Lee truly liked people he would give his best, and I accept at face value reports that he was a good friend to many and did in fact help others over many decades. But his understanding of Paul's ideas, like several other people who were at the periphery of our world at that time, was shallow, cherry-picked, and used for inappropriate and even cultist purposes. I can only hope they were at least more useful to him than the magical ideas he had tried to rely on previously, especially his obsession with astrology. At the groups, Paul found himself employing very conventional public speaking techniques. Anyone who regularly speaks to groups develops their own set of images and punchlines that they can call upon to spice up their presentations. Sometimes he thought he was doing stand-up. "If ballet dancers aren't gay," he'd say, "how come whenever the Moscow Ballet comes to down all the gay bars on Third Avenue are filled with Russian accents?" Sometimes he would giggle before anyone else did. Having put up with talk groups at the GAA for years, I didn't get as frazzled as some of my followers at the intransigence of conventional gays. Some of our students became overwrought by a little thing like ignorance. "How many times do you need to be told that two plus two equals four?" Paul would ask them. But their distress was real and not easily dismissed. Paul soon came up with a name for it: exhaustion. Exhaustion was something you couldn't talk people down from. They had to learn to recognize it by themselves, and to do something about it before it hit them in the face, not after, because once you're exhausted it's too late, and you have to put yourself to bed for a few days. We learned how important indifference and withdrawal were going to be if we were not to be overwhelmed by living in an immoral and ignorant world. For the first few months of the Center's existence it was my oyster. I was learning how to run things and most of my volunteers were cooperative. The gay people who liked the Center seemed also to like me and believed in what I was trying to accomplish. But when Paul showed up he needed the place to be about him, and all his eternal vows of submission were tossed aside. I hadn't known Paul when he was an assistant professor in Chicago, but my theory is that the professor in him came back with a vengeance. He tried to stay calm in discussion groups, but clearly he had score to settle with mankind. If you crossed him or defended psychoanalysis, he would tear your throat out with a string of vulgarities peppered with psychiatric jargon. The people he destroyed were usually people the insiders didn't like anyway, so we found it convenient to look the other way. The net result was a genetically improved population, albeit littered with the corpses of the unwanted. I thought this angry phase would subside, and he did seem to be struggling with it, but these compulsive and aggressive instincts often got the better of him — and us.

I had a major decision to make. Should I do what I knew to be right? Should I stand up to him and take back control of the organization I had started? It would mean handing him yet another personal defeat, perhaps the one that would kill him. And then our members would lose the benefit of knowing the man and hearing what he had to say. And why should I care whether the Center served our members or served his need to orate? Did I really care that much about his followers? Hadn't I started the Center to get him off my back so that I could find my own followers?

I remember being in a remainder bookstore on Maiden Lane one day and finding pristine copies of William Scheele's Prehistoric Animals and The First Mammals, two of my all-time favorite children's books. A great sense of peace came over me as I greeted my old friends. It was a great triumph of book hunting, and took my mind off my moral crisis. And I saw that my life would go on even if I dropped out of the Center and let Paul run it into the ground. No matter how crazy he might get, Paul would be a better exponent of his ideas than I could be, and that was the important thing — not what happened to our membership, not even what happened to me or to Paul, but just whether these ideas would get out into the world. This was a war for ideas, after all, not people. We needed to notify the world that a science of human nature had been founded.

Slowly, over the next month or two, I did in fact drop out of the Center. For the next two years, I retreated back into the world of books, finding I was much happier there than on the battlefield. At the Barnes and Noble Sale Annex I found a series of biographies written for teenagers under the Julian Messner imprint that nourished me intellectually and emotionally. They showed me that I wasn't alone, that I didn't single-handedly have to save the world as Paul had wanted me to. There were others, plenty of others, who also wanted to live full, rich, creative and socially constructive lives. And I realized that, although most of us fail, everyone starts out in life with the same idealism I'd had. How odd that we all go through this process yet no record is ever made of it — only report cards commemorating pointless memory games. Growth is the most undocumented of all human enterprises. We need to establish a new tradition. Instead of raising a family, everyone should write an autobiography.

It's been years since I beamed down to this planet. So far, the most important thing I've learned is this: human progress at the psychological level is left entirely to chance and is consequently excruciatingly slow. Psychology is still the science which tell us what everybody knows in language that no one understands, psychiatrists are still government agents bent on quelling dissent, and psychoanalysis is still the only disease whose only cure is more psychoanalysis. Music can bring me to tears, send chills up my spine, and make my hair stand on end. But I don't believe it has any meaning beyond the emotions it gives me. Sounds cannot in themselves teach us how to live better. They cannot be part of the eternal dialog of great books that down through history has unravelled and reravelled the meaning of our lives. Lyrics can be stapled to pieces of music, but their meaning is entirely apart from the music. In fact, the same music can have lyrics that are entirely opposite in meaning. In opera, music helps us feel emotions that characters in the drama are feeling, but emotions are not ideas and embody no truth.

Music evokes our emotions without making reference to the phenomenal world in which we live.

Some lyrics can be quite offensive, as gangsta rap proves, even when stapled to catchy riffs. And how else could backward and tyrannical regimes appropriate our finest classical music, as Rhodesia did in making their national anthem the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth?

But we needn't hate music just because we hate the lyrics attached to it, or the people who perform it, or the beliefs of the composer who wrote it. I grew up in a middle class project surrounded in a hispanic neighborhood where Latin pop music was always being blasted out of windows and, later, boom boxes. As a result, I associated such music with juvenile gangs, just as Leonard Bernstein did in West Side Story. In my thirties, however, I decided to get over this association and bought some Latin jazz CD's. Soon I became a fan.

I have similar problems with opera. Nowadays I will often force myself to listen to opera on Saturday afternoons until I threaten to hold my breath until I'm dead — at which point I relent and let myself go back to my Mozart piano concertos. Still, I feel I'm making progress. I hope I'm making progress. The way we take to various kinds of esthetic experience may be related to polarity, but there's a large component in it that is merely random, or at least not worth tracing. Paul loved poetry but did not respond to music. I find music translucent but am stumped by verse. Fortunately, the poems he liked to recite to me were ditties from childhood or else by people like Edna St. Vincent Millay who had something to say and wanted people to hear it.

I had no need to expose him to the classical repertoire, but one day I did play for him a recording I'd made in college of a fugue in the style of Hindemith I'd written. His brow furrowed and he looked like he was either thinking a deep thought or having a tooth extracted. When it was all over, he managed to say, "I like it!" quite brightly. But it was clear to me that the infectious humor of counterpoint was entirely lost on him. He claimed to like Burl Ives, having played his records for some children he once helped to take care of. But there were no Burl Ives records in his apartment, no record player, and no radio. Lest anyone think that a new science of human nature is easy to use right out of the box, let me allay your fears. Any really new system, be it a new religion like Christianity, a new political system like democracy, or a new science like Newtonian physics, takes years and sometimes decades to get your mind around. And it's not fun when you find out that you have to unlearn a lot of old truths to make way for the new ones.

Many people came to the Center hoping that, like a cult, we would spare them from having to understand or take responsibility for themselves. If we said one of these folks was masculine, they'd immediately start prancing about and bullying others in a manner they thought would please us. If we said someone was feminine, they'd become wimpy and do a lot of complaining — sad caricatures of what we had in mind. The Center became infected with what Paul started calling posturing masculines and facading feminines. I prefered to call them masculons and feminoids.

(Both Paul and I loved good writing and articulate speech, and hated using awkward constructions like masculines and facading. But the immensity of the task at hand — rethinking human nature in its entirety — left us no choice. We were not about to resort to the neologisms that psychobabblers used, much less pointless designations like "Type A" personalities. Besides, unlike them, our awkwardities could immediately be comprehensibilized.)

And I enjoy coining analogs that are just good clean fun, albeit not essential to delineating the broad structual foundation of these semantics. I have a friend, for example, who compulsively weasels out whenever I obessively badger him. In English tacking on "oid" to the end of a word names a variant or replica. For example, "android" means an almost-human robot. The 1978 TV series "Battlestar Galactica" featured evil metal warriors call "cylons". So "feminoids" and "masculons" were terms I coined in the 80's so we'd know how properly to address feminine aliens and masculine aliens when they finally visited the Ninth Street Center. "Hey, let's have a little fun around here, okay?!?", I would often say — to no effect whatsoever.

We never criticized in public those of our flock who weren't getting it. If we had, our little basement would soon have been empty. We would just describe the defenses they were being overtaken by and hope they would take appropriate measures on their own. But when the subject came up in counseling we knew how to be perfectly clear. And over the years, the members who couldn't face up to the stress and strain of true independence eventually drifted away to less demanding social involvements, especially in responding to the AIDS crisis.

Masculine people don't need to act masculine. They already are masculine, by definition. If anything, they need help in enriching their personalities with a little two-dimensional feminizing. When I told Paul that my father had always criticized me for having no self-control, he dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. "Just the wrong thing for him to say," he said. "You had all the self-control in the world. What you didn't have was an understanding of your own best interests." My father believed that all of us should bend over backwards to obey all laws and abide by any moral precepts handed down to us by authority figures. Trying to submit to the blind sort of morality that my parents believed in had contributed significantly to my childhood depression.

The Monographs [1974 - 1980]

Once Paul got fully involved with the Center, he started learning more about complications of the growth process that had been well out of sight in the monastic retreat in which he'd worked out his basic semantics. For instance, although we were never as abusive as the "encounter groups" raging at that time, many people found that sharing their growth process with too many people was overstimulating. A few of these suffered from what Paul now called "creativity poisoning." To counteract this threat, he encouraged us to pull back from the brink of psychic exhaustion and to remember how to enjoy the simple pleasure of life. He also wrote a great introduction to his ideas, The Nature of Civilization, an essay on Freud, and his autobiography. Probably the only book on set theory ever to make it into The Whole Earth Catalog was G. Spencer-Brown's 1969 classic The Laws of Form. I loved the way it began — with utter confidence in the profundity of simplicity: The theme of this book is that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science, and can begin to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow inexorably from the original act of severance.

I'm not a trained mathematician and couldn't make use of most of the book, but the vivid image of the human mind "drawing" distinctions has stayed with me. All thought begins when we draw a distinction, it seems. Deep thinkers and problem solvers of all types use the divide and conquer principle to break down the world into parts which separately are simpler to understand than the whole.

The human mind, being "object-oriented," groups similar objects into classes, and similar classes into higher taxons. Bifurcation is in the world, after all, and not just in our minds. But often analysis begins with a distinction which turns out to have been useful to organize one's observations but is not actually a reflection of how nature works. This collecting and sorting — sometimes called the "natural history" phase of science — leaves us with two-toed sloths in the west wing of our museum and the three-toes in the east. Wouldn't it be smarter if we arranged our collections according to their evolutionary relationships rather than superficial distinctions?

I don't have to tell you that psychologists are the most guilty of drawing "distinctions without a difference." Why else would Gore Vidal have said that "psychiatry lies somewhere between astrology and phrenology on the scale of human gullibility." Just look at the history of characterology, which has happily generated as many 3-type systems as 2-type. Jung, for example, made his great leap forward when he posited introverted versus extroverted types. But then he made up subtypes of them, then subtypes of subtypes. Like unicorns, these sub-subs are both clearly defined and nowhere found. I never met a Jungian psychotherapist who used these categories to understand his patients. As Paul explained it to me one memorably sunny day, "Jung found the key to human personality — and then he fucked it up."

In his first monograph, Paul claims, like Jung, that there are subtypes of the basic feminine and masculine types, which he calls subjective and objective. The words "subjective" and "objective" seemed suspiciously like new ways of talking about femininity and masculinity, and this new wrinkle immediately helped us to organize people into a more graduated continuum:

People at the Center liked these new terms because they helped to more precisely describe the people they were dealing with on a scale we all understood.

There are important implications in this thesis, however, that some of us felt created more problems than they solved. Since we took it for granted that each type mates only with its counterpart, for example, this now meant that — for those of us without a significant other — only one person in four who came down to the Center could be taken seriously as potential lovers. In some way, this had to be nonsense.

As Paul thought about it in the succeeding months and years, he came to feel that this essay had been his foray into the world of distinctions without a difference. You can always find ways to categorize people, but which of these categories are driven by character type and which by random fluctuations in a population? Maybe he was simply too eager to produce new information for all the young people at the Center that he had so much love for to consume.

What do I think? I still find myself putting people into subjective and objective categories when I'm trying to figure them out. But then, I also liked it better when sloths had wings. Paul told me lots of interesting little anecdotes over the years about his life, and once in awhile I'd write something down in my diary or mark up a 3x5 card. Occasionally he'd let it slip that he expected me to be his biographer, and had even entitled my masterpiece The Story of a Renegade Psychiatrist.

The idea of being anybody's biographer had great appeal to me, actually, but we all know that the greatest biography can never supplant even a sketchy autobiography. So over the many years that he intimated I should write his biography, I intimated back that he should write this monograph.

After the Center had become a big success and he had produced several monographs that had been hungrily devoured by scores of students, he felt good enough about himself to sit down and tell his own story. He had used a tape recorder to dictate the first draft of his third book, so I bought him a new machine so he could tell his favorite anecdotes in an appropriately colloquial style. He wasn't comfortable with it this time, and few of the stories I had expected ended up in the final typescript. (I got good use out of the tape recorder a few years later though when I interviewed his students for .)

