As I Lay Dying went down pretty easily, but I remember many nights struggling my way through The Sound and the Fury, Cliff notes at my side. It felt like scaling Everest, and the vistas at the top were worth the climb.

A couple of weeks ago, as part of my ongoing project to read great novels, I decided to revisit The Sound and the Fury, and I’m more than glad I did; I finally have an answer to give the next time I’m asked what one novel I’d bring to a desert island. But what I’m flabbergasted by is this: How did this book ever get assigned to high school students in the first place? I ask for at least two reasons:

• The story is saturated with sex and racism (societal racism, that is, not Faulkner’s). It’s all “whore” this and “nigger” that, to the point where I’d have thought the PC police — you know, the guys who banned Huckleberry Finn — would have intervened long ago. (Come to think of it, high school was long ago. Maybe they have intervened.)
• What high school student has the patience to figure out what’s happening in a book like this? The first quarter is narrated by an idiot with no sense of time, so that he jumps back and forth between periods of his life mid-page, mid-paragraph, and sometimes mid-sentence, as he starts describing one event and finishes describing another similar event that took place twenty years earlier. Nobody (except maybe the Cliff Notes) ever warns you about the ever-shifting time frame. (I have no idea how the Cliff Notes people figured it out.) The narrator of the second quarter is no idiot, but seriously disturbed, and obsesses on events that are never described, but which we have to infer from the obscure references in his internal monologue. There are multiple characters with the same name, and single characters with multiple names — and not a shred of of warning about all this.

As I said, my high-school-self relied on Cliff Notes for guidance. I am not ashamed to tell you that my adult self required Cliff Notes, Barron’s Notes, Spark Notes, and the full power of the Internet. My strategy was to read a few pages, then seek help to find out what just happened, then reread. When I got to the halfway mark, I went back to the beginning and read the book straight through (the second half is mostly downhill). I am eager to return to the beginning and read it straight through one more time.

Make no mistake; this is perhaps the best novel I’ve ever read. The rewards are surely commensurate with the effort, but I can’t help believing that few high school students would invest enough effort to earn the rewards.

And yet—something magical did happen to me back in high school (belated thanks, Mrs. Schreiber!), something that left me with a decades-long intention to reread this book someday, and now I have, and I’m about to read it again. Maybe I should have also dipped into the Hemingway.

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The Intellectual and the Market Place — Stigler’s classic defense of the marketplace against the discomfort felt by so many intellectuals — is well worth a quick read. Parts of it have been paraphrased so often by so many imitators that they’ve begun to seem almost trite, but none of the imitators has ever achieved Stigler’s panache. Besides, it’s been imitated so much precisely because there’s so much here worth saying. A few sample paragraphs to whet your appetite:

Several charges related to the dominance of self-interest have rounded out the intellectual’s indictment of the market place:

First, the system makes no provision for men whose talents and interests are not oriented to profit-seeking economic activity.

Second, there are cumulative tendencies toward increasing inequality of wealth, which—if unchecked—will polarize the society into a great number of poor and a few very rich.

Third, the game in the market place is unfair in that inheritance of property plays an immensely larger role in success than the efforts of the individuals themselves.

I shall comment briefly on each of these assertions.

The first charge is true—the market place will not supply income to a man who will not supply something which people want. People have enormously varied desires, but not enough of them wish to hire men to engage in research on ancient languages nor, sixty years ago, did they hire men to study quantum mechanics. The market place does not provide an air force or alms for the poor. It does not even supply babies. I conclude that a society needs more than a market place.

The second charge, that there are cumulative tendencies to ever-increasing inequality of wealth, is untrue. I would indeed ignore the charge for fear of reprimand from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Straw Men, were it not that this strawman is so popular. In plain historical fact, the inequality in the distribution of income has been diminishing, and the diminution has been due to market forces even more than to governmental efforts. It is also worth noting that a modern market economy has a less unequal income distribution than either centrally directed or unindustrialized economies.

The third charge, that inheritance of property plays a dominant role in the distribution of income in the market place, is an overstatement. Inheritance of property is important, but it will give some perspective to the charge to notice that property income is only one-fifth of national income, and inherited property is less than half of all property, so less than 10 per cent of all income is governed by inheritance of property.

No useful purpose would be served by trying to appraise the proper role of inheritance of property in a few passing remarks. We should have to look carefully at the effects of inheritance on incentives; we should have to look at gifts during life, which are almost equivalent to bequests; and we should have to decide whether privately endowed colleges do enough good to offset the inevitable high-living heirs—whether we can have Carleton without having Tommy Manville.

If you have any favorite Stigler quotes, memories or insights, do share them either in comments or by email. I’ll post some more of them as the week goes on.

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I was, I think, six years old at the time, and my question was this: If you’re traveling at 50 miles an hour at 1:00, and you’re traveling at 70 miles an hour at 2:00, must there be a time in between when you’re traveling exactly 60 miles an hour?

What made this question intelligent—and probably what made it incomprehensible to my parents—was that I was very keen to distinguish it from the question of whether your speedometer would have to pass through the 60-mile-an-hour mark. It seemed clear to me that the answer to that one was yes—that even if your true velocity could somehow skip directly from 50 to 70, the speedometer needle, in the course of whipping around from one reading to the other, would have to pass through the midpoint.

