tale, it was clear that for Lem it was as if the woman did not know if her house had a bathroom.
Lem himself was exceedingly handy, a fixer and a tinkerer. It wasn’t only that there were half a dozen patents under his name (No. 3001450: the improved rearview mirror; No. 3246507: the puff tonometer; and so on); it was that every house they lived in was an extension of the lab, full of cunning devices like the pulley that allowed the rooftop TV antenna to be rotated from a ground-floor closet or the wiring that put a phone in the tree house or the switches that let you control the garage light from any of three locations. The acquisition of a quarter-inch drill was literally something to write home about. In the mid-1950s, their first-ever TV set had to be accompanied by a complete set of replacement vacuum tubes so that Lem could be the in-house repairman. For decades, a Bendix washing machine traveled with the family from house to house with Lem constantly fixing it. July 1955: “I took apart most of the Bendix to fix the valve which got in trouble with rust. I know all there is to know, now, about mixing valves in Bendixes.” When the thing finally died, it became an organ donor, the solenoid salvaged from the carcass making an automatic garage-door opener for the village fire department; as the sirens wailed, the firehouse door would fly up to greet the arriving volunteers.
When people asked Lewis how he became “handy,” he used to say that he really didn’t know beyond being curious and paying attention. But the Family Letters tell a different story. Lem buys Lewis a kit from which to make an electric motor. Lem pays Lewis three cents per shingle to help roof the garage. Lem’s quarter-inch drill is not for him alone: Lewis and his brother Lee are to run the wiring through the studs of the newly built guest room. Lewis builds model airplanes. He builds a birdhouse for Betty. He is given polarizing lenses, and Betty writes home, “Lewis spent a long time pasting various thicknesses of cellophane together so that he would have a varicolored butterfly when he put it between two polarizers. He will probably make a good scientist since he cares essentially nothing for the material things of this world and becomes absolutely engrossed in such projects. I never knew anyone so consistently oblivious to his surroundings.” Lem once bought Lewis a lens-grinding lap, “a tremendous piece of machinery which the two of us can scarcely lift,” Betty wrote. The gift arrived one Christmas Day, “and Lewis has spent almost all his time since then polishing agates that he found in Minnesota last summer. His hands turn blue from the abrasive, and he is perfectly blissful.”
TRIBAL SCARS: THE SMARTY. Like an invisible electric fence by which a dog can be kept to its proper yard, in Lewis’s childhood a surround of offhand remarks about intelligence (“not stupid I keep saying to myself”) marked the line between the Dummies and the Smarties of this world. The Family Letters bear some traces: a carpenter’s helper described as “a little lacking mentally”; a cousin’s daughter graduating from college with “honors in chemistry though not cum laude”; Lewis in the fourth grade testing at the sixth-grade level; brother Lee in the seventh testing at the tenth.
The substance of these observations is not the point but rather that they were worthy of speech in the first place, that it mattered to mark the categories, to sort the population, hand out the uniforms, and begin the endless back-and-forth of wits and half-wits, show and shame, the copulatory friction of identity-by-difference that repeats itself again and again into the future, there being no final resting place once the weary game has begun, for the tenth grade is followed by the eleventh, eleventh by twelfth, twelfth by college, graduate school, a job, another job, the horizon of Smartville receding with every achieved approach. The only relief would be to quit the game entirely; ah, but that would mean self-expulsion from the very tribe that brought you into being, exile from the one homeland whose citizens can always be counted on to remember who you are.
In the last week of freshman year at the state university, Lewis slept through the final exam in chemistry, and although the kindly professor allowed him to take the test late, he ended up with a D in the course. This was a case not of a sleeper dreaming that he has forgotten an exam but of dreams themselves allowing the sleeper to forget an exam in fact. Betty said she had hoped that after a successful first year he could transfer to an Ivy League school, but now it was hopeless. He’d crossed the line. As the sun rose, some subtle, resistant force had deposited the slumbering youth on the shores of Dumbville.
Years later, when he was accepted as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, his hosts bragged to the incoming fellows that percentage-wise it was harder to get into the Institute than it was to get into the freshman class at Harvard. Back across the line! What an honor! And yet an honor, it turned out, that brought an unexpected grief, for when Lewis got the news, his first impulse was to pick up the phone and call home, to close the loop with the authors and original audience of this element of Who He Was. But it was too late. Lem and Betty were both ten years dead.
FEED ON THE PRESENT. Larry Rosenberg, a dharma teacher from the Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, tells of the time he was in New York City with a free afternoon and his wife suggested that they visit the Tenement Museum, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Untouched for over fifty years, the museum’s apartments present preserved examples of the housing offered to immigrant families in the early twentieth century. Rosenberg himself had been born and raised in a similar building in the same neighborhood and found himself unexpectedly transported into the past.
“Suddenly certain things started to come back to me about my past, and I couldn’t talk for quite a while.” Asking himself, “Did I come out of this? Did I grow up here? How can that be?” he was mostly struck by the great distance between the life he had come to live and that long-ago childhood. “Seeing the size of what was called the bathroom, which was more like a telephone booth—no bathtub, no shower, et cetera. And my memories of living with my parents, my mother’s three sisters and brother, and both my grandparents in a space like this.”
Rosenberg told this story in the context of a talk about a distinction he draws from Buddhist teaching between “real time” and “psychological time.” With real time, we do not dwell on (or dwell in) the past or the future but simply note them (saying, “I grew up in New York” or “When I retire I’m going to Florida,” and so on). With psychological time, on the other hand, past and future take over the present; we live in them, identifying with their pleasures and pains. As the Buddhists say, we “make self” out of them (as I might make self out of my pride in publishing a book or my shame over having flunked a chemistry exam).
In Rosenberg’s case, what struck him in this regard was not the Tenement Museum itself but the way his account of the visit changed over time. At first it had been a bare experience. It “sort of opened me up, and I saw something about my origins and a sense of myself. . . . Right on the spot I was quiet. I didn’t want to talk for a while. I was very moved by it. Some of it was painful, a lot of it was pleasant, but . . . it conveyed to me the distance I had traveled, socially, psychologically.”
Later, however, when he got home and recounted the story to various friends, “the telling started to change a bit, from it just being a straight report of a fact and what I went through. I saw that it was promoting the self. What it was saying was, ‘ Aren’t I wonderful! I started here, and then I was a professor, and I dropped out, and now I’m a dharma teacher, and I know how to dress—I’m a real American guy!’” The story had picked up self-importance along the way; “there was some mileage coming from it.”
Rosenberg is clear that this kind of self-making may be unavoidable and often harmless, but as a matter of Buddhist practice it should at least be noticed, be brought to mind. “I saw what the mind was doing; the mind was taking materials from the past—at first they were just ‘factual’ but then it immediately started to use them for the present, the present sense of myself. . . . The self is constantly using the materials of the past and the future to nourish itself, to build itself up. . . . I didn’t do it consciously. . . . It just happened. The ego is going to work, and that’s what it knows how to do.”
Rosenberg likes to use a food metaphor to describe how the ego