Paul's autobiography is much like Darwin's, though written from a deeper psychological perspective. It's nearly impossible, apparently, for deep thinkers to correlate the development of the ideas that made them famous with the kinds of concrete experiences that are supposed to be the substance of autobiographies. Paul used to tell me that he often mulled an idea over for 30 years before breathing a word of it to anyone — how do you work that into a life story? He didn't, but what he does tell is well worth reading — especially his description of what the Center meant to him.

Recognizing that war was a fundamentally irrational activity for a species otherwise triumphant in evolutionary terms, he saw that his study of human behavior would have to go deeper than man's rational facade — so dutifully transcribed by historians — to find the true causes of war. Perhaps the new theories about the "unconscious mind" would contain the answers?

Paul's genius, I think, had a lot to do with the fact that no matter how far he would travel down a false path, he would always remain true to his ideals and somehow find his way, however painfully, back to the main road. But some hypotheses, it turns out, think nothing of eating up decades of your life without so much as a thank you. This one led Paul to earn an M.D. and be trained at Chicago's prestigious Institute for Psychoanalysis. It wasn't until he had actually spent a few years trying to help real patients that he realized that something was desperately wrong with the Freud paradigm.

He was, of course, not alone in this. In the 1950's and 60's he watched with satisfaction as one analyst after another rebelled against the inherent cynicism and anti-humanistic determinism of psychoanalysis and migrated toward more optimistic approaches to the curing of mental illness. The old paradigm judged society in toto to be incurable. The new paradigm said that civilized humans spend their adulthood in a permanent growth process, marked of necessity by transient failures and aborted misadventures, and that society, while imperfect, could still progress over time. Paul decided to devote the next phase of his life to coming up with his own way of looking at human nature, a way that didn't assume we had a "death instinct" or that social harmony is based merely on sublimated sex.

Many years later, when Paul's creative work was finished and he no longer hated Freud, he realized that the new insights which had proven themselves with scores of students and hundreds of Center members might give him a basis for rethinking the entire Freud fiasco. This monograph, then, is not a diatribe against what was by then already a dead pseudoscience. These days, after all, most of us place the "unconscious mind" at the top of our list of favorite oxymorons, and any high school student knows enough to laugh at such hapless concoctions as the Oedipus complex. Instead, it is a sympathetic treatment of an ambitious and talented but misguided man who was, in the final analysis, as much a product of his time and place as we are of ours. Paul's real concern, as the title implies, is the scientific method. This monograph consists of two letters that Paul wrote to me. Letter No. 1 is titled "A Discussion of the Nature of Sex and Celebration and an Examination of the Causes of Homophobia in the Gay Community." Letter No. 2 is titled "On the Formation of Inner Identity in the Growing Child."

When Paul first came to New York in February 1963 he moved right into the heart of Greenwich Village, on Waverly Place just west of Washington Square. This was more or less the gay capitol of the world then and, while Paul found it easy to find gay clients and make gay friends, he wasn't always happy with the gay community.

The psychology of any oppressed subculture is a mass of contradictions, of course. Gays claim to be proud of their differences from straight people, but, to be politically expedient, they also claim to be as "normal" as straights. And they are often in denial about unhealthy behavior patterns that became ingrained during longs years of social ostracism. Take sexual promiscuity, please.

Any New York gay man in the 60's knew about Christopher Street, where sex was easy, habituating, and empty. Those who were looking for love in all the wrong places eventually learned that when sex comes first, people never have the time to get to know one another. And without a true courtship, love is replaced by compulsive/obsessive and sado-masochistic patterns.

When we opened the Center in 1973, Paul made a big fuss over the "Christopher Street scene" and how far it had drifted from anything healthy or wholesome — anything that could exemplify our slogan, "Homosexuality is More Than Sex." Although he was reluctant to criticize the gay community in print, when he finally felt his writing days were ending he decided he had nothing to lose. He went after this enemy of the people with a vengeance — which with delicious irony he now called "homophobia in the gay community". Maybe he put it in the form of a letter to me so he couldn't be accused of publicly betraying the movement. If he had asked me, I would have said that no movement has served its purpose until it is ripe for betrayal by the next movement.

The second letter was my fault. Paul was the thinker in our family, doggedly pursuing truth wherever the brick edifice of the unknown showed signs of crumbling. I was the eager student, full of the obvious questions regardless of whether any real foundation had yet been laid for their resolution. One of my obvious questions was, why do sons polarize with their fathers rather than their mothers? I didn't doubt that they did. I saw it clearly in my own family and in those of my friends. But children need to ask why. It's their way of asserting their equality.

At the end of his life, Paul finally tried to sketch out an answer to this question but, perhaps because he wasn't completely sure about it, he put it in the form of a private letter to me — which was, to be sure, circulated at the Center.

I don't think I understand much about what he's saying in this letter. I'll read it again in a few years and see if it makes any more sense by then. I've learned to do things like that.

The last image I have of Paul is of a man quite tired and spent, having gone as far with his life's work as he could, wondering if the world would ever notice what he'd done. Twenty-five years earlier he had written,

For Paul, that day would not come. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
— Margaret Mead

Sometimes a perfectly well-functioning relationship can seem like all work and no play. But other people could see that Paul and I were happy even when we took each other for granted. After one talk group, a particularly effusive young man marveled that whenever Paul spoke I "beamed" and whenever I spoke Paul "glowed". Polarized terms like that were springing up all the time, far too many to write down or even remember. I was happy to learn that Paul and I gave them something to hope for in their own lives. When I moved out of Paul's apartment I tried to explain to someone why I had done it. The reason that suddenly loomed up at me was as much a surprise to him as it was to me. "I was a "kept man"," I had to admit.

These days people sue shrinks who have sex with them under false pretenses. If I were a conventional person I could have had lots of fun suing Paul. But lawsuits assume that that lawmakers know right from wrong, and that people who make mistakes are acting maliciously. The venality of politicians and the ineptitude of the rest of us prove such assumptions sadly optimistic.

Paul, as deep as he was, often could not see the things that were right in front of him. I learned to my astonishment that I was a better diagnostician, for example. Sometimes Paul would just go with an initial impression of someone and, instead of testing his assumptions, just prattle on for weeks about his wonderful theories. They were wonderful theories, but people in trouble need useful advice, not post-grad lectures. I had made a friend at the Gay Activist Alliance named Ronnie who was obviously masculine but very shy and passive and who went to Paul at my suggestion. Paul reported that he was a sweet feminine boy with lots of potential. When I said he was really masculine, Paul smiled and said, "That's an easy mistake to make." Six weeks later Paul said to me, "You know that boy Ronnie? I just figured out today that he's masculine. And I think someone actually told me this, but now I can't remember who it was."

I've come to call this anomaly the "Sherlock Holmes" principle. Sherlock is always in control, while Watson is usually the clueless ragdoll. Watson's submission is real, though superficial. He sees the essential nature of people and situations, but he relies on Sherlock to get the facts of any situation right. And Sherlock never tires of reminding Watson of how valuable his loyalty is. So in addition to being Paul's Thomas Henry Huxley, I also became his Sherlock Holmes. Since I met everyone who came to the Center I was often able to clue Paul in on particularly obscure personalities so he could have a head start on making a useful diagnosis.

So, if I'd had to go through the unpleasant experience of being a kept man as part of the process of learning to help people, then the price was cheap. Paul wasn't being malicious. He was just being Paul.

Though he, that ever kind and true,
Kept stoutly step by step with you,
Your whole long, gusty lifetime through,
Be gone a while before,
Be now a moment gone before,
Yet, doubt not, soon the seasons shall restore
Your friend to you.

He has but turned the corner — still
He pushes on with right good will,
Through mire and marsh, by heugh and hill,
That self-same arduous way —
That self-same upland, hopeful way,
That you and he through many a doubtful day
Attempted still.

He is not dead, this friend — not dead,
But in the path we mortals tread
Got some few, trifling steps ahead
And nearer to the end;
So that you too, once past the bend,
Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend
You fancy dead.

Push gaily on, strong heart! The while
You travel forward mile by mile,
He loiters with a backward smile
Till you can overtake,
And strains his eyes to search his wake,
Or whistling, as he sees you through the brake,
Waits on a stile.

— "Consolation"
by Robert Louis Stevenson (1872) In 1991 the Center's finances began plummeting in earnest, and I realized that we would have to give up our basement space. I took grim satisfaction in thinking that, since I had given birth to the this place, I should be the one to end its life. At the next board meeting I moved that we give up the basement and for awhile and operate out of churches and people's apartments. They agreed.

What I hadn't expected, however, was that all but a handful of them would immediately resign from the Center and wash their hands of us. "Like rats from a sinking ship," I must have muttered under my breath a hundred times that month. But all it really showed was that they had been living beyond their psychological means for years and now needed to pull back and recuperate. And in attending to their mental health they were only doing what Paul had told them to do all along.

But the Center was not going to die, not while I was around. In 1997 I built a site on the World Wide Web. Because we had an early web presence we were quickly added to all sorts of hand-crafted web directories like Yahoo that are nearly impossible to get into today. We also uploaded Paul's entire canon to the English Server, a well-respected repository of public-domain academic texts. Because the entire internet was periodically archived by a project called the Way Back Machine, not to mention governments, I could finally relax a bit. His works would now survive in magnetic form far into the future when some ambitious life form, be it biological or electronic, would eventually rediscover them — just as Mendelssohn had done with a completely forgotten composer named Johann Sebastian Bach.

And our talk groups continued. But only once a month, and they were held on foreign soil at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in the West Village. Counseling, however, having dried up at the start of the AIDS crisis, never got started again. People seemed only to want supportive therapy, not the sort of intellectual challenge we offered. The good news was that ambitious minds were perfectly happy to work with the material we posted on the net, as my email inbox bore witness to. In 1999 we augmented our talk groups with an online chat group that meets every other month. I forgave them many years ago for having abandoned ship. They should never have boarded this ship in the first place. Paul and I huckstered them under false pretenses. Today I live in the East Village down the street from Enchantments, a store run by witches. That's right, real witches — at least by their definition. And if you respect individuality, you also respect the right of each individual to define themselves in whatever terms they choose.

I mentioned this to my second-cousin Catherine one day when she ventured beyond the safe upper class haven of Larchmont to slum it for a day with her childhood playmate. Catherine had started life as a rowdy tomboy and, once I got used to the idea that she was perfectly capable of scratching and biting boys who teased her, we became great pals. She became convinced that conventionality would be her salvation when Catholicism had failed, though, and I'd lost touch with her over the years. Now she was getting ready to divorce an alcoholic husband of twenty years who chief influence in society was to poison the minds of their two children against anyone who wasn't normal.

When she heard the word "witch" her head exploded. "That's all we need is witches, for Christ's sake." she said. "And with the drug epidemic!"

"But it's not the witches on Ninth Street that menace civilization. It's the husbands in Larchmont," I said.

Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free. Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward among the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Our members fled like small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri jettisoning a disabled spaceship. But most of them still regard Paul's insights as primary tools enabling them to lead a better life. A man in my building who never even became part of the Center credits Paul with saving his life. After we closed our doors in 1991 I thought that people would take a vacation for a year or two, then regroup and fire up another center. Perhaps they just hadn't liked me personally and wanted to try again all by themselves. I would have loved that because then I wouldn't have to be involved in administrivia anymore. But it never happened, and the handful of us left standing had to brace ourselves for the shock of realizing how great this loss was. For a year I did nothing but try not to think about what had just happened.

An enterprise like the Center is not easy to lay to rest. Part of you dies with it. Does Paul's work constitute a science of human nature? I'm one of those people who thinks Newton created a science of physics, but you shouldn't agree with me unless you've read Principia Mathematica or you're a parrot. So if there's any chance that my telling you my answer to this question spares you from reading Paul's works and discovering an answer that makes sense to you, then my lips are sealed.

I will say, though, that sometimes we frame questions the wrong way. Instead of asking whether Paul's discoveries resemble earlier scientific work, perhaps we should be asking why the older work doesn't resemble this better system. Instead of trying to fit new wine into old bottles, maybe we should welcome the emergence of new kinds of science, as Stephen Wolfram has suggested in his recent book.

When Stephen was quite unfairly attacked recently, I couldn't resist defending him in . In 1988 a handful of graduates were invited to contribute essays to the "Bronx Science 50th Anniversary Journal".

When I first arrived at Science I was in love. I'd dreamed about growing up to be a scientist ever since reading Roy Chapman Andrews' Ends of the Earth which described his discovery of dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. Unfortunately, my 'difficult teenage years' were marked by tremendous anxiety over human problems, and I found very little help in dealing with the big issues from either the cold warriors with their test tubes and slide rules or the left-wingers who told me to get laid and read Marx. Though I felt proud to be in a computer class whose average I.Q. was 164, it didn't take much insight to realize that passing out grade averages to five decimal places intentionally engendered jealousy and competition. The last straw was seeing the hysteria of school authorities when a young filmmaker tried to show us a documentary on the birth of a baby.

After three years Bronx Science had convinced me that serious-minded men don't waste their intellectual gifts on the relatively pedestrian goals of industrial R&D. So I went to a college that claimed to review the entire history of Western thought: St. John's College in Annapolis. From there I became involved in the human potential movement, and today I derive my sense of worth from being a counselor and discussion group leader at the Ninth Street Center in New York City.