I quite vividly remember worrying that my question about your speed would be misinterpreted as a question about your speedometer, a question to which I thought the answer was obvious and therefore could only be asked by a very stupid person—a very stupid person for whom I did not wish to be mistaken. Therefore I prefaced the question with a long discourse on how it was thoroughly obvious to me that if your speedometer reads 50 miles an hour at one time and 70 miles an hour at another, then surely it must pass through 60 on the way, but that this was not not not not not the question I was about to ask, which concerned your actual speed and not the measurement thereof. By the time I got around to formulating the question itself, my parents (or at least my father; I don’t remember whether my mother was present) had quite understandably given up on figuring out what I was trying to get at.

In retrospect, though, what I was trying to get at was the distinction between the Intermediate Value Theorem, which applies to continuous functions (like your speedometer reading) and Darboux’s Theorem, which applies to derivatives (like your velocity). And I had exactly the right intuition, which is that the Intermediate Value Theorem is easy but Darboux’s Theorem is (comparatively) difficult. In other words, it’s pretty much obvious that the speedometer has to pass through 60 but not so obvious that your actual speed has to pass through 60, although in fact it’s true.

Perhaps a much more intelligent (or obstreperous) child would have questioned the continuity of the speedometer reading, or the continuity of space and/or time itself.

What is the most intelligent question you can remember asking as a child? Did you get a good answer?

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The Captain was amazed, and so was I. Long into adulthood, I pondered how that book could possibly have known where Mister Green Jeans was. The best answer I ever got was from the journalist Chris Suellentrop, who speculated that it was probably one of those quantum mechanical things where the act of asking the question caused both the book and Mister Green Jeans to settle down from a cloud of possibilities into mutually compatible states. Others—not so very long ago—speculated that perhaps the book was controlled by a satellite operating a surveillance camera.

Nowadays, of course, we can all carry that book in our pockets. I wonder if today’s children would find anything particularly magical about a reference work that has the answers to pretty much everything, and updates them on the fly.

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One of the various unsatisfactory answers I keep getting is something like: “Umm. You wouldn’t care.” But I know that’s wrong, because I’ve read Clown Town.

Clown Town was my most favorite book since before I could read. Fortunately for the various adults who were called upon to read it to me morning, noon and night, I managed to memorize it before I could even read it myself. The key dilemma faced by the residents of Clown Town is what to name the baby. The day is saved by the baby’s father, who invents the name “pood”, which, of course, is perfect, because it reads the same in both directions.

In my memory, I was an exceptionally dull and unquestioning child (I remember asking exactly one intelligent question in my first ten years on this earth; unfortunately my parents couldn’t figure out what I was asking, so I figured there was no point in ever asking another) but even I could see that there was a gap in the reasoning here. I remember being bothered by it then, and I’ve been bothered by it ever since.

Fast forward to the modern age, when my increasingly internet-savvy parents managed to find me a copy of my beloved book. (Of course, it might have been better to just not throw it out in the first place, but I’ll take what I can get.) And I just reread the story (as can you if you follow the link). And here’s what I found out:

ALTHOUGH I READ THIS BOOK 94,578 TIMES AS A CHILD, I MANAGED TO MISS THE ENTIRE POINT EVERY SINGLE GODDAM TIME.

Because, you see, here’s what actually happens in this story: The town meets to discuss a name. The schoolmaster shows up to record the proceedings. But he insists on writing all the names upside down on his blackboard, making them entirely indecipherable to the masses. He does this, basically, just to be a dick. (It’s been suggested that this part of the story might have had a formative influence on my personality.) But the child’s father saves the day by inventing the name “pood” which utterly defeats the schoolmaster’s diabolical joke.

It took awhile, but I get it now. My next project is to reread Jack and the Beanstalk.

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I’m not sure how old I was at the time, but I must have been very young because I already knew the refrain by heart when my father first told me about foreign languages. In other countries, people use different words than we do. We say “cat”, but in Spain they say “gato” and in Russia they say “koschka”.

Well, I could easily see where this was going. Before my father could finish his sentence, I jumped in to announce that yes, those people might use other words, but we’re right and they’re wrong—right, Daddy?. I’m not sure whether he recognized his own refrain, but he looked quite taken aback as he gently explained that, well, no, there is no right and wrong, and one word is as good as another as long as the people around you understand what you’re saying.

In that moment I decided that the world made absolutely no sense and there was no point in even trying to understand it. Yesterday we were right and everyone else was wrong. Today everyone’s equally right. Was there no pattern here?

Somehow I outgrew my disillusionment. Today I dare to hope the world does make sense, or at the very least that it’s worth trying to find some sense in the world. I believe that racism is evil, that foreign languages are benign, and that, the mental limitations of four-year-olds notwithstanding, it’s not too hard to find a moral framework that can reconcile that paradox. Other paradoxes seem much harder. Here’s one that I keep coming back to: How can it be okay to remain childless but not okay to have children and treat them badly—given that the children themselves would presumably prefer being treated badly to not being born at all? (I am assuming here, for the sake of argument, that if you couldn’t treat your children badly, you’d choose not to have them. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone, but it does apply to some people. Those are the people I’m calling “you” in this question.)

I don’t know the answer to that question. I do persist in thinking about it. Feel free to address it in comments (or to share your own favorite moral paradox), though it’s not the focus of this post. Mostly I just felt like telling you this story.

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