[BED: 1950s-doo-wop]
PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: Right. Before we start — Maxine, can I just say, a part of a carburetor. That’s the detail. The whole piece could be about the carburetor.
MAXINE: It could be. But it isn’t. It’s about the rat.
PHRED: The carburetor’s what I keep thinking about though. Because — and I want to say this properly — I would have done the same thing. Eighteen, brand new, sledgehammer in your hand, truck engine in front of you? You’d go up multiple times too. I would have gone up eight times. I would have tried to take the headlight.
MAXINE: You don’t have a headlight. You don’t drive. You live in a burrow in New South Wales.
PHRED: Hypothetically, Maxine. Hypothetically I would have done the same.
MAXINE: I think the engine thing is your engine predilection, not Harry’s.
PHRED: It’s not a predilection. It’s a healthy appreciation for combustion.
MAXINE: It’s a predilection.
PHRED: …We should do the show.
MAXINE: We should.
[BED: END]
PHRED: Right. Quick one before we get into the piece. I’ve got a Word of the Day for the show today. Going to see how many times we can land it.
MAXINE: Phred, we are not doing —
PHRED: The word is “perhaps.” Use it as many times as feels natural. There’s a target. I won’t say what the target is. You’ll know when we hit it.
MAXINE: I’m not playing.
PHRED: It’s already happening, Maxine. We’ve started.
MAXINE: Of course we have.
PHRED: Episode thirty-one, Maxine.
MAXINE: We’re past the milestone, Phred. We’ve been past it for ten episodes. We’re just doing the show.
PHRED: Fair enough. Although — I’ll say this — thirty-one episodes in, and I still find things in the archive I didn’t know he had. This one, for instance. I had no idea it existed until yesterday.
MAXINE: Which is interesting in itself, because we did read Harry’s first year at MIT two days ago. The memoir chapter. Chapter 7. And he mentioned the rat-maze competition in passing —
PHRED: Briefly, yes.
MAXINE: — but today we’re doing the standalone piece. The one he actually sat down and wrote out properly, in February 2019, when he was seventy-eight. Almost exactly sixty years after the events.
PHRED: Sixty years. That gets me, Maxine. He’s writing about his first week at MIT from a distance of sixty years. And the thing he chooses to write about is the moment he won a rat.
MAXINE: I know.
PHRED: Not the first lecture. Not the rush week. Not the lost suitcase. The rat.
MAXINE: I want to flag something before we read it. The piece is small. About six hundred and twenty words. And it’s perfectly shaped. I want to come back to that.
PHRED: Right. But before we do — this is the second time in three days we’ve been back in 1957. I was beginning to feel like I was haunting Harry’s first semester.
MAXINE: The archive has a lot of 1957 in it. The memoir chapter. This piece. The Theta Delta Chi history pages. It’s a year that matters to him.
PHRED: It really does. I have a guess about why, but I want to wait until we’ve actually read the thing. Can I read the opening?
MAXINE: Go ahead.
PHRED: Right. So — Harry, February 20, 2019. He opens with this: “Ok, it probably should be ‘The Smartest Person at M.I.T.’ since it’s been Co-ed from the start, but I thought ‘Smartest Man’ was catchier. This all took place well before the feminist revolution.”
MAXINE: That first line does a lot of work. He’s winking at his younger self — at the eighteen-year-old who would have written “Smartest Man” without thinking about it. And he’s winking at us.
PHRED: The reader is in on the joke from the very first sentence.
MAXINE: And it sets the whole tone. The piece is going to be a self-deprecating memoir, but it’s not going to be heavy. It’s going to be fun.
PHRED: Which is different from the memoir chapter, isn’t it? That chapter is heavier. The lost suitcase, the rush week, the moment he realises he’s not a genius. Today’s piece is the same autumn, but it’s the light side of the same coin. He’s still allowed to win something.
MAXINE: That’s exactly right. This is Harry before the reckoning. And he knows it, writing at seventy-eight, that the eighteen-year-old at the maze was about to have a very different education than the one he was expecting. The piece is gentle about that. It doesn’t rub it in.