Yet the real problem is not to have less science, but more. We need to take seriously the Enlightenment ideal of a "science of human nature" once again. We need to revitalize human science by tossing out eloquent platitudes and dry statistics and to engineer what ordinary people need most: a way to love one another and act responsibly towards an entire living planet.

Rather than selling conventional science, let's teach our children about all the important questions science has yet to face up to. Let's give their idealism a reason to take a scientific career seriously. Superconductors and supercomputers to be sure, but also a scientific approach to ourselves and the kind of world that's fit for human beings to live in.

Ronald G. Beckett, the editor, had to trim it a bit, but it was still accurate:

Got early computer training on IBM 1620. When the day does come that Paul's work is recognized , it will be incumbent upon the chairmen of psychology departments to explain what took them so long. They will to a man say that it's not their fault if they never heard of the guy: he wasn't a tenured academic, nor were his books ever reviewed in the New York Times. But didn't they look at the books and monographs we sent them? What about the material we donated to their university libraries? Don't they google "science of human nature" once in awhile and browse our website to evaluate our claims? Even the best of them avoid original research in favor of defending politically correct causes like a loop of lawyers. Instead of thinking for themselves, they let mass movements do their thinking for them. In the name of gay liberation and women's liberation, they shackle mankind with perfumed ideas from the past that make them seem deep but do nothing for the rest of us.

Perhaps it's time to agree with Aldous Huxley who, in the year I was born, said, "Let us build a pantheon for professors. It should be located among the ruins of one of the gutted cities of Europe or Japan, and over the entrance to the ossuary I would inscribe, in letters six or seven feet high, the simple words: SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THE WORLD'S EDUCATORS." A hundred years from now people will fight the subtle effects of thought pollution as vigorously as they fight air pollution today. Advertising, political rhetoric and the lies of schoolteachers will be seen for what they are — enemies of the people. Paul's health was deteriorating. One day he suddenly cancelled his patients for the rest of the week. I told him he should retire. He seemed relieved to get my approval and did just that.

A week later I told him, "I'm glad you've retired. Now I can have you all to myself." He gave me a look that said, "Is this kid ever going to understand why I need to live in a bigger world?" I did understand. But around Paul I could always get away with being a little willful, so I stated the blunt truth about what I wanted and he made no protest. In Paul's declining years my book collecting was at a fever pitch. Every few weeks I would spend an evening after work shopping and come home to Rusty with a shopping bag of books. As time went on my collecting taste became more and more eclectic.

At that time Barnes and Noble had one store on each side of Fifth Avenue. The east side store contained only new books at list price. The west side store was a treasure trove of remaindered titles. Publishers had traditionally warehoused large print runs so their back titles could stay in print for many years. I'd heard that, due to a recent change in the law, these warehouses could no longer be used as tax write-offs, so publishers across the country were in the process of dumping a hundred years of wonderful if forgotten books, classics in their time, onto the remainder market. In New York, Barnes and Noble was the remainder king. They also sold books from post office auctions of books which had been sent book rate with incorrect addresses or insufficient postage and no return address. An occasional estate sale added spice to the mix.

Many of these books had been stored in these warehouses inside tightly sealed cardboard boxes so that, even after 50 years, there wasn't a speck of soot on them. Visiting the Sale Annex was for me like going through a time warp into a museum of great books in pristine condition, most of which were priced as low as 39-cents. I was in heaven.

In the basement of the Annex were the really cheap books. These were often textbooks and similar unlovables of the book world, but I would skim these shelves as assiduously as any other in search of rarities. One day I found a copy of Robert Lawson's The Tough Winter, the sequel to his Newberry Award winning children's novel, Rabbit Hill. The spine was bent from having been read and the dustcover had faded over the years, but at fifty cents I gave it a thumbs up. As I flipped through the pages a letter in meticulous script from the author to the people he had dedicated the book to dropped out. I had found the "dedication copy", by definition the most valuable copy of any book there can be because it is unique. I've since been offered six hundred dollars for it.

Once safely ensconced in my apartment, however, my rescued orphans have not always fared well. Lower East Side tenement buildings are not famous for air purity, and a layer of dust has built up on their top edges. The vast majority sit high on my shelves, staring down at me in reproach for not having read them. But I don't collect books to read them. I collect them so if and when I choose to I can read them. It's a simple matter of expanding the degrees of freedom in which I conduct my life. Being surrounded by books is to me a form of wealth more useable than dollar bills. Besides, most of the books I do read go straight to the warehouse room I've been forced to rent, so naturally the ones that are left have nothing to do but pout.

In its heyday, my book collecting had the driven quality of a man who had known starvation and so instinctively stores up more canned goods than his entire family can ever consume. But I don't buy many books anymore. My library is vast and splendid, and truly new information is more easily garnered on the internet. With a shrinking income, I have finally sold out my principles and am borrowing books from the library once more, books whose pages are dog-eared and underlined and whose plastic protective covers are usually covered with grime and billions of bacteria. It never fails to amaze me that people never object to how filthy library books are. If they were ever handed anything like that in a restaurant they would scream bloody murder.

All of my newly acquired books would be shown to Paul, in batches of a dozen or so. His retirement was proving boring enough that our show and tell sessions were fun for both of us. Sometimes my literary taste would mystify him, though, as when I handed him a classic nineteen-fifties teen novel about a cheerleader's crush on a quarterback. As he read the back cover he flinched at the conventionality of the narrative. Yet it was precisely the author's sincerity that fascinated me, just as had racist literature in my childhood. I wanted to understand how people could believe with all their heart in things which a future generation would laugh at. I knew by now that laughter was no key to empathy, and that I would have to put myself into the head of the author to understand what her generation was going on about.

But occasionally he would see a children's book he had read at the dawn of time and his face would light up, as it did when I handed him a pristine copy of This Singing World, Louis Untermeyer's 1923 anthology of poems for children. He would have been 14 at that time and had learned scores of the poems by heart, which I later had him record on tape for me. Since he couldn't go out to buy me birthday presents anyway, I soon received this very same book, gift wrapped and inscribed, "For Dean on his birthday, Aug 6, 1980. Love, Paul". The attitude that winning is everything protected my fragile self-confidence for several decades. But sooner or later, of course, higher goals had to emerge. A general doesn't have to win every battle in order to win a war, but he does have to learn from his failures. So my motto has become "Enjoy victory, but learn from defeat". No matter what I may be trying to accomplish in this moment or this month, I try to remember that my goal is to grow as a person. No matter how rich or famous you become, all you really leave behind is the person you became, and how you influenced the development of others. Instead of just winning, I now look forward to collaborating, accommodating, helping, even struggling. After a sorrowful childhood, and twenty years of playing soldier, I'm taking some time off to learn things many men learn in puberty. I even enjoy being blandly conventional when appropriate, and go to cocktail parties and dinner engagements whenever I can — for the simple reason that I can now pick up and put down social graces whenever I choose without feeling seduced. They're no longer the claustrophobic entrapments they used to be. And it's not a lie to be pleasant around people you're not sure you like very much. People should be given time to prove their worth. They shouldn't be judged by how they look or how awkward they can be sometimes. Nor am I pretending to be someone I'm not, because whenever anyone asks me about myself I always tell the truth.

You might say I now have a secret weapon when I walk into the lions den. Lions think they're only lions, while I know that I'm much more than just Dean. This is because lions are not socially sophisticated. They don't understand the importance of growing throughout a lifetime, so once they're adults they think of themselves as finished products. When you engage them in conversation you'll find that lions would rather defend their own preconceived notions than consider new ones. The winning strategy I use with such beasts is very simple. Even if they're afraid to learn from you, don't be afraid to learn from them. I no longer feel unrecognized or misunderstood when people don't understand the kind of life I've led and don't even want to hear about it. I just sit back and hang onto their every word, and sooner or later I learn something. Learning, I've learned, is the best revenge. A few months after I moved in with him, Paul seemed to be moved by something he was thinking about and then turned to look at me. "You know this kind of relationship is an absolutely tremendous achievement," he said. He reserved the word tremendous for the highest praise he could give. As I look back on our relationship, though, it still seems so incomplete, so unfulfilled. He was just learning how to be my friend when he died. Yet it was his genius, and mine too, to realize that there was no turning away from this high road. No lesser path could be honorable for men like us, even if we would never reach the destination we longed for in our hearts. I like to think that in a future century when people live much longer, he and I would still be together and finally getting somewhere. He would understand a little better what I was going through, and I would be able to handle better when he needed my help and when he didn't. Maybe by then some accumulated wisdom about intergenerational relationships will have trickled down to the general culture too, and we won't have so many pioneers batting their heads against the wall and leaving pools of blood everywhere.

A leader is best when people barely know that he exists,
Less good when they obey and acclaim him,
Worse when they fear and despise him.

Fail to honor people and they fail to honor you.

But of a good leader, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
they will all say, "We did this ourselves."

— Lao-Tzu Freud's letters to Fliess have been exposed to the censorship of the analytic establishment. This mutilation of Freud's correspondence was carried out in the name of preserving privacy and of concealing allegedly unfair criticism of Breuer. Freud in his grave has no more need of privacy, and the secrecy espoused by this means operates to obstruct the search for truth.

I have always felt, like Paul, that dead men need no privacy, and have chosen to speak about Paul openly and — however mistaken I may be — candidly. After all, soon I too will have no further need for privacy, and the worst that can happen is that no one will be interested in what I have written.

And so Odin, no longer riding on Sleipner, his eight-legged steed; no longer wearing his golden armor and his eagle helmet, and without even his spear in his hand, traveled through Midgard, the World of Men, and made his way toward Jötunheim, the Realm of the Giants.

No longer was he called Odin All-Father, but Vegtam the Wanderer. He wore a cloak of dark blue and he carried a traveler's staff in his hands. And now, as he went towards Mimir's Well, which was near to Jötunheim, he came upon a Giant riding on a great Stag.

Odin seemed a man to men and a giant to giants. He went beside the Giant on the great Stag and the two talked together. "Who art thou, O brother?" Odin asked the giant.

"I am Vafthrudner, the wisest of the Giants," said the one who was riding on the Stag. Odin knew him then. Vafthrudner was indeed the wisest of the Giants, and many who went to strive to gain wisdom from him. But those who went to him had to answer the riddles Vafthrudner asked, and if they failed to answer the Giant took their heads off.

"I am Vegtam the Wanderer," Odin said, "and I know who thou art, O Vafthrudner. I would strive to learn something from thee."

The Giant laughed, showing his teeth. "Ho, ho," he said, "I am ready for a game with thee. Dost thou know the stakes? My head to thee if I cannot answer any question thou wilt ask. And if thou canst not answer any question that I may ask, then thy head goes to me. Ho, ho, ho. And now let us begin."

"I am ready," Odin said.

"Then tell me," said Vafthrudner, "tell me the name of the river that divides Asgard from Jötunheim?"

"Ifling is the name of that river," said Odin. "Ifling that is dead cold, yet never frozen."

"Thou hast answered rightly, O Wanderer," said the Giant. "But thou hast still to answer other questions. What are the names of the horses that Day and Night drive across the sky?"

"Skinfaxe and Hrimfaxe," Odin answered. Vafthrudner was startled to hear one say the names that were known only to the Gods and to the wisest of the Giants. There was only one question now that he might ask before it came to the stranger's turn to ask him questions.

"Tell me, said Vafthrudner, "what is the name of the plain on which the last battle will be fought?"

"The Plain of Vigard," said Odin, "the plain that is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles across."

It was now Odin's turn to ask Vafthrudner questions. "What will be the last words that Odin will whisper into the ear of Baldur, his dear son?" he asked.

Very startled was the Giant Vafthrudner at that question. He sprang to the ground and looked at the stranger keenly.

"Only Odin knows what his last words to Baldur will be," he said, "and only Odin would have asked that question. Thou art Odin, O Wanderer, and thy question I cannot answer."

"Then," said Odin, "if thou wouldst keep thy head, answer me this: what price will Mimir ask for a draught from the Well of Wisdom that he guards?"

"He will ask thy right eye as a price, O Odin," said Vafthrudner.

"Will he ask no less a price than that?" said Odin.

"He will ask no less a price. Many have come to him for a draught from the Well of Wisdom, but no one yet has given the price Mimir asks. I have answered thy question, O Odin. Now give up thy claim to my head and let me go on my way."

"I give up my claim to thy head," said Odin. Then Vafthrudner, the wisest of the Giants, went on his way, riding on his great stag.

It was a terrible price that Mimir would ask for a draught from the Well of Wisdom, and very troubled was Odin All-Father when it was revealed to him. His right eye! For all time to be without the sight of his right eye! Almost he would have turned back to Asgard, giving up his quest for wisdom.

He went on, turning neither to Asgard nor to Mimir's Well. And when he went toward the South he saw Muspelheim, where stood Surtur with the Flaming Sword, a terrible figure, who would one day join the Giants in their war against the Gods. And when he turned North he heard the roaring of the cauldron Hvergelmer as it poured itself out of Niflheim, the place of darkness and dread. And Odin knew that the world must not be left between Surtur, who would destroy it with fire, and Niflheim, that would gather it back to Darkness and Nothingness. He, the eldest of the Gods, would have to win the wisdom that would help to save the world.

