In a time and place that feels distant to me now, I spent an afternoon in the living room of Norton
Juster, retired architect and author of The Phantom Tollbooth. I was
sent there by my freshman advisor when I was doing an independent
study on Mathematics in Literature. As an author of fiction that
discusses math, I intended to interview Mr. Juster about the
connection between the two fields. A couple nights ago I found the
essay I wrote to chronicle our visit, and I was re-tickled all over
again by this man and by his outlook on life. So much, that I
want to excerpt it here:
[cue 18 year old voice]
The first thing Norton Juster said
when I called him on the phone was, “Spell your name, please.” I
presume he writes down the name of everyone who calls him,
telemarketers and all. Then he asked why I called. I told him I
wanted to talk about mathematics and fiction, together.
“I’m not much of a mathematician,
but I think there’s a lot of humor in any subject where people
think of things like negative numbers. Call me back in a week-- I’m
going out of town to speak.” His voice disguised his age well. He
must be around seventy years old, but it was still clear and
capable-sounding, with a tinge of a New Yorker’s accent. If I
hadn’t known better, I would’ve placed him in his late thirties.
I called Juster back a week later. He
asked me to spell my name again and told me, again, that math has a
lot of humor in it. He accidentally called mathematicians
‘mathemagicians,’ which is the name of the king of Digitopolis in
his most famous novel, The Phantom Tollbooth.
“That’s a Freudian slip if I ever
heard one,” he said. Then he told me to come over to his house next
Monday so we could talk.
His white house was a
pleasant walk up a residential street about five minutes from
Amherst's main intersection. It perched on a slope, with the garage
on the lower level and the front door on the upper.
Juster let me in and led me past the
kitchen into his living room. Every light was off. He told me I could
sit on the couch and then crossed behind me to open the curtain,
letting in cool afternoon light.
“I need a hardback chair on account
of a bad back,” he explained as he eased into a folding chair with
a canvas seat and wooden frame. An enormous potbelly covered in a
blue knit sweater sat on his lap.
“Are you comfortable? Ok. Now. Tell
me what you’re up to.”
I explained to him that I was studying
fictional books that incorporate mathematics into their plots. Why do
the authors do it? Is it good writing? Can numbers and letters, which
aren’t supposed to get along, share a page anywhere except in a
textbook? In The Phantom Tollbooth, the neighboring kingdoms
of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis are in perpetual competition. I
thought that Juster, if anyone, would have some ideas about how the
two connect. It turns out he has a lot of ideas about how everything
connects.
“I don’t precisely remember where
the Digitopolis and Dictionopolis came from. But it’s the idea of
words against numbers. People have the idea they have to decide which
one’s important for their life—as if we have to choose,” he
told me.
“I guess the way I came to it was
that I was thinking about how I had trouble spelling as a kid, and
then I got to thinking of all the things I had trouble with. My main
motivation was remembering how, when you’re a kid, you wonder why
all this stuff is being thrown at you and you don’t know why.” He
held up one hand, touching all of this fingers together.
“Its like, you learn a fact. Bing.”
He flicked his fingers outwards as if making a tiny explosion in the
air. He went on. “Then you learn something else, and Bing, over
here.” He exploded the air to his lower left. “Then another over
here.” He did it again, leaving three explosions in the air.
“And its only later, and sometimes a
long time, when you start seeing how these things connect, because
everything connects. So as you learn, you draw lines.” He traced
lines in the air with his pointer finger leading from one explosion
to the next. “So me, as an old man, I have just a mass of
connecting lines.” He leaned back to admire the imaginary web
before him.
“Once a kid asked me what happens
when all of the dots are connected, and I must’ve scared him to
death. I said, 'You die.'
“I don’t know why I said that. But
that is how it is, sort of, that’s what life is all
about—connecting lines,” he concluded.
[end excerpt]
I can't entirely agree with Juster-- I
don't think an understanding of how everything is connected is
necessarily the main function of life. What, for instance, should you
do once you've drawn a line? Just sit and think about it? Or do
something? Maybe it doesn't matter, but I like to think it matters.
On the other hand, I see his
interconnecting web theory as a gentle reminder to anyone who is
trying to figure out what they want to do with their life. Back in
that living room, I was struggling to decide what to study and
wondering if seemingly unrelated topics I loved could be combined.
Now, in the job world, I am wondering how to combine my incongruous
catalog of work experience and interests-- outdoors and city, fair
housing and middle schoolers, education and creative writing,
counseling and journalism and social justice. In the lens of the
Episcopalian Service Corps, you hear people talking about “discerning
a vocation,” that is, figuring out what it is that God is calling
you to do in your work.
But if there is no God calling me to
do anything, the question becomes, is there a specific career path
that will energize and invigorate me the most AND make the greatest
positive impact on a community? I think Norton Juster would say yes,
there are career paths like that, but plenty of them; and there's no
reason why you have to choose one over another for the rest of your
life, or even the long term. All of your experiences on and off the
resume are dots that eventually you will have the wisdom to connect. (You hope.)
