by A. J. Jacobs
F
fable
Julie and I spend the afternoon at my mom and dad’s apartment. They’re throwing a brunch for their friends, and we’ve been invited to have some smoked turkey and try to make a good impression. I sit on the couch next to their friend, a lawyer named Bob. When he learns about my project, he tells me an encyclopedia-themed fable. I haven’t heard too many of those, so I’ll repeat it here.
“Did you hear about the Middle Eastern potentate?” he asked me. “This potentate called a meeting of the wise men in his kingdom, and he said, ‘I want you to gather all the world’s knowledge together in one place so that my sons can read it and learn.’ The wise men went off, and after a year, they came back with twenty-five volumes of knowledge. The potentate looked at it and he said, ‘No. It’s too long. Make it shorter.’ So the wise men went off for another year and they came back with one single volume. The potentate looked at it and said, ‘No. Still too long.’ So the wise men went off for another year. When they came back, they gave the potentate a piece of paper with one sentence on it. A single sentence. You know what the sentence was?”
Bob looked at me. I shook my head.
“The sentence was: ‘This too shall pass.’ ”
Bob paused, let it sink in. “I heard that when I was very young and it has always stuck with me.”
It’s a good story. And it’s some good wisdom, too: “This too shall pass.” So far, the Britannica has backed that sentiment up. The Black Plague passed, the Hundred Years War passed, the vogue for codpieces passed. Maybe Bob’s sentence is, in fact, the secret of life. I wonder if I’ll be able to come up with anything better by the end of my journey. What will be my mind-blowing one-sentence distillation of all knowledge? René Descartes had a fetish for women with crossed eyes? The French had not only canned laughter, but canned weeping? Needs some work.
Fahrenheit, Daniel
My anger toward 18th-century German physicist Daniel Fahrenheit is all out of proportion. I went into the living room just now and starting ranting to Julie about this brainless jackass Fahrenheit. She tilted her head, concerned. “Is there maybe something else going on here?” She’s right. Our babyless marriage continues to darken my mood—and Herr Fahrenheit is taking the brunt of it. Still, he genuinely pisses me off.
Born in 1686, he spent most of his life in the Netherlands, where he invented the mercury thermometer in 1714, which is fine. I don’t begrudge him that. I do, however, find his temperature scale completely absurd. For zero on his scale, Fahrenheit chose the temperature of an equal ice-salt mixture. For 30, he chose the freezing point of water, and 90 was supposed to be the human’s normal body temperature.
There’s so much wrong with that, I’m not sure where to start. First of all, Fahrenheit bungled the measurements. As I’ve been forced to remember all my life, freezing point of water is actually 32 degrees and body temperature is 98.6. So he’s an inaccurate moron. Second of all, why choose 30 for the freezing point of water in the first place? What’s wrong with starting it at zero? Oh, that’s right. He’s reserved zero for the temperature of an equal mixture of ice and salt. Huh? Where’d he come up with that one? How about an equal mixture of ice and tomato juice? Or how about one-third ice and two-thirds baking soda, with a dash of paprika?
I’m astounded by the inertia of bad ideas. Once they take hold, it’s a bitch to root them out. Now, three hundred years later, we’re stuck with Fahrenheit’s ill-thought-out, badly executed system. It makes my blood boil, which happens at about 100.1 degrees Celsius.
Family, The
A hippy Christian cult in the sixties whose female members were instructed to engage in a practice called “flirty fishing.” In other words, they spread the gospel by having sex with men. Unfortunately, while spreading the gospel they also spread herpes, and flirty fishing was discontinued.
Farinelli
Remember what I was saying about eunuchs? Here’s another one. Born Carlo Broschi, Farinelli was the most famous castrato opera singer of the 18th-century. In 1737 he went to Spain, where his singing alleviated the melancholia of Philip V. Every night for ten years he sang the same four songs to the king. I hope he at least shuffled the order.