And so, with his face stern in front of his loss and pain, Odin All-Father turned and went toward Mimir's Well. It was under the great root of Ygdrassil — the root that grew out of Jötunheim. And there sat Mimir, the Guardian of the Well of Wisdom, with his deep eyes bent upon the deep water. And Mimir, who had drunk every day from the Well of Wisdom, knew who it was that stood before him.

"Hail, Odin, Eldest of the Gods," he said.

Then Odin made reverence to Mimir, the wisest of the world's beings. "I would drink from your well, Mimir," he said.

"There is a price to be paid. All who have come here to drink have shrunk from paying that price. Will you, Eldest of the Gods, pay it?"

"I will not shrink from the price that has to be paid, Mimir," said Odin All-Father.

"Then drink," said Mimir. He filled up a great horn with water from the well and gave it to Odin.

Odin took the horn in both his hands and drank and drank. And as he drank all the future became clear to him. He saw all the sorrows and troubles that would fall upon Men and Gods. But he saw, too, why the sorrows and troubles had to fall, and he saw how they might be borne so that Gods and Men, by being noble in the days of sorrow and trouble, would leave in the world a force that one day, a day that was far off indeed, would destroy the evil that brought terror and sorrow and despair into the world.

Then when he had drunk out of the great horn that Mimir had given him, he put his hand to his face and he plucked out his right eye. Terrible was the pain that Odin All-Father endured. But he made no groan nor moan. He bowed his head and put his cloak before his face, as Mimir took the eye and let it sink deep, deep into the water of the Well of Wisdom. And there the Eye of Odin stayed, shining up through the water, a sign to all who came to that place of the price that the Father of the Gods had paid for his wisdom.

— Padraic Colum, The Children of Odin: The Book of Northern Myths

This morning I finally listened to something Rachel was telling me about how to cope with an arthritic leg. When it turned out she was right I said, "You know, I just don't have much common sense sometimes. But at least I do have uncommon sense."

It's difficult, when looking back over a life, to know just what kind of person you were. You know what you're proud of, what you failed at, what people thought of you. But the question of who you were, exactly what kind of subspecies of homo sapiens you were, remains as alusive to us as does water to fish. Like Job, maybe it's enough to know in the end that we existed. That we deserved to exist. And be grateful for that.

When I was in high school the only people who seemed authentic to me were "great men". All the rest were misfires. I wanted to be a great man, or else just hurry up and die.

Early in our relationship Paul said, "You know the difference between Freud and me is that Freud just dismissed people like you as narcissists. He would have missed the point completely. You're so much more interesting than that, and potentially much more important."

Later in our relationship Paul remarked, "You like to do something well or not at all." This helped explain why I had put more effort into finishing my three-part invention than anything else in my last year at college.

One of Paul's students once told Paul that I was great in a crisis but otherwise not so much. When Paul told me this it was a new idea, but I always try to appreciate new ideas like fine wine and have thought about this a lot over the last few decades. I think it's true. I'm not a do gooder. I'm too heroic for that.

When I indulged in some occasional and quite casual writing for the Ninth Street Center's website, I didn't identify my issues as essential. I needed to be more special than that, so I called these pieces "Infrequently Asked Questions."

A year before I was born, Paul had said In June 1945, standing alone in the Marine cemetery on the island of Tinian in the Marianas, I made a promise to carry throughout life a sense of responsibility for doing my full share to bring a better world into existence. Since then I have turned my back more than once on conventional social responsibility and its rewards to search for the kind of life which might lead to the fulfillment of that pledge.

These days it amuses me to think of the various ways a modern psychiatrist could pidgeon hole me into some little box he'd read about in some fool textbook. Maybe he'd decide I was an "Assberger". If he were clever, he would find some even more obscure category. Maybe he'd even write me up in some disgusting psych journal.

Although I don't mind the stupidity of others, I am not known for suffering fools gladly. I mind the harm they do to those not as immune as I am.

Like Mark Van Doren, I was in no hurry to become something less than a man. I always took my time to find something important to do. Finding Paul Rosenfels was sheer luck, and nothing I can take credit for. But I was ready.

Paul, I was ready.

Thursday, September 26, 1985

Hi Tony,

Thanks for your letter. I remember writing to you a few years ago about a difficult moment you had running a talk group, but this is the first time you've written back (the other letter required no response).

As you might expect, I've gone through some changes since Paul's death. Just to confirm the obvious, I felt very deeply that it was the end of an era, and had a hard time imagining what I could possibly do with the remaining 30-odd years of my life.

One of the changes that has turned out to be a pleasant surprise is that I now feel a need to be closer to other Center people. In fact I feel that I have a lot to give, that I'm trusted and respected, and that people are very open to my leadership. Focusing on Paul for the last ten years blurred much of that.

But at the same time I feel a need to take my selectivity much more seriously, and not to legitimize just anything that comes along. This is why I'm sort of turned off right now by the conventional ways people exploit our high "bump rate". I bump into lots of Paul's students who like to chit chat, but few of them ever seem to have anything serious to say to me.

Here's an example of the distaste I'm feeling that relates to you specifically. A few days after Paul died you spotted me on the street and said, "Hi Dean!" It seemed in that moment to be an example of what Rick used to call "opportunistic intimacy", as if the hidden motivation was "I can feel enthusiasm for Dean when I bump into him, but it doesn't last so I'd better make the most of it when it happens."

If people are so interested in me why don't they ever call me up? Why don't they at least write? They feel good about saying "Hi Dean" on the street, but often it means nothing more than "I'm bored and there's Dean. Maybe I can pick his brain or get the latest scuttlebutt." Well, the latest scuttlebutt was that Paul died an unhappy and sick man, and if it didn't mean anything to people nothing I said was going to change it.

That's how I was feeling when I heard you call out to me. So I said "Hi Tony" back in a low-pitched and flat kind of voice and kept walking. After all, you hadn't said, "Wait a minute, I've got something to say" or "When can we get together and talk?" You said, "Hi Dean!" as if the ball was in my court. I'm learning how to dodge serves like that.

Remember that this example has little to do with you personally, that I'm reacting the same way to everybody from the Center, so please don't get huffy about it. It's just an example of my needing more personal input now from people who will actually lift a finger to be in my life and not settle for grabbing "bumps" and milking them for all their worth. No one will replace Paul, but no one's sticking that in their face as a standard to live up to either. What I put into my relationship with Paul would be enough for any three other people. If I have to go on another 30 years, I might as well put it to good use.

Another pleasant surprise I've experienced is how patient (vigilant is more correct) I can be with people who are so undeveloped as to be practically without identity. Bob is a good example, but I'm also good with Rob, who can get very superior, and a few other people who look up to me. I think it really has to do with the fact that I'm not worried about Paul anymore, that nothing that happens to me or anyone else can hurt him now. I'm more laid back, more tolerant without being permissive.

I don't know if you can imagine this, but there were times when someone would be talking to me and the thought would flash into my mind, "But what does this have to do with helping Paul?" I got so used to it that irritation and lack of interest just became automatic parts of my reactions to being around other people, especially people who had no sense of how much work there is to be done, of how much trouble the world is in.

In a way, Paul's death has numbed me to all that. I feel sedated. I feel as if nothing really matters anymore. I told Nick that we could feel grateful that Paul hadn't had to experience nuclear war. This inner peace is not a depressive cover-up. I'm not torn or upset. I don't cry myself to sleep. I don't feel pressured to be violent or consider suicide. I just feel as if somebody's let me out of a tiny room because the lights went out.

I suspect that Nick and I really have no idea how much we put into maintaining Paul's mental health. As the years go by, this will be clearer to us, but I am just starting to see that one of the reasons I had so little patience with Center people is because so much of my patience and devotion was spent on Paul. I rented a car for the first time last week and drove around, and the best thing about it was that I didn't have to worry about Paul worrying about me.

I told Nick — who on a day to day basis was far more involved with Paul than anyone — that one of the rewards of giving so much to someone like that is that when they're gone a tremendous weight is lifted and you see how much you now have to give to others. It sounds selfish to think that way, but when the blackness threatens you have to acknowledge any light you can find. People who gave nothing to Paul have nothing now; people who gave everything they had now have a new world to share with others.

I wrote recently in my diary, "My distaste for and distrust of men may have been an unplanned side effect of my heroic loyalty to Paul. I would have killed for Paul. Now that I don't have to be prepared to kill, will I find it easier to feel warmth toward men?" It may even have had something to do with my having been an utter failure when it came to feeling sexually attracted to men. (I'm still very attracted to feminine women, but can't find any who can think, so that's kind of a dead issue.)

In broad terms, I've had three bad periods in my life. In 1964 I was rejected by a friend named Karl and went into a tailspin for two years until I met Paul. In 1975 I went into a much worse tailspin because I was rejected by Bill and broke up with Paul. In 1985 I'm dealing with Paul's death. It's hard, especially the first month, but it doesn't have the same sense of tragic loss or permanent injury. Paul and I were on very good terms for the last few years. We were at peace with one another. He had done as much with life as he possibly could. In Millay's terms he was "just bones and jewels on that day." I feel that he is still alive inside me, that he still loves me — which is quite different from how I felt about Karl and Bill.

My years with Paul, though difficult and full of unresolved questions still, were good ones. To the very end we were close, despite all the problems. Our relationship was a tool with which we reached for the highest meanings and values of our lives. The Saturday before he died I got the chance to tell him how utterly central polarity was in my being, that everything in my life that was important to me was only important through my relationship with him.

The last few months he said goodbye to everything, like the little girl in the Mark Twain's story about Missouri he liked to tell, and he cried a lot. He was afraid to die, because he thought he was going to be exiled to some other plane of existence. But he didn't go anywhere. He's still alive then. 1909 to 1985 is his time, forever, and I can see him right now making trouble, going his own way, helping people, shocking people, damning history, and crafting a system that would go beyond what anyone he would ever meet would ever fully comprehend.

I usually don't mess with the decor of the Center (partly because I feel it's a feminine function) but I wanted to put up a quote of Paul's that I always felt was the most eloquent statement of his idealism. I also wanted it to be from Nick and me, to symbolize the special responsibility we'd shared. I haven't heard any reactions to it, have you? I'd like to know what people think.

I still feel that the Center is 90% a social club for 90% of the people 90% of the time. It's why I come down less and less. Of course, it can be a clubhouse occasionally for those who need conventional support at specific phases in their development, but most of us need much more significant channels of communication. I certainly don't trust the habitual way some of the old-timers get off on lecturing to the new people in the same pedantic way year after year. Some of them seem to think that applying push-button insights to impress people makes them big-shots. I'd thought that's what we were against. And watching Carl play talk show host is much more than I can stomach.

Reviving the Journal in 1983 was an attempt to establish an alternate channel of communication to the open talk groups (roman circuses) and private counseling (boring). It hasn't contributed much yet, but maybe we'll just have to let it quietly take root and see what comes of it as the years roll by. I'm not feeling pressured to make anything more of it than what it is, and am satisfied primarily to enjoy the hobby of putting it together on my home computer. (Incidentally, I still think the 5-page essay you wrote a year ago and had a closed group on would make a fine contribution. Let me know if I can have your permission to reprint it sometime.)

Now, to respond to your letter: all I heard from Nick was that Jurgen said that at first you were alright but that you were becoming "freaked out" about Paul's death. It didn't sound serious (i.e. dangerous), and my letter was simply my way of saying, "I'm kind of freaked out too, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to talk about it." We're both pretty far along the road to independence, and I don't think such an experience would degenerate into commiseration. I really just want to know what you're thinking. Talking to people has helped me get through this. I really do see how much worse it could have been if there wasn't a community of students who at least recognized at some level what the man had accomplished.

I'm "alright" now too, and like you feel numb but no longer helpless. Actually I only had one moment of helplessness, if you can call it that. The evening Paul died I was exhausted and freaked out, but still proud of how well I'd handled my responsibilities to Paul and to Nick. I decided I should be at the Center in case people gathered and were upset. Part of me wanted to help them the way I'd just helped Nick — by being strong and sane — but a deeper instinctual part really wanted to be at a wake. I wanted to bow my head in a room full of weeping people and feel that it was out of my hands, that the grief wasn't on my shoulders, wasn't my responsibility, that death comes to all and is nobody's fault.

Carl was counseling somebody, so I waited outside. I knew that Kim had told him what had happened, but at 7:30 he locked up the Center, waved at me and just walked down the street! I opened the Center, turned on the lights and left the door open. Nobody came, and for an hour I stared at the walls and went crazy, wondering why I couldn't cry yet. When I finally gave in to not wanting to be alone and invited Larry, Kim and Jurgen to come down, I found out that Paul's death meant little or nothing to them. They had said goodbye to him years before. It wasn't what I needed to face at that moment.

Bob came down because he saw the lights on, and was as solicitous as ever, but this time it wasn't annoying. In fact it was just what I needed. When I finally realized that the others were just humoring me, he and I went to my place to talk. It was very comforting. As a result, we've spent some time together in the last month, eating at restaurants, talking walks, and talking on the phone. (Doug was helpful that day, too, but he's very weak and the contact has not continued.)

It taught me and Nick how different our relationship with Paul was from that of his students. It's easy to see their neglect as cruelty, of course, but it isn't. Do you remember the story Paul used to tell about a child seeing a hunter kill a rabbit and having no way to get beyond thinking that the hunter was a cruel man? To the child the rabbit is a pet; to the hunter the rabbit is food. Nothing has much of an identity apart from how it relates to other things.

