Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [69]
The Reasonable Man
He suffered spells of excessive rationality. When these struck it was not enough to make progress in his scientific work, nor to rectify his mother’s checkbook, nor to recompute his own equivocal balance sheet (eighteen dollars for laundry, ten dollars to send home … ), nor to lecture his friends, as they watched him repair his bicycle, on the silliness of believing in God or the supernatural. During one occurrence he wrote out an hourly schedule of his activities, both scholarly and recreational, “so as to efficiently distribute my time,” he wrote home. When he finished, he recognized that no matter how careful he was, he would have to leave some indeterminate gaps—“hours when I haven’t marked down just what to do but I do what I feel is most necessary then—or what I am most interested in—whether it be W.’s problem or reading Kinetic Theory of Gases, etc.” If there is a disease whose symptom is the belief in the ability of logic to control vagarious life, it afflicted Feynman, along with his chronic digestive troubles. Even Arline Greenbaum, sensible as she was, could spark flights of reason in him. He grew concerned about the potential for emotional disputes between husbands and wives. Even his own parents fought. He hated the battles and the anger. He did not see why two intelligent people, in love with each other, willing to converse openly, should get caught in arguments. He worked out a plan. Before revealing it to Arline, however, he decided to lay it out for a physicist friend over a hamburger at a diner on the Route 1 traffic circle. The plan was this. When Dick and Arline disagreed intensely about a matter of consequence, they would set aside a fixed time for discussion, perhaps one hour. If at the end of that time they had not found a resolution, rather than continue fighting they would agree to let one of them decide. Because Feynman was older and more experienced (he explained), he would be the one.
His friend looked at him and laughed. He knew Arline, and he knew what would really happen. They would argue for an hour, Dick would give up, and Arline would decide. Feynman’s plan was a sobering example of the theoretical mind at work.
Arline was visiting more and more often. They would have dinner with the Wheelers and go for long walks in the rain. She had the rare ability to embarrass him: she knew where his small vanities were, and she teased him mercilessly whenever she caught him worrying about other people’s opinions—how things might seem. She sent him a box of pencils emblazoned, “Richard darling, I love you! Putzie,” and caught him slicing off the incriminating legend, for fear of inadvertently leaving one on Professor Wigner’s desk. “What do you care what other people think?” she said again and again. She knew he prided himself on honesty and independence, and she held him to his own high standards. It became a touchstone of their relationship. She mailed him a penny postcard with a verse written across it:
If you don’t like the things I do
My friend, I say, Pecans to you!
If I irate with pencils new
My bosom pal, Pecans to you!
…
If convention’s mask is borne in view
…
If deep inside sound notions brew
And from without you take your cue
My sorry friend, Pecans to you!
Her words struck home. Meanwhile she had nagging health worries: a lump seemed to come and go on her neck, and she developed uncomfortable, unexplained fevers. Her uncle, a physician, had her rub the lump with a nostrum called omega oil. (This style of treatment had had its heyday a hundred years before.)
The day after his presentation to the physics colloquium in February, Richard went up to Cambridge for a meeting of the American Physical Society, and she took the train from New York to Boston’s South Station