Farnsworth, Philo
The Utah engineer who helped develop television. In 1927, after many years of research, Farnsworth successfully broadcast the first image in the history of the American TV: the dollar sign. He couldn’t have come up with a more appropriate image for his invention. Somehow, deep down, Philo knew that Lisa Kudrow would earn $1 million per episode for singing songs about her smelly cat.
Fellini, Federico
The movie 8½ got its name from the number of films Fellini had directed at up till that time: seven features plus three shorts. That answers a question that I had never, ever wondered about.
Fertility and infertility
According to the Britannica, Julie and I are officially experiencing infertility. “Infertility is defined as the failure to conceive after one year of regular intercourse without contraception.” We’re up to fifteen months now.
The Britannica says that one in every eight couples is infertile. That’s a pretty high percentage, and it would make me feel better if the anecdotal evidence in my life provided any support. Instead, our friends just keep pumping young ’uns out.
As for medical advice on beating infertility, the Britannica hasn’t provided much I haven’t gotten from our ever-growing stack of how-to-get-pregnant books. But that’s not to say we aren’t enlisting the Britannica’s aid—by which I mean Julie and I have become experts in ancient fertility rites. Every time I read about a preliterate society’s rituals, I tell Julie, who makes a note of them. We know it’s highly unlikely any of these will have any effect, but what’s the harm in trying? Nothing else seems to be working.
So we have adopted a Fertility God of the Week. First came Anahiti, Iranian goddess of fertility and agriculture. Then it was Baal, the god of fertility worshipped by Canaanites. After that, Dumuzi, the Sumerian goddess of fertility and marshes. We don’t actually worship these gods, and we have yet to sacrifice any small mammals to them, or even offer up our ficus tree. But we do like memorizing their names. It gives us something to do.
“Who is it this week?” Julie will ask.
“This week we’ve got good old Earth Mother.”
“Oh, yes. Earth Mother.”
“And unlike other female fertility goddesses, she doesn’t undergo periodic sexual intercourse with a male god.”
I also bought Julie a stuffed rabbit, because in the section on Easter, I learned that rabbits are a symbol of fertility. The Easter bunny was imported from pagan rituals, and did not actually have much interaction with Jesus.
“You know, some cultures believe that flagellation promotes fertility,” I say, as we read in bed one night.
“I’m gonna have to pass on that one.”
“Just one whip?” I say.
“No thanks.”
I lightly whip her with the comforter, just for luck.
Fillmore, Millard
The thirteenth president was born in a log cabin. Why doesn’t poor Millard ever get press for this? Lincoln hogs all the log cabin spotlight.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
In 1920, after marrying Zelda and publishing This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald wrote: “Riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky, I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”
Jesus. That one stops me. What a sad quote. I find it particularly haunting because I’ve had that same feeling. During those few times in my life when I’ve been exceedingly happy, I’ve only gotten stressed out because I figured that my happiness would be fleeting. Fitzgerald’s life didn’t end so well—a spiral of drunkenness and commercially unsuccessful novels and a heart attack at forty-four. Not a good role model.
Fleming, Ian
He not only wrote the Bond books, but also th
e flying-car novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And it’s there you can find the line that summarizes Fleming’s philosophy of life: “Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes’ otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.” Huh. That’s actually moderately profound. It’s not quite Ecclesiastes, but it’s pretty good advice. A much better way of thinking than Fitzgerald’s, anyway.
fondue
Legend has it that this dish originated during a Swiss truce in the 16th century, when the Protestants brought the bread and Catholics brought the cheese. Or the other way around—no one’s sure. It’s a nice story. Sort of Reese’s Peanut butter cups, but with more war and religion.
fowl
Technically, the term “duck” should be used only for a female. The proper term for a male duck is “drake.” So Daffy Duck’s true daffiness: gender identity disorder.
French literature
I e-mail my favorite high school teacher to tell him about Operation Britannica. I figure I’ve done him proud. He agrees to meet me for lunch.
