RICHARD FEYNMAN-what do you care what other people think?

WHEN I was a young fella, about thirteen, I had somehow gotten in with a group of guys who were a little older than I was, and more sophisticated. They knew a lot of different girls, and would go out with them—often to the beach.

One time when we were at the beach, most of the guys had gone out on some jetty with the girls. I was interested in a particular girl a little bit, and sort of thought out loud: "Gee, I think I'd like to take Barbara to the movies ..."

That's all I had to say, and the guy next to me gets all excited. He runs out onto the rocks and finds her. He pushes her back, all the while saying in a loud voice, "Feynman has something he wants to say to you, Barbara!" It was most embarrassing.

Pretty soon the guys are all standing around me, saying, "Well, say it, Feynman!" So I invited her to the movies. It was my first date.

I went home and told my mother about it. She gave me all kinds of advice on how to do this and that. For example, if we take the bus, I'm supposed to get off the bus first, and offer Barbara my hand. Or if we have to walk in the street, I'm supposed to walk on the outside. She even told me what kinds of things to say. She was handing down a cultural tradition to me: the women teach their sons how to treat the next generation of women well.

After dinner, I get all slicked up and go to Barbara's house to call for her. I'm nervous. She isn't ready, of course (it's always like that) so her family has me wait for her in the dining room, where they're eating with friends—a lot of people. They say things like, "Isn't he cute!" and all kinds of other stuff. I didn't feel cute. It was absolutely terrible!

I remember everything about the date. As we walked from her house to the new, little theater in town, we talked about playing the piano. I told her how, when I was younger, they made me learn piano for a while, but after six months I was still playing "Dance of the Daisies," and couldn't stand it any more. You see, I was worried about being a sissy, and to be stuck for weeks playing "Dance of the Daisies" was too much for me, so I quit. I was so sensitive about being a sissy that it even bothered me when my mother sent me to the market to buy some snacks called Peppermint Patties and Toasted Dainties.

We saw the movie, and I walked her back to her home. I complimented her on the nice, pretty gloves she was wearing. Then I said goodnight to her on the doorstep.

Barbara says to me, "Thank you for a very lovely evening."

"You're welcome!" I answered. I felt terrific.

The next time I went out on a date—it was with a different girl—I say goodnight to her, and she says, "Thank you for a very lovely evening."

I didn't feel quite so terrific.

When I said goodnight to the third girl I took out, she's got her mouth open, ready to speak, and I say, "Thank you for a very lovely evening!"

She says, "Thank you—uh—Oh!—Yes—uh, I had a lovely evening, too, thank you!"

One time I was at a party with my beach crowd, and one of the older guys was in the kitchen teaching us how to kiss, using his girlfriend to demonstrate: "You have to have your lips like this, at right angles, so the noses don't collide," and so on. So I go into the living room and find a girl. I'm sitting on the couch with my arm around her, practicing this new art, when suddenly there's all kinds of excitement: "Arlene is coming! Arlene is coming!" I don't know who Arlene is.

Then someone says, "She's here! She's here!"—and everybody stops what they're doing and jumps up to see this queen. Arlene was very pretty, and I could see why she had all this admiration—it was well deserved—but I didn't believe in this undemocratic business of changing what you're doing just because the queen is coming in.

So, while everybody's going over to see Arlene, I'm still sitting there on the couch with my girl.

(Arlene told me later, after I had gotten to know her, that she remembered that party with all the nice people— except for one guy who was over in the corner on the couch smooching with a girl. What she didn't know was that two minutes before, all the others were doin' it too!)

The first time I ever said anything to Arlene was at a dance. She was very popular, and everybody was cutting in and dancing with her. I remember thinking I'd like to dance with her, too, and trying to decide when to cut in. I always had trouble with that problem: first of all, when she's over on the other side of the dance floor dancing with some guy, it's too complicated—so you wait until they come closer. Then when she's near you, you think, "Well, no, this isn't the kind of music I'm good at dancing to." So you wait for another type of music. When the music changes to something you like, you sort of step forward—at least you think you step forward to cut in—when some other guy cuts in just in front of you. So now you have to wait a few minutes because it's impolite to cut in too soon after someone else has. And by the time a few minutes have passed, they're over at the other side of the dance floor again, or the music has changed again, or whatever!