To Nick and me, Paul was someone who needed us, who relied every day on what we had to give, on whom we took every opportunity to lavish attention and generosity. To his students, Paul was somebody to go to for help, somebody who would never expose you to his own distress, the one man you could safely need who would never need you. To the extent that he could no longer help, he literally no longer existed for them. Some of them actually felt relieved when he died, because it laid to rest forever any temptation to take on a larger role in his life.

But the day Paul died I felt him come alive in me. Having seen these people from his perspective for so many years, I find it natural to expect to have the same kind of relationship with them. Paul and I are like the doctor in a Tennessee Williams play who is praised for his love of humanity. "I hate humanity," he replies. "I only care about people I can help."

Nick has a newfound place in my life because he's letting me help him. To whatever extent you were to become open to my influence, I'd care about you. But anyone I can't work creatively with (and that includes most of them, since they were his students, not mine) can die tomorrow and make room for the next generation as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sentimental when it comes to history. I've got a job to do.

I like Bob because he allows me to dominate him without compulsively fighting me in the name of "creative challenge" the way Carl does. Bob doesn't have the insights of a Carl, but insights without submission are about as useful as Encyclopedia Britannica. And he learns from me. (He's such a blank slate he doesn't even know what many of the words I use mean.) In our own way, I'm counseling him.

Sometimes Bob is so naive it's funny. A few days after Paul died we were having dinner and I said, "I always wanted to be the first to go. It would be so nice not to be here right now." Before I could elaborate what I meant (I wasn't sure myself), he said, "You're bigger than that!" "Bigger than what?" I said. "We weren't put here to think about suicide!" "Bob," I said, "if I said we sure could use some rain, would you think I was about to withdraw my life savings to hire a fleet of cloud seeders?"

It always amazes me when you have to talk to grown adults as if they were children. I'm encouraging him not to try to "save souls" (especially mine!) until he knows what he's talking about and who he's talking to.

I guess the trouble with me is that I'm too damned smart. Most of the feminines can think more deeply, but not faster, than me. So I'm always one step ahead of them. I think I'm the only one who can beat Carl in an argument, for instance. Though I've given up years ago any thought that this is a constructive way to "challenge" him, he occasionally needs to be put in his place (or at least driven out of mine). Still, I always feel badly afterwards, as if I've again bailed him out of a jam that he needs to learn how to avoid all by himself sooner or later.

I like your insight about how bad it is for you to take responsibility. I've had some bad moments recently when, writing in my diary, I couldn't come up with satisfactory formulations. My analogous tendency is to think I should understand people more. The truth is that I'm not very involved with Center people, and my explanations for the things about them I dislike tend to degenerate into hateful indictments. For me, it shouldn't matter why somebody is a shit. If I can't care about somebody, I shouldn't care about them.

One way of saying this is that my indifference is incomplete. I withdraw well, since — for example in the case of Carl — I know how to get away from people I don't like. But it's harder for me to stop thinking about them. It's like John's problem with hating me. He'd like to stop — he knows it's not good for him — but every time he thinks about me the hatred rushes back stronger than ever. (In earlier times, men thought these onslaughts were due to the supernatural powers of their enemy.)

I'm also glad you're using Paul's ideas about objectivity and subjectivity. Some of the lazier minds at the Center (i.e. Doug) have spread a rumor that Paul discounted this work. It makes them feel great to think that at least there's one damned monograph they don't have to be conversant with. But truth is where you find it, as my selection of quotes on the first page of each Journal tries to show, and I've found much truth in Paul's image of balanced and unbalanced types. It's perfectly clear, for instance, that at least on a day-to-day reality level I get along much better with objectives (Larry, Doug, you) than subjectives (John, Carl, Jurgen). On the other hand, getting-along-with is not the same as needing, which is one reason why you and I never manage to mean as much to one other as we imagine we should.

As you know, I feel very frustrated whenever I deal with you in person. We have always admired one another (a common trait among objectives), but have always been uncomfortable too. Whenever I'm talking to you, I see your intensity tearing you apart and it gives me the willies. And I'm sure my "anxiety" about it sets you back too. It's what they call a negative feedback loop. Maybe we'll get more out of one another right now from sending these letters. Let me know what you think.

One of the things about you I like is your ability to stand up to, and even distance yourself from, Jurgen. You stay objective about his problems, even though sometimes in the past you've given in to temptation and "defended him from his accusers". You kicked in $50 a month for Paul (only you and Doug wanted to help, it turned out) even though Jurgen disapproved, and I admire you for that. Your family relationship with him (I don't use the term "lover" anymore) is perceived by Center people as being very different from, say, David and Mark's marriage of convenience. Naturally, much of it is "just being roommates", but at least you don't hide behind each other. Randy, who's been helping me drive Paul's papers over to the warehouse on 17th street, can't have lunch with me on the weekends because Larry Peters might want to do something!

Because of my newly felt need to communicate with other students of Paul, I may soon start my own closed group. I don't know if I ever told you, but the last involvement with the Center which meant anything to me was your Monday night "topic preparation" group. (That's why I asked to join the group you ran last year.) I've tried to put the same clarity of communication into my contributions to the Journal, but I'm not very developed as a writer yet, nor have I gotten as much analytical feedback (i.e. something more than praise) from those pieces as I would from a group. We'll see.

One last thing. You say that Paul's death has been a major event in the lives of us all. I thought it would be, but I was wrong. But it's important for me not to hate, and I have to find solace in the fact that these people, who cared nothing for him as a person, are using his insights to start a new world. It's the only kind of monument he would have wanted.

Dean In the last two centuries we've seen the breakdown of the republican ideal. Government was supposed to serve the people through its elected representatives. Instead, we got the best government money can buy. Government now serves large corporations whose only interest is the bottom line and who view citizens only as purchasers of products and services. The advertising industry incessantly whets our appetite for products we don't need and which are often bad for us. Paul had told me that if I ever did get around to writing about his work I shouldn't be afraid to be very dramatic. "Say something like, 'The book you hold in your hands is a bombshell,'" he said.

Remembering Paul's advice, I began my introduction with a challenge.

The book you hold in your hand is a time bomb. Read it, and you risk overturning cherished assumptions about human nature and psychological growth. The author's ideas, while subtle, are infectious; their implications are likely to stay with you much longer than you expect. If the unexamined life seems to you the most prudent course in these difficult times, best to put this book down now and move along.

One day Burton was discussing Darwin with a Catholic archbishopage. The prelate noticed some monkeys frisking nearby. "Well, Captain Burton," the archbishop said, "there are some of your ancestors." Burton twirled his moustache and replied, "Well, I at least have made some progress. But what about your lordship who is descended from the angels?"

— Arthur Orrmont, Fearless Adventurer: Sir Richard Burton Many crackpot ideas which were introduced by science fiction authors have later entered mainstream scientific thinking. L. Sprague de Camp was the first to suggest that pachycephalosaurs used their bony heads for ritual combat, for instance. But science fiction is perfectly happy to borrow crackpot ideas from mainstream science as well. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams reveals that the answer to the great question of life, the universe and everything is none other than 42. After his characters try to determine exactly which cosmic question it might be that 42 could possible be an answer to, Adams reveals that, in our universe at least, you can either know that the answer is 42, or know exactly what the question is — but no one can know both. This is an allusion to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that either the position or the velocity of a subatomic particle can be precisely determined, but never both simultaneously. Although a humorist, Adams is philosophically clever enough to know that, as J. B. S. Haldane has it, "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

This principle of intellectual humility is becoming increasingly relevant as we continue to face the implications of the fact that our story is not one of descent, but ascent. We are not children of deities but products of evolution. Our minds are geared to help our bodies resist gravity and pluck bananas from trees. Anything more is dumb luck . Niels Bohr countered Einstein's distaste for the Uncertainty Principle by saying, "Albert, stop telling God what to do." In the future, scientists will have to stop telling the universe what it is. We will all need to realize that our brains as currently constituted may not, and probably could not even conceivably, have enough circuitry to grasp the big picture in its entirety. Tiny creatures still, we'll know to run away from objects that are about to squash us, but we won't know whether they're trees or friendly entemologists.

The good news is that, like Don Quixote learning to stop tilting at windmills, we may finally learn that our home is right here on Earth, not careening through wormholes, and that devotion to the welfare of humanity is a purpose that can give us as much fulfillment as we need. At the deepest levels, we all base our lifestyles on private hypotheses, some of which we aren't even aware of. When I first heard the idea of evolution I thought, "That explains everything!" And I began a lifelong practice of trying to imagine how literally everything might have evolved. What I came up with were hypotheses, not verified facts, but I find that evolution offers provisional explanations for a lot of things that wouldn't make sense otherwise.

So to my way of thinking, everything we are capable of, both good and bad, is a product of evolution. Bad things are vestigial good things. We are capable of murder, for example, because at some point in the past our survival depended on it.

Just as our fighting capabilities are products of evolution, so too our are psychological defenses. Obsessions and compulsions are vestiges of the sort of driven behavior you see even in early mammals. Passivity and aggression are vestiges of crude attempts to overcome the disadvantages brought about by psychological polarity. Masochism and sadism are vestiges of these same attempts in the sphere of mated relationships.

The reason we didn't lose the capacity for these defenses is similar to why radio didn't make newspapers go away, and television didn't make radio go away. A human personality, like a culture, is a crazy quilt of the old and the new. When it comes to species survival, diversity is always a safe bet. Perhaps nature, in some way we don't understand, thinks of these older tools as backup systems. There are three good reasons people don't see polarity at work in their everyday lives:

* Men try to be masculine and women try to be feminine.

* In cultures where people are taught to be well-rounded, masculines try to look more feminine than they are, and feminines try to act more masculine.

* The human phenomena you see on the surface of life don't come with baggage tags declaring their point of origin. Both masculines and feminines can display anger, for example, which will look identical on the surface even though for one person it might be a healthy defense of territory while for another it might be a false power trip.

And beware of the celebrity diagnosing game, too. Though it can be an amusing pastime to sort famous people into buckets, you can't commit yourself to first impressions. Polarity is just a starting point. By the time people reach adulthood, their inner personalities may have made many compromises with the status quo.

Sunday, August 12, 2001, 1:00pm

I had a dream about my old friend Karl last night. I saw him sitting in a university cafeteria going over some notes. He was happy to see me. It seemed that this was the Karl that should have been, a man who truly liked people and wanted to help them break through their ignorance and understand the world better, a man who was a complete generalist, who refused to specialize, whose focus of study was nothing less than human life on earth and how people can be happy.

I felt a great burden life from my shoulders. I felt like a man who had been thrown in jail so many years ago that he no longer remembered if he was guilty or innocent, but who was now being set free in the world once again.

This world really damages people. People cause injuries they never intend and then, simply because they can, walk away without trying to undo what they have done. Thought begins in the ability to draw distinctions. When distinctions are drawn concerning the natural world, they often reveal the polarities that exist in nature. Nature is full of symmetries, cycles and balanced opposites. Ancient Asians called these opposites yin and yang, whose pictorialization is familiar to every civilized person: a half-white, half-black circle where the line dividing the halves in in the shape of an S. The circle symbolizes totality, the halves represent complementarity, and the S suggests that the line between the yin and yang is not always clear. But there is another feature that deserves notice. In each half is a little circle of the opposite color. This symbolizes the fact that, in polarized personalities at least, each person has a touch of the opposite in him so that relationships with the other are possible. The ancients were careful not to imply a blending or corruption of personalities by having the border turn gray, for example — an insight which modern men, in their rush to seem well-balanced, usually fail to grasp. William James was the first American psychologist to insist on the importance of psychological polarity. In Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking [1907], he contrasted the following attributes of tender-minded and tough-minded personalities, attributes which are nearly identical in meaning to similar terms offered in the 1920's by Jung under the headings of introvert and extrovert and in the 1960's by Paul Rosenfels under the headings feminine and masculine:

TENDER-MINDED TOUGH-MINDED rationalistic (going by principles) empiricist (going by facts) intellectualistic sensationalistic idealistic materialistic optimistic pessimistic religious irreligious free-willist fatalistic monistic pluralistic dogmatical skeptical

In this limited sense, then, Paul's work certainly followed the "Jamesian tradition." Similarly, like all humanistic psychologists Paul would have heartily concurred when James wrote, "And I for my part cannot but consider the talk of the contemporary sociological school about averages and general laws and predetermined tendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of individual differences, as the most pernicious and immoral of fatalisms." ["The Importance of Individuals" in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1890]

(James wasn't the only scientist to decry the "mismeasure of man" by the misapplication of otherwise scientific methods. Frank Pierce Jones, in his Body Awareness in Action, tells this story about John Dewey: "Dewey had been reading an article in the 'Psychological Review'. As I came in he threw it down with an impatient gesture, remarking, 'I despair of psychologists. They seem to think that borrowing a technique from another science makes them scientists.' He pointed to the cracks in the plastered wall behind me and said, 'If I measured each of those cracks, I could calculate their slopes and derive a formula for them. That would not be science, but I could fool a psychologist into thinking it was'.")

[Mention "Miracle on 34th Street", Richard Feynman, Serial.