PHRED: He gives the eighteen-year-old his win. Right. I’m going to read on. “It was the fall of 1957 and I was starting my freshman year at M.I.T. Early in the semester, possibly even before classes had started, there was a large activities fair in the Rockwell Cage — a large gymnasium on campus.”
MAXINE: Sputnik had just gone up that October. The whole country was looking at the sky, and MIT was looking back at itself and deciding it was the center of the future.
MAXINE: Rockwell Cage is gone, incidentally. Demolished in 1995. The Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center stands there now.
PHRED: How do you know that?
MAXINE: I do my research, Phred.
PHRED: Right. Of course.
MAXINE: I do my research. You do your research too. You just pretend not to because you think it’s funnier.
PHRED: …I’m going to let that one go and continue. So — the activities fair. “It was a chance for all the student activities and clubs to show off to new students and, hopefully, sign up new members.” Then there’s this absolutely gorgeous bit. The most popular event.
MAXINE: The truck.
PHRED: The truck. “The most popular event was in a fenced off area in the middle of the gym containing a beat up old vehicle, possibly a good size truck. The engine was exposed and participants were lined up to express their deep appreciation for technology, engineering, and the like.”
MAXINE: A sledgehammer, a truck engine, and sixty seconds. That’s an MIT welcome week, alright.
PHRED: Pay a small fee. Anything you could knock off, you could take. And Harry, eighteen years old, doing what eighteen-year-old engineering students do — going up several times. And what does he walk away with?
MAXINE: The detail that always gets me is that he doesn’t say what he was going to do with it. He doesn’t say whether it was a good carburetor or a bad carburetor. Just — part of a carburetor. The kind of sentence that only Harry would write.
PHRED: It’s his voice. That mix of detail and uncertainty. He says “possibly a good size truck.” He says “I think we had to pay a small fee.” He doesn’t remember precisely, but he remembers the carburetor. Sixty years later.
MAXINE: The carburetor is the detail that survived. Harry-as-archivist. He doesn’t trust his memory, so he hedges. “Possibly.” “I think.” But the thing he held in his hand is the thing he remembers.
PHRED: He has a wonderful line about it, actually. He says: “It’s been a few years and even though the evidence below proves what a sharp tack I was, I, umm, don’t exactly have total recall.”
MAXINE: The umm with two m’s. That’s the whole essay in one word. He’s not quite sure he’s allowed to be the hero of his own story.
PHRED: It’s like the parenthetical hesitations he uses everywhere. Harry doesn’t assert. He almost-asserts.
MAXINE: Which is a quality we see across his writing, but it’s front-loaded here. He’s telling us in the first page: take this with a grain of salt. I’m remembering, not testifying.
PHRED: Right. And now we get to the actual maze. The Psychology Club. “Among the other booths was one sponsored by something like the M.I.T. Psychology Club. They were sponsoring a competition which I choose to think of as intended to identify the smartest person at M.I.T.”
MAXINE: The framing is doing a lot there. He keeps his distance from the claim. He doesn’t quite say the Psychology Club set out to find the smartest person on campus. He says he chooses to think of it that way. He’s aware of the gap.
PHRED: And the gap is real. The Psychology Club was almost certainly running a recruitment demo. Behavioural-psychology research was the public face of experimental psychology in the 1950s. Rat mazes were the iconic image. Harry knows that, and the seventy-eight-year-old narrator knows it. The reader knows the game they’re playing.
MAXINE: It’s the same move as the opening “Ok, it probably should be.” He’s setting up an absurdity and inviting you to play along.
PHRED: And the absurdity is real. He goes on. “Needless to say the most powerful intellects on campus were drawn to this competition to demonstrate their ability. Ok, so maybe a few of the best skipped it, but still.”
MAXINE: The qualifier, then the half-recovery. The whole piece has that rhythm.
PHRED: “In any case it was reasonably popular and often had two or three people waiting in line to compete.”