After a certain amount of this stalling and fooling around, I finally mutter something about wanting to dance with Arlene. One of the guys I was hanging around with overhears me and makes a big announcement to the other guys: "Hey, listen to this, guys; Feynman wants to dance with Arlene!" Soon one of them is dancing with Arlene and they dance over towards the rest of us. The others push me out onto the dance floor and I finally "cut in." You can see the condition I was in by my first words to her, which were an honest question: "How does it feel to be so popular?" We only danced a few minutes before somebody else cut in.

My friends and I had taken dancing lessons, although none of us would ever admit it. In those depression days, a friend of my mother was trying to make a living by teaching dancing in the evening, in an upstairs dance studio. There was a back door to the place, and she arranged it so the young men could come up through the back way without being seen.

Every once in a while there would be a social dance at this lady's studio. I didn't have the nerve to test this analysis, but it seemed to me that the girls had a much harder time than the boys did. In those days, girls couldn't ask to cut in and dance with boys; it wasn't "proper." So the girls who weren't very pretty would sit for hours at the side, just sad as hell.

I thought, "The guys have it easy: they're free to cut in whenever they want." But it wasn't easy. You're "free," but you haven't got the guts, or the sense, or whatever it takes to relax and enjoy dancing. Instead, you tie yourself in knots worrying about cutting in or inviting a girl to dance with you.

For example, if you saw a girl who was not dancing, who you thought you'd like to dance with, you might think, "Good! Now at least I've got a chance!" But it was usually very difficult: often the girl would say, "No, thank you, I'm tired. I think I'll sit this one out." So you go away somewhat  defeated—but not completely, because maybe she really is tired—when you turn around and some other guy comes up to her, and there she is, dancing with him! Maybe this guy is her boyfriend and she knew he was coming over, or maybe she didn't like the way you look, or maybe something else. It was always so complicated for such a simple matter.

One time I decided to invite Arlene to one of these dances. It was the first time I took her out. My best friends were also at the dance; my mother had invited them, to get more customers for her friend's dance studio. These guys were contemporaries of mine, guys my own age from school. Harold Cast and David Leff were literary types, while Robert Stapler was a scientific type. We would spend a lot of time together after school, going on walks and discussing this and that.

Anyway, my best friends were at the dance, and as soon as they saw me with Arlene, they called me into the cloakroom and said, "Now listen, Feynman, we want you to understand that we understand that Arlene is your girl tonight, and we're not gonna bother you with her. She's out of bounds for us," and so on. But before long, there was cutting in and competition coming from precisely these guys! I learned the meaning of Shakespeare's phrase "Methinks thou dost protest too much."

You must appreciate what I was like then. I was a very shy character, always feeling uncomfortable because everybody was stronger than I, and always afraid I would look like a sissy. Everybody else played baseball; everybody else did all kinds of athletic things. If there was a game somewhere, and a ball would come rolling across the road, I would be petrified that maybe I'd have to pick it up and throw it back—because if I threw it, it would be about a radian off the correct direction, and not anywhere near the distance! And then everybody would laugh. It was terrible, and I was very unhappy about it.

The one about the leaves was easy. When I was walking to school, I heard a little noise: although the wind was hardly noticeable, the leaves of a bush were wiggling a little bit because they were in just the right position to make a kind of resonance. And I thought, "Aha! This is a good explanation for Elijah's vision of the quaking bush!"

But there were some miracles I never did figure out. For instance, there was a story in which Moses throws down his staff and it turns into a snake. I couldn't figure out what the witnesses saw that made them think his staff was a snake.

If I had thought back to when I was much younger, the Santa Claus story could have provided a clue for me. But it didn't hit me hard enough at the time to produce the possibility that I should doubt the truth of stories that don't fit with nature. When I found out that Santa Claus wasn't real, I wasn't upset; rather, I was relieved that there was a much simpler phenomenon to explain how so many children all over the world got presents on the same night! The story had been getting pretty complicated—it was getting out of hand.

Santa Claus was a particular custom we celebrated in our family, and it wasn't very serious. But the miracles I was hearing about were connected with real things: there was the temple, where people would go every week; there was the Sunday school, where rabbis taught children about miracles; it was much more of a dramatic thing. Santa Claus didn't involve big institutions like the temple, which I knew were real.

So all the time I was going to the Sunday school, I was believing everything and having trouble putting it together. But of course, ultimately, it had to come to a crisis, sooner or later.

