” mashing buttons on her calculator and using her pencil to scribble out more and more of these symbols, new symbols which the arrangements of the symbols in her book somehow unleashed into possibility—all while grumbling and sighing in irritation. I was fascinated by the process, watching her glance at the symbols and then send the tip of her pencil into a flurry of scratchings, scribblings, and crossings-out, until it arrived at some final number—the mysteriously-arrived-at “answer”—as seemingly arbitrary as the rest of the process—which she then lassoed in a circle of graphite before moving on to the next “problem.” I was not only enchanted by the sorcery of this, but I began to grow sick with envy in my heart at little Emily’s privilege of education. I was envious that she was so comfortable with this privilege that she had grown resentful of it. What I would have given for a formal education like hers! To learn algebra, geometry, calculus, and trigonometry and all the rest of it! All the education I had ever received—outside of my experimental instruction in spoken and written language and my lessons in philosophy and logic with Mr. Lawrence—I had given myself, with little outside guidance. I had given it to myself not out of a desire to better my mind, but simply out of curiosity, nothing but curiosity, as I sat in the reading room of the University of Chicago library, where I read many books more or less at random. I would read Thucydides followed by Freud followed by Dickens followed by Austen followed by Machiavelli followed by Blake followed by Montaigne followed by Wittgenstein followed by Cervantes, returning often to Milton, and most often, I think, to Shakespeare. I read these books merely because they were the books that happened to be in that room. I also read legal disquisitions, encyclopedias, medical school primers, travelogues, books on astronomy, botany—it didn’t matter, I was utterly indiscriminate in my reading; all of it fascinated me. The problem was (and this is the curse of the autodidact) my studies had no guiding direction, and so my education lacked any sort of coherent plan, path, or structure—and so there were (there have always been) gaping holes in my learning, and one of these holes was mathematics. Thus I stood gape-jawed and wide-eyed in rapture before little Emily’s arithmetical aptitude, while simultaneously eaten up inside with jealousy at her fortunate birth, a jealousy that darkened even into a shade of anger because she took her fortune for granted so. But my anger went away. “I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end.” (Blake.) Only I didn’t tell it, actually. I swallowed it, and like a bit of unwholesome food it pained my belly awhile, and then the pain subsided as my system digested it. Silly monkey—educations are for kids.
So I had to sate myself with watching in glazy-eyed awe as the tempests of numbers and other symbols shot from the tip of her pencil as if from the end of a wizard’s wand.
“Fuck off,” she said, in a voice unheated with any real anger. “I can’t concentrate with you standing there, like, breathing on me. Go away.” I retreated from looking over her shoulder in remorse, and instead occupied myself with her books, or in inspecting all the artifacts contained in the room. Dejectedly, I sat down and played with the sexless woman-dolls in their dollhouse. So we passed the remaining hours of the waking night, she bent monastically over her studies with pencil, calculator, and book, and I sitting on her floor playing with dolls. It is a woeful thing to be a striver like me.
The hours ticked away like this until the house gradually grew silent and dark. Other noises had helped to animate this house—footsteps and so on from downstairs, and the murmur of a TV—but these noises died away as the evening wore on, and soon in little Emily’s bedroom we could tell by the silence and the absence of vibration in the rest of the house that everyone else in it had gone to bed. There was a soft knock on the door. I abandoned the dolls and swiftly hid myself amid