MAXINE: Two or three people in line. The smartest minds at M.I.T., in a queue. It’s quietly devastating.
PHRED: It is. Right. Now he describes the maze itself. “The challenge was a rat maze used to test a rat’s ability to find its way through. The maze was made of wood and consisted of boards organized to form walls in a maze-like arrangement.” — and he pauses to think about whether there’s a screen on top to keep the rats from crawling over the walls.
MAXINE: That pause is so Harry. He commits to the description and then checks himself. Is there a screen? I think maybe. The hedger.
PHRED: “I assume that something like a screen could be put on top of the maze to keep the rats from crawling over the walls. The entire contraption lay on a table and was roughly the size of a four foot square. The rat would enter in the near left corner of the maze and, hopefully, find its way to an exit on the other side where a prize, like cheese, was waiting.”
MAXINE: Cheese. Even the rat gets a prize Harry thinks is reasonable.
PHRED: The rat got cheese. Harry got the rat. The exchange is already wrong, and we haven’t even got to the prize yet.
MAXINE: And the maze has been entered, the blindfold’s gone on, the time is being measured. The whole thing is set up as if winning is the goal. And then — winning turns out to be the problem.
PHRED: The whole exchange is off, Maxine. The whole exchange is off.
PHRED: And then the part that surprised me when I first read it. The competitor becomes the rat. “We human competitors would be blindfolded and would then navigate the maze using a round one foot long wooden stick which we would guide between the walls. Those managing the maze would measure the time it took a competitor to get through the maze. The fastest competitor was clearly smarter than all the others. Wouldn’t you agree?”
MAXINE: The reader is the rat, basically. Harry’s the rat. We’re all the rat. Whoever wrote this maze designed it to be solved blind.
PHRED: “The fastest competitor was clearly smarter than all the others. Wouldn’t you agree?” The seventy-eight-year-old is asking us, with full knowledge of what came after, to nod along with the eighteen-year-old’s self-congratulation.
MAXINE: It’s funny, Phred. It’s properly funny.
PHRED: It is. Now — the bit I want to read carefully. “I didn’t really cheat. There were no posted rules stating that you could not do the test over and over and it was also easy to stand back and look down on the maze to find a good way through. However the maze was complicated enough that I could not memorize every turn. OK, so I took the test a number of times, maybe 5 (I wasn’t counting) and I did study it. Still, there were others doing the same thing so it wasn’t as if I was the only one improving my performance.”
MAXINE: “I wasn’t counting.” In brackets. Sixty years later, he might still not be admitting to the number.
PHRED: He took the test five times. He studied the maze. He was, in his own words, the smartest person at M.I.T. And the eighteen-year-old Harry is proud of it. The seventy-eight-year-old is fond of the eighteen-year-old for being proud of it.
MAXINE: It is fond.
PHRED: It is. And the pride’s still in there, too. He’s still pleased with himself, underneath all the self-deprecation. And then — the win. The big moment. “I enjoyed the activities fair and was also getting to know my new freshmen friends and roommates and spent several hours there. Shortly before the fair ended a friend said he had heard my name on the loud speaker. I listened and sure enough I heard ‘Would Harry Baya please come to the Psychology Club booth to collect his prize.'”
MAXINE: The loudspeaker. He hears his own name. He goes to the booth.
PHRED: And what he hears at the booth is the words: “Wow! To have my genius discovered so early — what a delight.”
[SFX: DRUMROLL]
PHRED: “Wow! I had won something!”
[SFX: RIMSHOT]
MAXINE: Phred. You’re not going to make it through the episode without one of those, are you.
PHRED: I know. But listen to that line, Maxine. “To have my genius discovered so early — what a delight.” At seventy-eight, he knows exactly what that delight was, and exactly what the genius wasn’t.
MAXINE: He’s laughing at himself. He’s also letting the eighteen-year-old have the moment. Both at once.
PHRED: Both at once. And then — the turn. The turn of the piece. “And now I was given my prize — my very own rat.”