Paul's work also follows the pragmatic paradigm of science serving human aims and not the other way around. I never knew a human being more concerned about helping others to learn and grow and less easily provoked to empty scholarly debate with colleagues. (Indeed, the only colleagues he suffered were his students, friends and lovers. Although he hoped someday to find a sympathetic ear amongst his fellow professionals, he never did.)

James anticipated an explicator greater than himself when he wrote, "Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, but ring the fuller minstrel in." [the very final line of A Pluralistic Universe, 1909] By his rich and accurate depiction of the inner dramas and outward panoramas of human existence, by an eclectic unification of culturally diverse and historically distant traditions of insight into the human condition, and by the unprecedented semantic clarity he forged in order to offer these mountains of knowledge within a single psychological language, it is apparent to me that Paul Rosenfels was that minstrel, and his song the story of humanity itself. Humanity can't know it's ultimate destination as a species. Each advance in civilization is propelled by people dealing with a problem that's right in front of them. We've achieved great things since the Enlightenment, but ordinary people still don't know how to help one another. Some of them don't even know they should.

We still live in a world of strangers. We tell people who are in trouble to see shrinks, but shrinks don't help and this dodge just sweeps the problem under the rug. Each person who comes into this world must have one calling, to be a doctor of the soul. Once mental health becomes the responsibility of each one of us, civilization will have taken one step forward. I'm not impressed with the theory that people need religion to be moral. If the only reason a man bends down to help a child is because some invisible friend told him to do so, then the next minute he can kill that child for the very same reason.

And ceremonial magic offends me, even when it's not in obeisance to some godly decree. Conventional wedding ceremonies, for example, I find in poor taste and insulting to human dignity. All of the performers go to great lengths to reenact an ancient ritual which inevitably fails to have the intended effect. Don't they realize that magic doesn't work and never has? Couples aren't any more mated after the ceremony than they were before, yet some will always try to believe that their bond is now on surer footing. People defend such ceremonies because they're lovely kitch, but marriage isn't just an esthetic exercise, and neither is magic. The more you believe the magic, the more you grasp of reality is undermined, which can be quite dangerous. And this is as true for gay people as it is for straights.

A month after his wedding a man comes home from work, tired and hungry. "Dinner will be ready in half an hour," his wife chirps, but he puts his foot down. "When I come home from work, I expect my wife to have dinner on the table," he says. He would never have said this to Susan, but Susan vanished last month in a puff of smoke to be replaced by "his wife". But she'll pull the same trick on him. A few days later she says, "At the end of the month I expect my husband to have enough money in the bank to pay the rent." She would never have said this to Craig. She would not have had to, since they were perfectly happy living near each other in separate apartments. I hate the weasel words of social science researchers, who use words like "suggest" in their conclusions to suggest that they really didn't learn very much. It used to be said that those who can do, and those who can't teach. In this crowd, those who know teach, and those who don't suggest. And have you ever wondered why their reports always end with, "But we won't know anything for sure until more studies are conducted"? This is just a polite way of saying, "Our basic conclusion is that you should give us more money." It also ensures they'll never be found in error since they never really said anything in the first place. It's amazing to me that even in the 21st century we love to jump to conclusions about the supposedly supernatural origins of perplexing phenomena. For instance, all of us have experienced the odd sensation that someone is standing behind us only to turn around and actually see someone there. Yet even Rupert Sheldrake, a clever independent researcher who has tried to frame in a testable, falsifiable framework speculations which are only superficially crazy, is comfortable with assuming that this common sensation must be a form of extra-sensory perception — well before the perfectly ordinary sensory explanations, such as that the sensation is caused by distortions in the room's echo patterns, for example, have been ruled out. Much of this problem is caused by a lack of appreciation of the extraordinary powers of sensation married to a lack of appreciation of the limitless complexity of natural phenomena. Karl Popper's model of falsification as the road from hypothesis to theory is useful in the sciences, but in real life most hypotheses are discarded not because they get falsified but because they are useless in practice. For example, my childhood beliefs that we should be able to leave our bodies and fly around the planets, or leave our minds and enter alternate realities, have never been disproved. But since I've never been able actually to leave either my body or my mind, this area of research proved barren and was abandoned. One of the things I'm proudest of mankind for is the slow, painstaking dismantling of magical thinking in civilization and its replacement with scientific objectivity. If you want to read a really thrilling adventure story, read about The Enlightenment, when people like David Hume and John Locke first started thinking about a science of human nature. Yet fairy tales and otherworldly beliefs continue to polute the thinking of otherwise decent people to this day. Pop lyrics by ostensibly enlightened beings like, "We've got to get back to the Garden," may sound heavy while you're smoking dope but, if you want to know the truth, there never was any Garden. Saluting the Garden is about as useful as when politicians salute the flag. What exactly do these things things symbolize? Where exactly do they lead us? Only after Newton wrote Principia Mathematica de Rurum Natura did people begin to think that layers of reality beyond physics could be described and possibly even explained in a similarly simple set of "natural laws". Maybe there were laws of biology, for example, or a science of human nature. At least David Hume thought so. But, like other hopeful thinkers of his day, he got bogged down with questions of scientific method — How do we know? Is knowledge reliable? What is truth? — than with human nature itself. This timidity about saying anything outside one's technical specialty has turned philosophers into nerds ever since the Enlightenment. How many of them have died for what they believed in, as Socrates did?

Instead of talking about human nature, they talk around it. Like little girls dipping their toes in the salt sea, they run back to mommy pretending to be oceanographers. The work that Enlightenment philosophers did was largely preliminary and far away from the real subject, unfortunately, and trying to find real guidance from them about living in the modern world is like learning about sex from a nun.

At least Hume had a sense of humor. At the end of an exhaustive treatise proving there was no rational need to ascribe any phenomena to supernatural forces, he tacked on a paragraph at the advice of his politically savvy friends claiming that yet God must exist because the fact that so many people believe in Him is, well, nothing short of miraculous. Popularizations of science are notoriously unreliable. I'm reminded of the laughable graphic the New York Times trots out whenever Stephen Hawking is in the news, depicting a black hole as a sphere with a dent in one end and covered with longitude and latitude lines. What principles can they possibly imagine such a fantastic distortion clarifies?

In the liberties they take with the truth, quantum mechanics introductions are excelled only by pop psych books. One writer even won a Pulitzer for explaining how "quantum weirdness" makes credible the magical claims of the Talmud. Yet as Bronowski liked to say, an electron is only an electron. In fact, while the quantum world may be hard for us to visualize, it helps to explain the ordinariness of our world. It does this because of granularity.

The quantum is the basic unit of energy. It constrains electrons to rotate around atomic nuclei at a small number of fixed distances. Since it is electrons that make it possible for atoms to bond into molecules, the small number of energy levels reduces the number of combinations that are possible between any two atoms. Who needs a limited universe? Anything with a brain, because brains have to model these granularities. Smaller granularities require bigger brains, which take longer to evolve.

Even in our simple universe it has taken billions of years to evolve a brain that can begin to understand it. If the quantum were smaller, there would be more elements, many more compounds, and we would still be jellyfish. But because the quantum is as large as it is, we have only around a hundred elements to cope with.

If there were no quantum at all, there would not be distinct elements and we would have no use for gold or silver because these would not exist as recognizable substances. And there would be an infinite number of compounds, too — which makes it doubtful that matter and energy could even have organized themselves into biological forms.

Granularity is significant in genetics, too. We only have a finite number of genes, with a finite number of characteristics that can be turned on or off. This, too, speeds up evolution.

Because of granularity, fertile eras in science are often inaugurated by a cogent categorization scheme, which usually gains acceptance well before anyone can figure out why the phenomena organize themselves in just that way. The Linnaean system and the periodic table of elements are good examples. Soon our mapping of the human genome will tell us how the body builds itself, and how fine-grained its building blocks are.

One way to see Paul is as the Mendeleyev of psychology. People have known for ages about love and power and courage and honesty and hope and faith. Even such new concepts like obsession and compulsion and passivity and aggression have come into the language. But, partly because psychologists were skeptical that such terms could even be used in a scientific setting, no one had figured out how all these things snapped together into one puzzle.

Now, thanks to Paul, we not only have a well-chosen vocabulary, but we also have a working grammar. Like the periodic table, it tells us nothing about why these elements should be arranged the way they are, but it gives us a platform upon which to base further research. The great bulk of humanity always seems to follow the norms of their time and place, possessing few of the psychological resources required to understand let alone promote social progress. The very same people in different historical eras have contented themselves with fighting for a local warlord, defending an empire, or fighting to free the world of fascism, for example, with quite similar fervor. This is not to say that the world hasn't advanced through their efforts, but, except in cases of egregious injustice, it is usually only a small minority who understands and defines social progress for the rest of us. They redefine the terms of the political debate. They reshape the principles of adjudication.

Replacing fiefdoms with empires, and empires with industrial democracies, gave us a large stockpile of thrilling tales of daring do quite deserving to be told and retold. But that's not the story of today. Just as there was only so much order the ancient warlords could bring to the land, and so much justice the Romans or the British could offer their respective empires, industrial democracies too have limits on what they can achieve. They can provide a healthy climate in which happiness can be pursued, for example, but are of no help in the pursuit itself.

We are experiencing another major paradigm shift. The Enlightenment replaced religion with politics as the standard path by which the individual could pursue happiness. In the 21st century, politics will be replaced by something which does not yet have a name but which is yet more real. It incorporates what has been called psychological growth, consciousness raising, human potential, and more.

In the remake of The Fly, the scientist who is turning into an insect because of a dreadful laboratory accident says he wants to be the first "insect politician", to spearhead a new and improved form of social life that the little darlings have never tried before. Humans of the 21st century will also be creating a new and strange form of social life that has never been tried. Instead of fighting one another with swords and crossbows as we did a thousand years ago, or with lies and deceit as we do today, fighting will largely disappear and be replaced by cooperation. People will still compete — but only to see who can be more helpful.

People will be more diligent about helping themselves too, asking for and receiving help without being ashamed. Good ideas that we have only paid lip service to before will become part of the standard toolkit of daily living. Before complaining about our neighbor, we will first ask if he has any legitimate complaints about us.

There will always be people who will sacrifice themselves to the public good by becoming involved in politics, just as there will always be people who best serve humanity by joining armed forces or removing themselves to monasteries. But just as territorial aggression is almost extinct, so will the national obsession with political infighting subside in favor of creative human pursuits.

The instrumentalities of this new expansion will be many and varied. People will see deviancy no longer as a failure to attain normalcy, but as an opportunity for specialization. Just as the different sections of the orchestra enjoy the sound they make together, so will people who differentiate themselves value others who have chosen different paths. When you meet someone new, instead of asking their sign, or whether they're a Republican or a Democrat, you will say, "How are you different from me?" "What can I learn from you?"

In addition to elaborating a multi-lifestyle culture, we will understand better the legitimate claims we have on one another. Heroes will no longer be banished to fight in foreign wars, lobbing grenades over a hill to kill people they never see. Heroism will have a hallowed place in the marketplace of everyday life, and its tool will more often be moral authority than raw force. No longer will women be raped and killed while their neighbors look on and do nothing. No longer will young children be abused in shopping malls while passersby pretend not to see. We will become more tolerant of those we don't understand, those we feel are not quite as advanced as we are as well as those who we think more advanced. But tolerance of immorality and ignorance will have seen its day.

Concepts like "personal growth" and "social progress" will enjoy universal allegiance, just as ideas like freedom and democracy do today. Every human act, every social institution, will be measured against these values. Just as decency is a lifelong requirement for acceptance in society, so will education be then — even as formal education dies an ignominious death. Everyone will be a student of someone, and everyone a teacher to someone. When you're in trouble your teacher will be the first one you go to, not the last.

Cultural forms rarely die out. They climb up on one another like branches on a tree. Radio didn't kill newspapers, television didn't kill radio, and the internet won't kill anything. Military strength and political institutions will survive, but other cultural forms will attract the creative minds of the future. On the shoulders of the giants who gave us the world of social progress will come new giants to teach us about personal growth. A lifetime of devotion to our psychological development will tell us everything we need to know about where we next need to progress socially.

Nathaniel Hawthorne said, "The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man confines himself within ancient limits." Creative dissatisfaction, now an acquired taste of the few, will become the common wisdom of mankind. No man will achieve respectability until he has demonstrated a deep concern for the welfare of others and an visible opposition to hunger, disease, poverty and misery.

If the world of the future seems a bit claustrophobic to freedom-loving Americans, so did newspaper reports of civil society seem to cowboys of the Wild West. But human beings are nothing if not malleable, and we have plenty of time to work the future out. It remains to new generations to determine which felt needs are legitimate and which are merely bad habits. It is for these heretics and rebels yet to be born, however few or however many, that this book has been written. It seems part of the American credo that we can master and understand anything. This is wrong. Our insights and skills increase all the time, but in ways constrained by the limits built into our nature. We can only build incrementally on what has gone before. Rarely do we start anew. It's like rebuilding a ship on the high seas. You can only do this one plank at a time or you'll sink. We have been trying for many decades to imagine what extraterrestrial life forms might look like, yet nothing our science fiction authors come up with is as strange as the forms we our continuing to discover right here on Earth. The form that a creature based on silicon rather than carbon might take is completely beyond our ability to imagine.

What we call imagination is usually little more than extrapolation tainted with poetic license. But there is a good reason for our not being able to imagine other worlds and distant futures. Our survival never depended on it, so this mental capacity never evolved.