The actual crisis came when I was eleven or twelve. The rabbi was telling us a story about the Spanish Inquisition, in which the Jews suffered terrible tortures. He told us about a particular individual whose name was Ruth, exactly what she was supposed to have done, what the arguments were in her favor and against her—the whole thing, as if it had all been documented by a court reporter. And I was just an innocent kid, listening to all this stuff and believing it was a true commentary, because the rabbi had never indicated otherwise.

At the end, the rabbi described how Ruth was dying in prison: "And she thought, while she was dying"—blah, blah.

That was a shock to me. After the lesson was over, I went up to him and said, "How did they know what she thought when she was dying?"

He says, "Well, of course, in order to explain more vividly how the Jews suffered, we made up the story of Ruth. It wasn't a real individual."

That was too much for me. I felt terribly deceived: I wanted the straight story—not fixed up by somebody else— so I could decide for myself what it meant. But it was difficult for me to argue with adults. All I could do was get tears in my eyes. I started to cry, I was so upset.

He said, "What's the matter?"

I tried to explain. "I've been listening to all these stories, and now I don't know, of all the things you told me, which were true, and which were not true! I don't know what to do with everything that I've learned!" I was trying to explain that I was losing everything at the moment, because I was no longer sure of the data, so to speak. Here I had been struggling to understand all these miracles, and now—well, it solved a lot of miracles, all right! But I was unhappy.

The rabbi said, "If it is so traumatic for you, why do you come to Sunday school?"

"Because my parents make me."

I never talked to my parents about it, and I never found out whether the rabbi communicated with them or not, but my parents never made me go again. And it was just before I was supposed to get confirmed as a believer.

Anyway, that crisis resolved my difficulty rather rapidly, in favor of the theory that all the miracles were stories made up to help people understand things "more vividly," even if they conflicted with natural phenomena. But I thought nature itself was so interesting that I didn't want it distorted like that. And so I gradually came to disbelieve the whole religion.

Anyway, the Jewish elders had organized this club with all its activities not just to get us kids off the street, but to get us interested in the Jewish way of life. So to have someone like me elected as president would have made them very embarrassed. To our mutual relief I wasn't elected, but the center eventually failed anyway—it was on its way out when I was nominated, and had I been elected, I surely would have been blamed for its demise.

One day Arlene told me Jerome isn't her boyfriend anymore. She's not tied up with him. That was a big excitement for me, the beginning of hope! She invited me over to her house, at 154 Westminster Avenue in nearby Cedar-hurst.

When I went to her house that time, it was dark and the porch wasn't lit. I couldn't see the numbers. Not wanting to disturb anyone by asking if it was the right house, I crawled up, quietly, and felt the numbers on the door: 154.

Arlene was having trouble with her homework in philosophy class. "We're studying Descartes," she said. "He starts out with 'Cogito, ergo sum'—'I think, therefore I am'—and ends up proving the existence of God."

"Impossible!" I said, without stopping to think that I was doubting the great Descartes. (It was a reaction I learned from my father: have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, "Is it reasonable?") I said, "How can you deduce one from the other?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Well, let's look it over," I said. "What's the argument?"

So we look it over, and we see that Descartes' statement "Cogito, ergo sum" is supposed to mean that there is one thing that cannot be doubted—doubt itself. "Why doesn't he just say it straight?" I complained. "He just means somehow or other that he has one fact that he knows."

Then it goes on and says things like, "I can only imagine imperfect thoughts, but imperfect can only be understood as referent to the perfect. Hence the perfect must exist somewhere." (He's workin' his way towards God now.)

"Not at all!" I say. "In science you can talk about relative degrees of approximation without having a perfect theory. I don't know what this is all about. I think it's a bunch of baloney."

Arlene understood me. She understood, when she looked at it, that no matter how impressive and important this philosophy stuff was supposed to be, it could be taken lightly—you could just think about the words, instead of worrying about the fact that Descartes said it. "Well, I guess it's okay to take the other side," she said. "My teacher keeps telling us, 'There are two sides to every question, just like there are two sides to every piece of paper.' "

"There's two sides to that, too," I said.

"What do you mean?"

I had read about the Möbius strip in the Britannica, my wonderful Britannica! In those days, things like the Möbius strip weren't so well known to everybody, but they werejust as understandable as they are to kids today. The existence of such a surface was so real: it wasn't a wishy-washy political question, or anything that you needed history to understand. Reading about those things was like being way off in a wonderful world that nobody knows about, and you're getting a kick not only from the delight of learning the stuff itself, but also from making yourself unique.