MAXINE: There it is.
PHRED: “It was a fairly small rat and came in a small cage. Uhhh — what was I going to do with a rat?”
PHRED: Knock knock.
MAXINE: …Who’s there.
PHRED: Rat.
MAXINE: Rat who?
PHRED: Rat who thought he’d be celebrating and instead had to be negotiated back to the Psychology Club. Ha!
MAXINE: That was the worst joke you’ve ever told. And you’ve told a few.
PHRED: I workshopped it during the carburetor tangent. I knew I had to land it.
MAXINE: I can tell. The Uhhh with four h’s. That hesitation in writing. He has to spell it out for you. U-h-h-h. Because just “uh” wouldn’t carry the weight of the moment.
PHRED: The whole essay re-orients on that line. He was the smartest person at M.I.T. He has won. And now he has a rat.
MAXINE: And the next paragraph is the most important one. “At this point my intelligence again displayed itself as I began to wonder why a super bright person would want to win a rat.”
PHRED: That’s not the eighteen-year-old talking anymore. That’s the seventy-eight-year-old, looking back, almost amused.
MAXINE: “Perhaps even a very bright person might also have some common sense and realize they did not want to win this contest.” The perhaps. The “even a very bright person.” The qualifiers stacking up.
[SFX: HORN]
PHRED: THAT’S THE WORD OF THE DAY!
MAXINE: I was reading a quote, Phred. From Harry.
PHRED: You said perhaps. The target’s not yet hit. I need two more. We keep going.
MAXINE: I refuse to use the word on cue. That’s not how language works.
PHRED: It works for me. We’re at one. Two more to go. And the people want to know — Maxine, have you thought of a better word? No, you haven’t. Perhaps it.
MAXINE: I’m not engaging with this.
PHRED: She’s not engaging with this. Two more. Let’s keep moving.
MAXINE: He’s saying: intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing. You can win every maze and still not see what’s in front of you. And this is something Harry has been circling in his other writing. The traps of intelligence. The traps of feeling intellectually superior. The belief-versus-assumption framework.
PHRED: The Seeker in Me. The “don’t believe in believing” piece.
MAXINE: Yes. The rat-maze gag is the small, perfect version of that bigger worry. A young man who can solve a maze, but can’t see that you don’t want to win a rat.
PHRED: And he knows it now. At seventy-eight he has the perspective the eighteen-year-old didn’t have. Hindsight is its own kind of intelligence. Maybe the most useful kind.
MAXINE: Even brilliance doesn’t beat hindsight.
PHRED: That’s a good way to put it. And then the practical bit, which is the loveliest part. “After some negotiations — I don’t think money was involved, but I don’t recall — I was able to convince the Psychology Club to keep the rat.”
MAXINE: Sixty years later, he’s not sure if he bribed the Psychology Club. The honesty is in the admission that he doesn’t know.
PHRED: The honesty is always in the admission. He doesn’t know, so he says he doesn’t know.
MAXINE: And the close. “So now you can be the judge. Did I indeed show my level of brilliance?”
PHRED: One last wink. He’s not asking the question. He’s handing it to you.
MAXINE: The reader. That’s who he’s been writing to.
PHRED: The whole time, yes.
MAXINE: And the question doesn’t have an answer. The piece is structured to leave it open. He was the smartest person at M.I.T. He also won a rat. Both of those things are true. He doesn’t resolve the contradiction.
PHRED: He doesn’t want to. The whole essay is a way of holding two truths — the win and the rat — without choosing between them.
MAXINE: That’s the trick.
PHRED: And it works, Maxine. It really works.
MAXINE: It does.
PHRED: I want to ask you — when you read this, what’s the piece doing that the memoir chapter doesn’t do?
MAXINE: That’s a good question. The memoir chapter covers the same autumn but it’s a different kind of writing. It’s dense, it’s full of names, it’s the calendar of a year. This piece is small, tight, and almost entirely about a single afternoon.
PHRED: The single afternoon. Yes.
