The conversation grew heated. Evidently, each believed his burden was the more onerous.
In the inverted pyramid formation Bosch had to physically support three generations of male Bosches on his shoulders. His father stood on his right shoulder, his brother on his left shoulder. On his father’s shoulders stood his paternal grandfather and his great-uncle, and on his brother’s shoulders stood his maternal grandfather and a first cousin twice removed. All this a hundred feet in the air, on a high wire. One wobble and his entire family fell to their doom, shouted Bosch. And they weren’t just standing there, they were juggling, a stream of machetes flying back and forth between the grandfathers, not to mention the great-uncle’s five flaming torches, et cetera!
Pasternak merely laughed, the Latvian programmer recalled.
So Bosch had six living Bosches standing once a night on his back, is that right? asked Pasternak. That’s nothing. He had twelve generations of Pasternaks, both living and dead, standing at all times on the surface of his brain, in a treacherous variant of the inverted pyramid you might call a vertical column formation. Twelve generations ago, in 1744, his ancestor presented the Pasternak Problem to the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences. He spent the rest of his life thinking about the problem, but he failed to solve it. So did the next ten generations. So did Pasternak’s father. And now it fell to him. He had been given every resource, every advantage. His father had even cut short his own mathematical career to provide his son with a top-notch mathematical upbringing. All the best schools, the best teachers. Training in Germany, France, and America. He had nearly three hundred years of past Pasternak thinking to draw on. It was, as his father put it almost every morning, time to solve this thing.
That, said Pasternak, is what I call a burden. Twelve dead men standing in a column on my brain. I would kill to have six live family members juggling on my back! I would feel as light as a feather!
My God, said Bosch the acrobat, what I would give to feel nothing but the purely symbolic weight of your dead ancestors.
It’s heavy, said Pasternak.
I bet it’s not actually so heavy, said Bosch. What’s heavy is six physical jugglers.
The deal was struck then and there, the Latvian programmer told authorities. Pasternak would grow a beard and pretend to be Bosch; Bosch would shave his beard and pretend to be Pasternak. The first to capitulate to the pressure of the other’s family had to buy a round of beer.
Bosch taught Pasternak — who luckily spoke fluent German from his studies — the rudiments of acrobatics, and Pasternak taught Bosch — who spoke fluent Russian from his travels — the rudiments of combinatorics. Then Pasternak went with the circus to Bremen, and Bosch went with Professor Pasternak back to Petersburg.
Disaster struck both families immediately. In Bremen, six Bosches climbed onto Pasternak’s back, his knee wobbled, and they all fell to their deaths. In St. Petersburg, Bosch bungled a simple mathematical operation and Professor Pasternak realized that his son would never solve the Pasternak Problem. He went straight to St. Isaac’s and flung himself from its golden dome.
Presented with the evidence, Pasternak and Bosch confessed.
The Germans wanted Pasternak to pay, and the Russians wanted Bosch to suffer, but the best lawyers in both countries could not find a German or Russian law that they’d actually violated. Reluctantly, the police released them. They met up three days later in a Riga bar, where they split the cost of the round of beer. Freed from their acrobatic and mathematical obligations, each planned, exuberantly, to spend the rest of his life pursuing his actual passion: birding for Bosch and backgammon for Pasternak. But at that moment, Riga police burst in and hauled them off. It seems Latvia has an old, seldom-enforced law on its books forbidding the sale or barter of one’s dynastic duties. The penalty is death.
57: FIGMENTS
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A solipsist at New York University who’d convinced himself through ironclad argument that the world was a figment of his imagination submitted as his philosophy dissertation two selections from Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and four from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Of all of the figments of his imagination, the student explained to his committee, he was proudest of the figment Hume and the figment Wittgenstein, whom he had considered his two principal influences before he realized they were actually his own creations.
The student was surprised when his dissertation committee — composed of two tenured figments of his imagination and one younger, untenured figment — accused him of plagiarism. He was brought before the University Disciplinary Board but declined to defend himself. It would be the height of insanity, he said, to defend himself before a University Disciplinary Board of his own creation.
He now lives at home with his parents in Demarest, New Jersey, a suburb and state of his own creation. His mother, a museum docent, acknowledges that she may well be a figment of his imagination. His father, a rather obstinate real estate attorney, maintains his metaphysical independence.
58: THE CONSTITUTIONAL LAW SCHOLAR’S TRAITS
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A renowned constitutional law scholar combined in one person intellectual verve, ethical decency, and physical elegance, but his three sons, to whom he’d hoped to pass on these three admirable traits, each inherited only one of them: the oldest son inherited the verve, the second son the decency, and the third the elegance.
In time, these traits, so valuable in combination, destroyed their lives.
Everyone who recognized the father’s familiar intellectual verve in the oldest son also expected, naturally, the concomitant decency and elegance. When it became evident that these traits were absent, his verve became a sign of what he lacked, and although the son was not especially immoral or inelegant in absolute terms, he nevertheless developed a reputation as a grotesque reprobate. Similarly, the second son’s ethical decency wasn’t admired on its own terms, so to speak: it merely marked the absence of his father’s verve and elegance, and though the son was not especially intellectually lethargic or physically inelegant compared to the population at large, he nevertheless became known as a mentally disabled monster. The third son, who had his father’s elegance but no particular verve or exceptional decency, was called a handsome depraved moron. These reputations followed them, needless to say, through their lives and to their graves.
An interesting coda. Each of the three sons had a son of his own, identical to him in every respect. The first son’s son inherited the verve, the second son’s son the decency, the third son’s son the elegance. By this time, though, the constitutional law scholar had faded into obscurity, so the presence of each trait no longer signified the absence of any others. Thus the grotesque reprobate’s son was simply considered brilliant, the mentally disabled monster’s son righteous, and the handsome depraved moron’s son suave.
59: SALVAGEABLE
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From his father he had inherited a heart with an arrhythmia condition, a mind with a melancholy disposition, a house with an insulation problem, and a tree with a fungal infection.