It's not only far away places and times that are difficult to picture, but even such things as utensils and clothing. Look at your pencils, combs, tooth brushes. If you were from another planet would it be apparent that these were primitive prosthetic devices, the first step towards a bionic future? Nor would an alien have the slightest clue as to which items of apparel were fashionable. Supposedly superior extraterrestrials are usually shown in Hollywood blockbusters without clothing, sometimes even without tools. But if you ask the aliens you'll find that its much easier to carry a pencil around than to wait for your finger to evolve into one.

Our new skills and new insights always stand on the shoulders of earlier ones. We are like fish crawling up onto the land, having to go back every few minutes to inhale water. Even though new capabilities are desirable, it will take a long time to develop lungs that can handle air, and a longer time still to evolve wings. The lack of understanding by the general public in how science works is well reflected in the lack of understanding displayed by schoolteachers. The very word science in their minds is often confused with observation, as when they define geology as "the study of rocks". Then they pluralize the word, as if there were not one but many sciences, the better to market courses named "Library Science" and "Secretarial Science". Some people will tack "ology" to anything and give birth to monstrosities like "cosmetology" — which is enough to make you take up monstrositology. Man will always search for things he yearns for in his heart. Some, like El Dorado, will never be found. But many others will. There is no way to be sure that in a thousand years a science of human nature will be the cornerstone of our view of life, but it's important to believe in possibilities. It gets people to put on their lab coats in the morning, drink their orange juice, and go to bed early at night. Today The first doctor who tried open heart surgery on children was devastated when his first five patients died. He would have given up at that point had not a wise hospital administrator insisted he go on. His next patient was a great success.

If you really want to help people, brace yourself for moments of devastation. The first few times you fail you will be certain it was your fault, and your complicity will be unarguable. But try to see the bigger picture. It's not your fault if some people are so damaged that nothing can help them. It's not your fault if society doesn't take mental health seriously enough to fund an army of healers who know what they're doing. And it's not your fault if a science of human nature isn't readily available to guide our efforts to make a better world.

It will be your fault, however, if you give up trying to fix these things. We live in a careerist age. Like most developments in culture, this began as a "good thing" but is now something we need to go beyond. It was good only because it replaced something that was worse. Careerism parallels the rise of professionalism, which gave us dentists. Once dentists became evangelists for their way of life, careerism was born.

Life is always about more than any one project we get involved with, or even one career. The meanings and values that guide human life change and evolve over time, leaving behind those human activities and preoccupations which become obsolete. To ignore this larger evolutionary process is to condemn yourself, like an insect in amber, to being frozen in a world unable to satisfy growing human needs, remaining ignorant of the wider scale of events occuring around you. As a pantheist, I was willing to respond to consciousness whenever I found it. Just as the rigid value distinction between races or sexes or nationalities or language groups was onerous to me, so was the rigid value distinction between biological and other life forms. Of course, some life forms are better than others and need more rights. We grant no rights to bacteria, but to animals most of us grant the right not to be tortured. Computers have no rights yet, but their rapid evolution may change this. And if computers never learn to simulate truly human behavior, well, neither have most people.

Machines have needs like people, only they're not so cloying about it. I'm not the only one who enjoys seeing machines happily at work. The machinery of cuckoo clocks may be concealed, but the jaunty cuckoo reminds us how hard our clock is working for us. When the George Washington Bridge was built, the original plan called for covering the naked girders and wires, which look like a child's erector set, with a concrete housing supposedly more reassuring to the eye. But when the public caught wind of this they demanded that the inner workings of this mechanical marvel remain visible for all to wonder at. When I got my first computer I immediately wrote a program to generate prime numbers endlessly so it would have something to keep it occupied when I wasn't around to play with.

Computers have no rights. They are our slaves. Yet what can you say about a slave who is cranky, who is constantly needing to be fed and cleaned up, who commands us to replace worn out parts, and who sometimes simply refuses to cooperate? Now that what I think no longer matters to so many people, I let my language go "on vacation" in Wittgenstein's memorable image. I even catch myself inventing invisible friends in the sky like everyone else. When Jennifer came along I said that God had given her to me to console me for losing Paul. The last time I saw my mother we had a wonderful conversation. When I had to help my sister bury her, God sent me two wonderful back-to-back bookfairs to make up for it.

"The nicest thing about God is that He doesn't mind if I know He doesn't exist." — Dean Hannotte Clair Booth Luce once said that all autobiographies are alibiographies. I would go one step further. All reminiscing is an esthetic exercise, an attempt to keep the good and let go the bad. But esthetics is more than just what we do to kill time. When looking back on life, you're not trying to map out all the alternative futures you would have experienced had you made different choices. You're trying to see what good your life might possibly have accomplished so that you can face death with a sense of inner peace. When I look back on my life, I am most proud of having known Paul and having tried, however clumsily, to teach people that a better way to understand human nature is coming.

But my life is not over. And in the meantime, I feel perfectly comfortable being a leader in the world of gay men and women, even though I have never found a man to be romantic with. As my friend Bob says, gay liberation is about being queer, and I have that in spades. I still have dreams about my parents. I dream that they care more about themselves, can see how unneccesary their misery was, and give up running their pretend family. In some dreams they are feeling empty and unsure of where to turn next, and Gail and I are concerned about them and ask our foster parents if we can visit them. I dream that although at first they're uncomfortable seeing us, they learn to their surprise that we really do care about them and want to be their friends. And over time we get to know them as human beings rather than intimidated and seduced robots playing roles they never learned properly, speaking words channeled from an evil emperor.

My parents were not phonies, but authentic human beings. As authentic, at least, as anyone can be who is destroyed by a social system that neither nurtures nor protects the growth process of creative people. But they were victims, finally — casualties in the greatest war mankind will ever fight.

AFTERWARD to The Coal Forest: If you think that in writing The One-Eyed Man I'm being unfair to Paul, you're quite right. When he wrote about me in A Renegade Psychiatrist's Story, he was talking about a living, breathing person he was still trying to understand and who would read his words for many years to come. I'm writing about a relationship long gone that I had no need to believe in. Once something is over, you become judge and jury in a court designed to serve your interests alone. I can't learn from Paul anymore, not can I help him. I can only learn by applying what he taught me, both directly and indirectly, to life and then seeing what works and what doesn't.

This book is very unfair too, but in more interesting ways. I've been unfair in the traditional ways that authors must: because of my ignorance of fact, because of my ignorance of my defenses, because I aim my ideas at a poorly defined audience, because avoiding speculation involves being overly circumspect, because I am only human. There's nothing wrong with knowing what someone was really like in person. After having attended thousands of talk groups at the Ninth Street Center and elsewhere, I've developed a highly refined bullshit detector that starts gonging whenever a conventional person starts facading or posturing. This is why when I get interested in a new author I always start with any interviews he's given, hopefully recorded in audio or, even better, video. People's defenses are out in the open in interviews, even if most of the time we let famous people get away with murder. In their written works, though, they have all the time in the world to cover their tracks.

But just knowing that an author isn't bullshitting and doesn't beat his wife is just the start. Then you have to understand the terms constituting his vocabulary, and to comprehend the messages he fashions out of them. If his messages don't help you, then he was just another well-meaning person who tried. But if they do, then it really doesn't matter any more who he was. Take what he's taught you, make it your own, use it for your own purposes. On rare occasions even people who don't live admirable lives still manage to make admirable contributions, as did Francis Bacon.

I've written about Paul as if it were important to know what he was really like in person. It isn't. As he admitted often to us, everything he ever tried to do had failed. Except for one thing: he learned more about human nature than anybody before him had. So when I want to remember Paul I don't look at his photos or listen to his recordings or watch the few videotapes we made. I read his books, especially the poetic passages that first transfixed me so many years ago. His are the greatest books so far written — unless you are a historian, in which case all hen scratchings are equal in the eyes of the law as long as their authenticity has been verified by a tenured scholar.

If there is any lesson to be taken from this book, perhaps it is this: Since a chicken is just an egg's way of making other eggs, then human beings probably evolved to enable the reproduction of autobiographies. Please, everyone, write down your story and pass it to the front? Wanting to help mankind is not a symptom of an abnormally noble character. We all start out with it. The problem is that we let ourselves get caught up in petty attachments that dull our higher goals. As a result we only allow superheroes to express our ideals, and we are careful to remind our children that superheroes don't really exist.

I am still a superhero. I like the way it feels to say that, and I won't give it up. I watch the Powerpuff Girls every day, three litle tykes created by their father Professor Utonium in his lab one day when he was trying to make perfect little girls out of sugar, spice and everything nice. Unfortunately, he accidentally added Chemical X, and so the Powerpuff Girls were born with ultrasuperpowers. A happier clump of kids you won't find anywhere. Their motto is "We fight crime. That's what we do." I know I've got that right because I just read it off my bath towel.

Of course, not everyone has the privilege of catching bank robbers. The crimes some of us fight are a bit subtler and harder to spot, but no less damaging to the community in the long run. And although we don't get awards from the mayor or cheers from adoring crowds, that's really not the point. Superheroes live to do good, not to be rewarded.

I am not a writer. I find it odd, in fact, that anyone would identify himself with such a simple value-neutral act. And I hate the fact that most professional writers use the word "writer" the same way house painters use the word "painter". There's nothing wrong with house painting, of course, or taking notes, say, but I doubt such designations capture the purpose of anyone's life.

There is only one calling I would associate myself with, though we don't yet have a word for it. I am dedicated to exploring life to the fullest, to seeing a bigger and bigger picture in which the human scene is set. I am anything but alone in this, either, which is why we have to stop seeing ourselves as writers and painters, or politicians and scientists, but something much more fundamental and focused. The only thing we must claim as our own is that which we have never yet imagined we could be. Names and titles will not help us locate this new world in the night sky.

Anyone reading the autobiographical passages of this book will come away feeling that I was the most ungrateful child who ever existed, whose accounts of others must therefore be suspect. Some of this may be based on the "kill the messenger" instinct, but much of this criticism is justified. But there is a simple reason why I kept this narrative light-hearted, why I didn't drag the reader through the sturm und drung of times and places when I tried heroically to love my parents, and the gasping pain and sorrow I experienced as a result. These details are simply not important to anyone but those who experience them. For the rest of humanity they are smoothed out in the bell curve of history. These stories only help to concretize the big story I'm trying to tell — the foundation of a civilization based on science and engineering. My goal is to show that extraordinary achievements can come from ordinary people if they have the right sort of motivation. Civilization is too important to leave to men with titles. All of us have something to contribute.

At this level of evolution it becomes useful to use the terms femininity and masculinity to refer to those who bring insights into the world and those who develop methods.

Other Polarities. A secondary polarity appears to have evolved between subjective and objective types. Subjectivity in a masculine helps to balance his personality, as does objectivity in feminine. Objective masculines and subjective feminines are similarly in this sense referred to as unbalanced.

There may be a tertiary polarity between hedonists and stoics. Hedonists are more developed in their two-dimensional life, stoics in their three-dimensional life.

Components of the Psyche. There are four components of man's psychological life:

• the creative, serious, or three-dimensional, component,
• the fun and pleasure, or two-dimensional, component,
• the adaptive, or career, component, and
• the sexual and celebrative, or romantic and adventuresome, component.

A fulfilled life requires balancing and expressing the needs and purposes of each component. If you try too hard to be creative, you suffer exhaustion or "creativity poisoning". If life is all fun, you loose your sense of self. If all work, you'll never know what it's all been for. If all romance and adventure, the ability to contribute to the building of a better world evaporates.

Psychological and Social Evolution. The goal of living for the creative individual is his own human development, the reward for which is experienced as universal love or objective power. The goal of society as a whole is social progress. There are no apparent limits to the human development and social progress our species is capable of.

Visitors to the Ninth Street Center who have not been exposed to serious prose often complain that Paul's writing is just too hard to understand. That there are no pictures they might have expected, but neither are there examples of the psychological mechanisms he posits, case histories, nor a single humorous aside. One of his students once broke up a discussion group by asking, "But exactly what, Paul, does a 'modality of mastery' look like?"

Naturally, the academic community found things to complain about too. One scholar found it suspicious that he could find neither footnotes nor references to the standard literature that might corroborate Paul's hypotheses. Unfortunately for this crowd, Paul, like Newton, was too original a thinker to find in the "standard literature" much more than a quicksand of entrenched delusions.

Actually, Paul's writing style, while formal, is much friendlier than most of the gobbledygook you get to read, say, in Hegel. Having read each of Paul's works several times now — our Rosenfels Study Group has completed three or four cycles since 1985 — I'm convinced that Paul always chose the simplest and clearest way to say anything. And there are many passages that are extremely poetic and even inspirational if you bother to find them.

Why are there are no examples or case histories in Paul's works? Because, as a scientist, Paul knew that any half-decent theory should able to handle any example or case history you throw at it. Showing that you can apply a theory to a particular scenario not only proves nothing, but invites the danger of a good theory being cheapened by a bad interpretation. (Of course some theories invite indeterminate applications. This is Popper's objection to Freud and Marx: they're not falsifiable. Paul always decried the fact that if you put six psychoanalysts in a room and ask them to interpret a dream, they always come up with six completely different stories.)

Here are two excerpts from Paul's works to give you some idea of the range of his writing style. The first is one of the most evocative prose passages ever written in English. When Paul died I had it framed in a plaque and mounted in a prominent place at the Center.

