But you haven't developed understanding, or—I have to use the word— tolerance.
You call them phonies, but when did either of them ever claim to be perfect, or superhuman?
They're ordinary people.
You're the genius."
He broke off awkwardly, suddenly aware that he was preaching at me.
"Go ahead."
"Ever meet Nemur's wife?"
"No."
"If you want to understand why he's under tension all the time, even when things are going well at the lab and in his lectures, you've got to know Bertha Nemur.
Did you know she's got him his professorship?
Did you know she used her father's influence to get him the Welberg Foundation grant?
Well, now she's pushed him into this premature presentation at the convention.
Until you've had a woman like her riding you, don't think you can understand the man who has."
I didn't say anything, and I could see he wanted to get back to the hotel.
All the way back we were silent.
Am I a genius?
I don't think so.
Not yet anyway.
As Burt would put it, mocking the euphemisms of educational jargon, I'm exceptional —a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of gifted and deprived (which used to mean bright and retarded) and as soon as exceptional begins to mean anything to anyone they'll change it.
The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn't mean anything to anybody.
Exceptional refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I've been exceptional.
Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed.
A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything—all the knowledge in the world.
Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it.
Is there time?
Burt is annoyed with me.
He finds me impatient and the others must feel the same.
But they hold me back and try to keep me in my place.
What is my place?
Who and what am I now?
Am I the sum of my life or only of the past months?
Oh, how impatient they get when I try to discuss it with them.
They don't like to admit that they don't know.
It's paradoxical that an ordinary man like Nemur presumes to devote himself to making other people geniuses.
He would like to be thought of as the discoverer of new laws of learning—the Einstein of psychology.
And he has the teacher's fear of being surpassed by the student, the master's dread of having the disciple discredit his work. (Not that I am in any real sense Nemur's student or disciple as Burt is.)
I guess Nemur's fear of being revealed as a man walking on stilts among giants is understandable.
Failure at this point would destroy him.
He is too old to start all over again.
As shocking as it is to discover the truth about men I had respected and looked up to, I guess Burt is right. I must not be too impatient with them.
Their ideas and brilliant work made the experiment possible. I've got to guard against the natural tendency to look down on them now that I have surpassed them.
I've got to realize that when they continually admonish me to speak and write simply so that people who read these reports will be able to understand me, they are talking about themselves as well.
But still it's frightening to realize that my fate is in the hands of men who are not the giants I once thought them to be, men who don't know all the answers.
June 13
I'm dictating this under great emotional strain.
I've walked out on the whole thing. I'm on a plane headed back to New York alone, and I have no idea what I'm going to do when I get there.
At first, I admit, I was in awe at the picture of an international convention of scientists and scholars, gathered for an exchange of ideas.
Here, I thought, was where it all really happened.
Here it would be different from the sterile college discussions, because these were the men on the highest levels of psychological research and education, the scientists who wrote the books and delivered the lectures, the authorities people quoted.
If Nemur and Strauss were ordinary men working beyond their abilities, I felt sure it would be different with the others.