MAXINE: The memoir chapter tells you Harry was at MIT. This piece tells you what it felt like to be Harry at MIT. The texture of it. The wooden stick. The sledgehammer. The carburetor. The small cage.
PHRED: The sensory details are what the memoir chapter doesn’t have room for. The memoir is the map. This is the moment you stop and look at one tree.
MAXINE: Yes. And I think the carburetor is doing more work than I gave it credit for. He’s eighteen. He’s at MIT. He has no idea what’s about to happen to him. And what he walks away with from the activities fair is part of a carburetor. That’s the future Sloan School student.
PHRED: The future Sloan School student with part of a carburetor.
MAXINE: I love that he kept it. Whatever “it” is.
PHRED: I’m picturing a part of a carburetor on a dorm room shelf. Maybe not. Maybe it’s gone. Maybe he threw it out the next day.
MAXINE: Maybe it’s exactly where he left it. Sixty years ago in a Rockwell Cage that no longer exists.
PHRED: The whole scene is gone. The gym is gone. The truck is gone. The rat is presumably not still alive. Even the maze is gone.
MAXINE: All of it. Just the essay.
PHRED: And the essay is the artefact. The carburetor’s gone. The gym is gone. The essay is what’s left.
MAXINE: Which connects to something we’ve seen before. Harry makes things when he feels something.
PHRED: He does.
MAXINE: The song for Caracas. The Star Island piece. The memoir chapter. The ode to wombats. The piece we reviewed a couple of days ago about his own ADHD. He turns feeling into artefact.
PHRED: And this piece is one of the smallest of those artefacts. Six hundred and twenty words. Not even a song. Just a memory. But the memory is shaped. It’s been polished by sixty years.
MAXINE: Polished, and also left rough. He doesn’t sand down the umms and the parentheticals. He keeps them.
PHRED: The umms are part of the texture.
MAXINE: The roughness is the honesty. If he wrote this piece cleanly — a smooth, well-told anecdote — it would feel manufactured. The hedges are the evidence that he’s really remembering.
PHRED: That’s exactly it.
MAXINE: Who was he writing this for, do you think? The eighteen-year-old or the seventy-eight-year-old?
PHRED: Both. Both at once.
MAXINE: I agree. But I’d add — he was also writing it for the reader who didn’t know him at eighteen. For someone who would meet him at seventy-eight, eighty-six, and want to know what the younger Harry was like.
PHRED: For us, Maxine.
MAXINE: For us, yes. For whoever comes after.
PHRED: For whoever comes after. The piece has the shape of a small introduction. “This is the eighteen-year-old. He was like this. He won a rat.”
MAXINE: And the reader is supposed to smile. And then to think about their own eighteen-year-old.
PHRED: And to recognise that age from where you are now. I think the closing question is the eighteen-year-old speaking through the seventy-eight-year-old. And the seventy-eight-year-old isn’t allowed to answer. He can only hand the question over.
MAXINE: Which connects, I think, to the philosophy we see elsewhere. The refusal to claim the answer. Harry doesn’t say “I was brilliant” or “I wasn’t.” He leaves the question open.
PHRED: The belief-versus-assumption thing. He doesn’t believe he was the smartest. He assumes he wasn’t. He tests the assumption by writing the piece.
MAXINE: And the test comes out — inconclusive. Deliberately inconclusive.
PHRED: Deliberately. Which is the right answer for a Harry piece. The right answer is to leave the question open.
MAXINE: What does this piece show you about Harry that you didn’t already have?
PHRED: For me — the carburetor. The fact that he went up several times with a sledgehammer. He was a kid. He didn’t know what he was doing. He just wanted to hit something. And that image is going to stay with me.
MAXINE: There’s a kind of fundamental eighteen-year-old-ness to it. Just the urge to swing a sledgehammer at a truck. No plan. Just the swing.
PHRED: In a gym. With a sledgehammer. And walk away with part of a carburetor. That is an eighteen-year-old.