My butt has barely touched my chair at the Chat ‘n’ Chew diner when he starts in on me. “You know, this is a ridiculous project. A complete waste of your time.” Oh boy. He’s got the same tone as when he handed me back my paper comparing James Joyce to prop comedian Howie Man-dell. I’ve just gotten a D minus, but this time it’s my life.
Mr. Bender was my English teacher in sophomore and junior years. Now, fifteen years later, I call him Steve, even though every time I say it, I feel like I’m playacting as an adult. Steve—a large, bearded man who looks a bit like Abe Lincoln without the sunken cheeks or stovepipe hat—was the cool, funny English teacher. He told us stories of his former life as a stand-up comedian alongside Eddie Murphy. He could play a mean ukulele. And he introduced us to surreal filmmaker Luis Buñuel, which was like catnip to our fuzzy rebellious high school brains. Since I graduated, Steve had gotten into Buddhism, which at this very moment he is using to attack my endeavor.
“From the Buddhist position, you’re actually dumber,” Steve says. “You’re taking an original, pure mind, which is a crystal reflection of the soul, and you’re making it dirty and crusty, so you won’t be able to see anything. You’re cluttering your mind.”
“I disagree,” I say, as I desperately try to flag down a waitress. Any distraction—a list of daily specials, perhaps—would help my cause. But the waitresses are as hard to find as Indonesia’s glory-of-the-sea cone shell (fewer than a hundred known to exist).
“Being a Buddhist, my relationship to knowledge has changed. It’s more about genuine inquiry than about the accumulation of facts.”
“Why can’t I have both?” I ask. “Like, did you know that Daniel Defoe went bankrupt thirteen times? That’s a good one for your English class, huh?”
Steve shakes his head. “You’re probably retaining a huge amount of superficial knowledge, and since we live in a superficial culture, you will impress people with your facts. But what about wisdom?”
“I’m not up to the Ws yet,” I say. It’s my cheap, fallback answer, and Steve is disappointed. I seem to have disturbed his Buddhist calm. In an effort to deflect any more attacks, I get Steve talking about Buddhism. He tells me how much he loves meditating. He says he’s attracted to Buddhism because it’s peaceful—Buddhists don’t kill people.
“Actually, they do!”
This is an exciting moment. I get to correct my former teacher. I tell Steve that the prime minister of Ceylon was shot by a disgruntled Buddhist monk. And that’s just one example. Steve nods. He knows all about that, and isn’t impressed. I am failing to see the big Buddhist picture.
“Do me a favor and read Bouvard and Pécuchet by Flaubert. I think you’ll find it very relevant.”
When your high school English teacher gives you an assignment, it’s best to follow it, even if you’ve already got a 33,000-page book weighing down your nightstand. So I picked myself up a Penguin Classics edition and dipped into this almost-forgotten novel.
Steve was right. This was relevant. Way too relevant. I was dismayed to learn that Gustave Flaubert had stolen my life a full 150 years before I was born, and was taking great delight in mocking it, the absinthe-drinking schmuck! In Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert tells the tale of two 19th-century Frenchmen—bumbling, sexually inept, and dumb as hunks of Camembert—who decide they want to learn everything. They begin to read obsessively. They are enamored of chemistry, so they set up an experiment—which ends up blowing up their house. They read up on medicine, only to become quack doctors who almost kill their patients. Same story with politics, religion, philosophy, and on and on. These two would make a nice buddy comedy starring Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler. Just as disturbing, Flaubert ridicules some of the very same insights I’ve had. Remember Absalom? I noted to myself that he should have gotten a crew cut so he wouldn’t get his hair stuck in the tree. Flaubert says he should have put on a wig. I console myself that my crew cut observation is much more clever.
I know what Flaubert’s saying. He’s saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. He’s saying that you can’t learn the secrets to life from reading textbooks. And I know that he and Mr. Bender have a point. At face value, my quest teeters on the absurd. Still, it is a quest—and that in itself is has some merit. I’ve never embarked on a quest. Who knows where it might lead, what I might discover?