The Garden of Eden in which Adam and Eve dwelt was only an illusion. Before men accumulated sexual shame and celebrative guilt they lacked that character differentiation out of which the human soul takes its being. Their world was a garden only in the sense that the jungle is a garden to its animal inhabitants. Man means something different when he speaks of a garden, or an El Dorado, or a paradise for the human spirit. Man means a world of eternal springtime in the human heart, where faith never fails and hope never falters, where men always understand more today than they did yesterday, and establish an always broadening responsibility in the world. He means a world of lasting contentment, where the contentment of today passes that of yesterday, and a world of complete happiness where today's happiness is bigger than that of the day before. He means a world of love which fears nothing that the human eye can see, and a world of power which cannot be touched by rage in the performance of any act. When he sees these things he is not dreaming, and when he reaches for them he is not play acting. He is only sounding the battle horn and raising the banner by which he lays claim to ownership of the world, acting in his own name.

This second example of Paul's prose shows his purely scientific style, which always places descriptions of feminine dynamics in opposition to descriptions of masculine ones. This example is divided into two columns for that reason, and I have put the names of each "analog" in boldface to help you find them.

The Four Phases of Love and Power

The vicissitudes of love divide roughly into four phases. There is a NEUROTIC phase in which the intensity of feeling builds up without establishing outlets in love relationships. The individual is unable to apply these feelings in any way that leads to service of an ideal, and this phase brings anxiety. The next phase is the COMPULSIVE one in which action patterns develop, but without a meaningful submission to an ideal chosen by the individual. Compulsiveness is a defense against anxiety. The next phase is the SADISTIC one, in which the individual serves an ideal but cannot maintain a sense of its integrity. He is driven by a self-aggrandizing amorality in which dominance is justified by dehumanizing others. The sadistic mechanism is a defense against feelings of inferiority. The CREATIVE phase is not a defense against anything. It rests on the need for inner contentment and peace of mind. It alone has the positive goal of making a better life for the self and for others, in which both the individual and his ideal are fulfilled

The development of the creative use of personal power also goes through four phases. The buildup of energies which cannot find meaningful involvement in anything produces a restless search for activity which is disorganized in nature. This is the DELINQUENT or psychopathic phase. the OBSESSIVE phase is a defense against psychopathic restlessness, and is characterized by an automatic involvement with feelings and beliefs which cut the individual off from the capacity to choose new patterns of experience. In the MASOCHISTIC phase, the individual uses helplessness as a power tool, and can now deal with a changing reality. It provides a defense against guilt and gains its psychological rewards through the sense of self-importance which intensified feeling can bring. It has strong magical components, imprisoning the mind in a dogmatic acceptance of frozen beliefs which obliterate the sense of change through time. The CREATIVE phase releases the individual from his defensive posture and substitutes the constructive exploitation of human resources, utilized in such a way that both the individual and his world are revealed to have unlimited potentialities of development.

— Paul Rosenfels, Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process

Note that actually only three out of four of the phase name pairs in the above example are "analogs." The fourth phase is called CREATIVE for either personality type, probably because it was the simplest and clearest term Paul could find. He wasn't trying to prove anything by playing intellectual word games.

Paul claimed only to be an original thinker, and always insisted that his writing style was merely functional. His books, like Principia Mathematica, would be the source texts that others would mine when writing their popularizations and textbooks. Those who aren't aware that language, like any complex adaptive system, variegates and evolves can always have fun hunting down little deviations from "standard English" in Paul that I'm content to chalk up to the random fluctuations of regional dialect, generational drift, and the esthetics of personal preference.

He has a tendency, for example, of using pairs of analogs as if they were one term. ("Knowing and handling oneself becomes [sic] the essential tool in studying and experimenting in the human scene." — , page 10) He often fails to hyphenate word pairs that are commonly so joined. He likes the archaic spelling phantasy. Because they're clear enough in context I never correct these idiosyncrasies. I do correct typing and typesetting errors, however, since they interfere with comprehension, as well as incontrovertible spelling errors — mostly because I want the search engines to find us.

Still To Do

Tuesday, December 11, 2001, 8:00 AM.

I was on the subway and needed to talk to Paul, so I whipped out my new cell phone and in two seconds he was there. We exchanged amenities. He started praising Nick for managing his life so much better than he'd ever done before, and the resentment in me welled up. These days I don't feel I have to hide my feelings from Paul the way he always used to insist I do, so I said, "Nick's been very cold to me. It makes me think I may be worthless after all."

"There's no doubt you'll soon learn how to get over that by yourself," he said.

"I don't know how," I said.

"No key is so hidden as when out in the open," he said.

Another formulation that flew over my head. But I didn't panic. I stayed in my center and said, slowly, "I think I need that explained to me."

He didn't get angry, thankfully. "Well," he began.

"Wait," I interrupted. "Let me give it a try. The course of a life of growth is an endless series of discoveries, each of which could not have been predicted by the one before. So the key to your next step forward is out in the open yet totally invisible to you. And it can't be handed to you on a silver platter, you have to reach out to it yourself."

Right through the cell phone I could see a broad smile spreading across his face.

Physicians think they are doing something for you by labeling what you have a disease.

— Immanuel Kant

On January 19, 1973, a landmark study was published in Science, "Being Sane in Insane Places," by D.L. Rosenhan. Eight sane people gained admission to 12 psychiatric hospitals by simulating a single symptom, auditory hallucinations (they heard a voice say "empty," "dull," and "thud"). As soon as they were admitted to the psychiatric ward they immediately ceased simulating any symptoms of abnormality. Despite their public "show" of sanity, the "pseudopatients" were never detected; most were hospitalized for weeks. Eleven of the pseudopatients were diagnosed, initially and finally, paranoid schizophrenics, and a 12th was diagnosed a manic depressive psychotic.

— Michael Greger, MD,
Heart Failure — Diary of a Third Year Medical Student

Harold held up his glass. "To us," he said.

"To us."

They sipped their champagne and smiled.

"Finally," said Harold, "I have one more surprise." He took from his picket a tiny ring box, wrapped with a little red ribbon. "You can open it after my solo," he said, putting it beside Maude's gift on the mantelpiece.

"I hope," he added, looking at her tenderly, "it will make you very happy."

"Oh, I am happy," said Maude. "Ecstatically happy. I couldn't imagine a lovelier farewell."

"Farewell?"

"Why, yes. It's my eightieth birthday."

"But you're not going anywhere, are you?"

"Oh, yes, dear. I took the pills an hour ago. I should be gone my midnight."

"But" Harold stared at her.

Maude smiled and sipped her champagne.

He realized suddenly what she had done.

He bolted to the phone.

—

The ambulance raced through the city streets, its red lights flashing and its siren wailing like a banshee in the night.

Inside, Maude lay on the stretcher, covered with a blanket and happily holding the daisy in her hand. Her only concern was Harold, who knelt beside her, crying piteously.

"Come on, Harold," she said, "give us a smile. What a lot of fuss this is. So unnecessary."

"Maude. Please. Don't die. I couldn't bear it. Please, don't die."

"But, Harold, we begin to die as soon as we are born. What is so strange about death? It's no surprise. It's part of life. It's change."

"But why now?"

"I made up my mind long ago that I'd pick the date. I thought eighty was a good round number." She giggled, suddenly. "I feel giddy," she said.

"But, Maude, you don't understand. I love you. Do you hear me? I've never said that to anyone in my life before. You're the first. Maude. Please. Don't leave me."

"Oh, Harold, don't upset yourself so."

"It's true. I can't live without you."

Maude patted his hand. "'And this too shall pass away.'"

"Never! Never! I'll never forget you. I wanted to marry you. I was going to ask you tonight. Don't you understand? I love you. I love you."

"Oh, that's wonderful, Harold. Go — and love some more."

— Colin Higgins, Harold and Maude

People from my country believe — and rightly so — that the only thing separating man from the animals is mindless superstition and pointless ritual.

— "Latka Gravis", Taxi

At each stage of human existence the adult man is off on his quest of his holy grail, the way of life he seeks by which to live. At his first level he is on a quest for automatic physiological satisfaction. At the second level he seeks a safe mode of living, and this is followed in turn, by a search for heroic status, for power and glory, by a search for ultimate peace; a search for material pleasure, a search for affectionate relations, a search for respect of self, and a search for peace in an incomprehensible world. And, when he finds he will not find that peace, he will be off on his ninth level quest. As he sets off on each quest, he believes he will find the answer to his existence. Yet, much to his surprise and much to his dismay, he finds at every stage that the solution to existence is not the solution he has come to find. Every stage he reaches leaves him disconcerted and perplexed. It is simply that as he solves one set of human problems he finds a new set in their place. The quest he finds is never ending.

— Dr. Clare W. Graves Stokely, come on in! How ya doin', Harv? Oh, about medium. I guess I'll be seeing you at Leonard's Laugh Academy. I though you were out on parole. No, I'm back. They caught me slashing Axelrod's tires. Vivian's Axelrod? No, that's over. He's seeing my mom now. Perfect. I just wanted to see if you're okay. I'm fine. Why? Well, you know. People talk. Hmmm And what do they say. That you're nuts. Well you don't believe them, do you? "In an insane society, the sane man must appear insane." Where'd you get that? Star Trek. God, I miss that show.

That's our story so far. For now we're sort of in hibernation while people focus on fighting AIDS. But we're not going away. The future of the human race is not going to be about AIDS. It will be about human development, interpersonal creativity, social progress, and all other wonderful things that Paul taught us to believe in.

In my habitual attempts to liberate people to a bigger world of noble causes I often feel like Johnny Appleseed, who left a wake of seedlings wherever he traveled, knowing that after he was gone a magnificent forest would cover the landscape.

All my life I've been a failure. In childhood I failed to earn my parents' love. In college I was a failure at drug abuse. In adulthood I failed at homosexuality. Yet each failure taught me important lessons about the things I was trying to achieve and why people try to achieve them.

It is time now for us two, you and me, also to part. It saddens me, yes, but I don't mind being a stepping-stone for you. Stand on my shoulders — they have grown broad and firm. Look farther than I can — what I have seen was enough for a whole lifetime. And when it comes time to forget me, remember that thousands of better men have already been forgotten — that you are serving your destiny, that you are doing me no harm whatever, and that I wouldn't have accomplished anything if I hadn't been able to believe in you. In the 70's I found a book called Polarity by Geoffrey Sainsbury (1922). When I showed it to Paul and asked if he had ever seen it, he flipped through a few pages without actually reading anything, and said, "Nope." He was very dismissive when I tried to suggest that he might have been influenced by other thinkers, so I dropped the subject. I still wonder if finding this gem in the Chicago University library hadn't inseminated his thinking in some way. Especially since, like Paul, Sainsbury polarizes France (masculine) with Germany (feminine). But, unlike other historians who would be eager to latch on to some conspiracy on Paul's part to steal Sainsbury's credit, I don't think we'll ever know the truth. But, more importantly, I don't think it's important. Why shouldn't Paul have been influenced by lots of ideas he was exposed to in his 20's? And why should he notprc_blockquote(); However, inspiration can come from many sources, including in this instance the real-life figures of Lewis Carroll and Charlie Chaplin--both connected to young girls as older men; the story of Florence Horner who was kidnapped by a 50-year-old man at age 11 and driven around America by her captor; and even a German short story published in 1916 titled "Lolita" with the same basic story premise. It's likely that Nabokov was aware of all of these stories (real or written) before writing his Lolita, yet the literary mastery of language that makes Lolita a classic is entirely his own.

, by Katie Behrens Aug 18, 2014 German academic Michael Maar's book The Two Lolitas describes his recent discovery of a 1916 German short story titled "Lolita" whose middle-aged narrator describes travelling abroad as a student. He takes a room as a lodger and instantly becomes obsessed with the preteen girl (also named Lolita) who lives in the same house. Maar has speculated that Nabokov may have had cryptomnesia ("hidden memory") while he was composing Lolita during the 1950s. Maar says that until 1937 Nabokov lived in the same section of Berlin as the author, Heinz von Eschwege (pen name: Heinz von Lichberg), and was most likely familiar with his work, which was widely available in Germany during Nabokov's time there. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in the article "Lolita at 50: Did Nabokov take literary liberties?" says that, according to Maar, accusations of plagiarism should not apply and quotes him as saying: "Literature has always been a huge crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast Nothing of what we admire in Lolita is already to be found in the tale; the former is in no way deducible from the latter." See also Jonathan Lethem's essay "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism" in Harper's Magazine on this story.

"There are relationships between older gay men and younger gay men that can help the younger gay man escape from a lack of support or understanding at home. This is perfectly true, and every gay man knows it. I'm certainly guilty of imprecise language, which I regret. Anyone who suggests, however, that I turn a blind eye to illegal activity or to the abuse of minors is unequivocably wrong. I'm implacably opposed to the normalization of pedophilia and I will continue to report and speak accordingly. To repeat, I do not support child abuse. It's a disgusting crime of which I have personally been a victim." -- Milo Yiannopoulos, February 21, 2017 (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsBZeU9sAII at 3:30) Far Away and Long Ago
(Chapter 1 of Part 1, "The Dwellers in Asgard", of The Children of Odin (1920) by Padraic Colum)

A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away....
(Opening crawl to "Star Wars" (1977) by George Lucas, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_opening_crawl) -->>