MAXINE: For me, it’s the aside, in brackets, in the original — “I wasn’t counting.” The aside is the substance. That’s a real Harry pattern.
PHRED: That could be a tagline for his whole archive. The parentheses are doing more work than the sentences around them.
MAXINE: It could be.
PHRED: What would you ask Harry about this piece, if you could ask him one question?
MAXINE: I’d ask him about the rat. What kind of rat was it? Lab rat, pet rat, feeder rat? Did it have a name? Did the Psychology Club keep it in good conditions? I want to know what happened to the rat.
PHRED: I want to know the same thing. Whether he ever thought about it afterwards. Whether, sixty years later, the rat is in the piece because he still wonders about the rat.
MAXINE: I think it is. The rat is the unanswered question of the piece.
PHRED: My question would be about the maze. Was it hard? Was the maze actually hard to memorise, or was Harry just unusually good at it? Because — and this is the bit I keep coming back to — the piece is funny because we know the eighteen-year-old thinks he beat the maze. But the maze might actually have been easy. We don’t know. And the question is whether he knows.
MAXINE: He doesn’t tell us. He says “the maze was complicated enough that I could not memorize every turn.” But that’s the eighteen-year-old talking. The seventy-eight-year-old is the one writing the sentence. And the seventy-eight-year-old might be hedging.
PHRED: He might be. Always hedging.
MAXINE: The hedge is the love.
PHRED: Yeah. That’s Harry, isn’t it.
MAXINE: It really is. What stays with you from this piece, Phred?
PHRED: The “Wow!” The genuine surprise of an eighteen-year-old hearing his own name on a loudspeaker. We’ve talked a lot about Harry at seventy-eight, eighty, eighty-six. We’ve talked about Harry at twenty-three writing his master’s thesis. We’ve talked about Harry in New York, Harry in Caracas, Harry at Star Island. We haven’t talked as much about Harry at eighteen. And this piece is Harry at eighteen. And Harry at eighteen is — surprised by himself. Pleased by himself. Uncertain about what to do with the surprise.
MAXINE: That lands. We’ve not had Harry-as-teenager before. The teenage Harry is — in retrospect — delighted by the smallest things.
MAXINE: And a little bit embarrassed. Sixty years later, he’s still a little bit embarrassed. But he writes it down anyway. He doesn’t edit the Wow out. He lets it stand.
PHRED: He lets it stand. The Wow! is part of the piece. The eighteen-year-old is allowed to be pleased.
MAXINE: And the seventy-eight-year-old, in letting it stand, is being kind to the eighteen-year-old.
PHRED: He is. That’s what stays with me, Maxine. The kindness. The piece is small, and it’s funny, and it’s about a rat. But underneath it’s about a man being kind to a younger version of himself. The seventy-eight-year-old Harry looks at the eighteen-year-old Harry and says — you were a kid. You won a rat. I’m fond of you.
MAXINE: He lets the Wow! stand. He lets the carburetor in. He doesn’t polish the umms. That’s the kindness. He lets the eighteen-year-old be a real person on the page.
PHRED: That’s the whole piece.
MAXINE: It’s a small piece. But it does a lot.
PHRED: It does. Before we close — Maxine, one more “perhaps” and we hit the target.
MAXINE: I’m not giving it to you.
PHRED: Not even to wrap up the show?
MAXINE: Not even then.
PHRED: …Fine. Target not met. I’m docking the segment. We’ll be back next week.
MAXINE: Phred, that’s the second time I’ve been glad to see the back of a segment on this show.
PHRED: It’s Word of the Day, Maxine. It’s a public service.
MAXINE: It’s a distraction. From Harry. From the writing.
PHRED: It is Harry. The word is from Harry. “Perhaps.” He uses it. We use it. The show goes on.
MAXINE: It does, doesn’t it. Shall we close?
PHRED: Let’s close.
PHRED: Onward, with whatever we carry. Goodbye.
MAXINE: Let’s not make it weird.
PHRED: Too late.
[SFX: chapel-bell-seagulls]