In fact, I like to think of Bouvard and Pécuchet as heroic. At least they’re trying to do something instead of sitting around eating pastries, ignoring basic hygiene, and persecuting Jews, which is what your average 19th-century Frenchman did. And some of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s so-called comical ideas—that women should be emancipated, that light indoors will one day be stored—turned out to be not so comical after all. Nice going, hommes.
I hate Flaubert, that superior bastard. Why should the pursuit of knowledge be the monopoly of so-called experts? Hooray for dilettantes. And anyway, earlier in the F section I learned that Flaubert was in love with a woman but didn’t tell her about it till thirty-five years later. Which leads me to the conclusion: what the fuck does he know?
Freud, Sigmund
I’ve never been a big fan of Freud’s. I think I know why—if I may indulge in a little self-analysis. When I first read Freud’s theories, I was a freshman in high school, and I wasn’t having an awful lot of sex. By which I mean no sex at all. So the idea that sex was the driving force in human behavior just increased my already dangerous level of frustration. It was like a color-blind person reading that the meaning of life lay in the joys of multihued flowers. No, I preferred Marx. Not that I’d had much experience with factories or proletarians or chains, but at least I could use Marx to take a self-righteous stance against my parents, those oppressive, bourgeois tools. As for Freud, I took great joy in repeating a quote I read somewhere: “Psychoanalysis is the disease for which it purports to be the cure.” That was nice. A dismissal of an entire system of thought with a single witticism. Brilliant!
Those early prejudices die hard, so I’m still not much of a Freudian. But if I had to choose one doctrine of Herr Doctor’s to embrace, I’d have to go with the Oedipal complex. That just might have some validity. In fact, now seems as good a time as any to lie back on my couch, rest my head against the analyst’s napkin, and dissect my lifelong competition with my dad.
It began early. Every night when I was a kid, we played the same game: a modified version of handball that involved my wall, my cantaloupe-sized green Nerf ball, and my bed (the obstacle that made the game interesting). We called it, imaginatively enough, Wall Ball.
The game took on enormous importance to me. I would practice with my Nerf ball—whose name, by the way, was Seymour—for hours after school. My dedication would have impressed Bjorn Borg. It was monotonous work. Thump, thump, thumping that ball against the wall, trying to land it in the hard-to-reach corner by the radiator. The only enjoyable break in my regimen came when the ball semiaccidentally rolled into my sister’s room acros
s the hall, eliciting a glass-shattering shriek. With good reason, actually. I had developed the habit of drooling on the Nerf ball for good luck (don’t ask). So Beryl would be doing her Spanish homework and all of a sudden this spongy green moist thing would roll up against her ankle—well, it couldn’t have been very pleasant.
When bedtime rolled around, Dad would come to my room and we’d play two or three games. To me, it mattered. I threw tantrums to rival John McEnroe, if not Caravaggio. I would shout and scream and use whatever bad words I thought I could get away with—“retarded” being a particular favorite. If there was a Wall Ball referee, I would have kicked him in the shins.
Thanks to my rigorous practice schedule, I’d occasionally win a game. My dad would congratulate me, seeming genuinely happy for me. And I’d take the opportunity to do something mature, like pump my fist and shout, “I am the Wall Ball king!”
If we weren’t feeling athletic, my dad and I had another option for competition—a board game version of hockey. I liked this game a lot, mostly because I had invented it. And since I was the inventor, I was also the expert on the rules. Interestingly, the rules turned out to be remarkably flexible. Especially when my father was winning.
“When the puck bounces off two walls at a forty-five-degree angle, you actually have to roll a nine or it’s automatically my turn,” I’d say.
“Is that so?” my father would say. He never argued. He just went along with it, happy to be interacting with me.
As I’ve gotten older, my dad and I have continued to play games, though we’ve moved on to those invented by other people: croquet, Boggle, Scrabble. I’ve become a slightly better sport. I no longer throw things, and I’ve phased out “retarded” in favor of more mature words, like “dammit.”