I got a strip of paper, put a half twist in it, and made it into a loop. Arlene was delighted.

The next day, in class, she lay in wait for her teacher. Sure enough, he holds up a piece of paper and says, "There are two sides to every question, just like there are two sides to every piece of paper." Arlene holds up her own strip of paper—with a half twist in it—and says, "Sir, there are even two sides to that question: there's paper with only one side!" The teacher and the class got all excited, and Arlene got such a kick out of showing them the Möbius strip that I think she paid more attention to me after that on account of it.

But after Jerome, I had a new competitor—my "good friend" Harold Cast. Arlene was always making up her mind one way or the other. When it came time for graduation, she went with Harold to the senior prom, but sat with my parents for the graduation ceremony.

I was the best in science, the best in mathematics, the best in physics, and the best in chemistry, so I was going up to the stage and receiving honors many times at the ceremony. Harold was the best in English and the best in history, and had written the school play, so that was very impressive.

I was terrible in English. I couldn't stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention—it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature. Any word can be spelled just as well a different way. I was impatient with all this English stuff.

There was a series of exams called the Regents, which the state of New York gave to every high school student. A few months before, when we all were taking the Regents examination in English, Harold and the other literary friend of mine, David Leff—the editor of the school newspaper—asked me which books I had chosen to write about. David had chosen something with profound social implications by Sinclair Lewis, and Harold had picked some playwright. I said I chose Treasure Island because we had that book in first-year English, and told them what I wrote.

They laughed. "Boy, are you gonna flunk, saying such simple stuff about such a simple book!"

There was also a list of questions for an essay. The one I chose was "The Importance of Science in Aviation." I thought, "What a dumb question! The importance of science in aviation is obvious!"

I was about to write a simple theme about this dumb question when I remembered that my literary friends were always "throwing the bull"—building up their sentences to sound complex and sophisticated. I decided to try it, just for the hell of it. I thought, "If the Regents are so silly as to have a subject like the importance of science in aviation, I'm gonna do that."

So I wrote stuff like, "Aeronautical science is important in the analysis of the eddies, vortices, and whirlpools formed in the atmosphere behind the aircraft. . ."—I knew that eddies, vortices, and whirlpools are the same thing, but mentioning them three different ways sounds better! That was the only thing I would not have ordinarily done on the test.

The teacher who corrected my examination must have been impressed by eddies, vortices, and whirlpools, because I got a 91 on the exam—while my literary friends, who chose topics the English teachers could more easily take issue with, both got 88.

That year a new rule came out: if you got 90 or better on a Regents examination, you automatically got honors in that subject at graduation! So while the playwright and the editor of the school newspaper had to stay in their seats, this illiterate fool physics student was called to go up to the stage once again and receive honors in English!

After the graduation ceremony, Arlene was in the hall with my parents and Harold's parents when the head of the math department came over. He was a very strong man—he was also the school disciplinarian—a tall, dominating fellow. Mrs. Cast says to him, "Hello, Dr. Augsberry. I'm Harold Cast's mother. And this is Mrs. Feynman . . ."

He completely ignores Mrs. Cast and immediately turns to my mother. "Mrs. Feynman, I want to impress upon you that a young man like your son comes along only very rarely. The state should support a man of such talent. You must be sure that he goes to college, the best college you can afford!" He was concerned that my parents might not be planning to send me to college, for in those days lots of kids had to get a job immediately after graduation to help support the family.

That in fact happened to my friend Robert. He had a lab, too, and taught me all about lenses and optics. (One day he had an accident in his lab. He was opening carbolic acid and the bottle jerked, spilling some acid on his face. He went to the doctor and had bandages put on for a few weeks. The funny thing was, when they took the bandages off his skin was smooth underneath, nicer than it had been before—there were many fewer blemishes. I've since found out that there was, for a while, some kind of a beauty treatment using carbolic acid in a more dilute form.) Robert's mother was poor, and he had to go to work right away to support her, so he couldn't continue his interest in the sciences.

Anyway, my mother reassured Dr. Augsberry: "We're saving money as best we can, and we're trying to send him to Columbia or MIT." And Arlene was listening to all this, so after that I was a little bit ahead.

Arlene was a wonderful girl. She was the editor of the newspaper at Nassau County Lawrence High School; she played the piano beautifully, and was very artistic. She made some decorations for our house, like the parrot on the inside of our closet. As time went on, and our family got to know her better, she would go to the woods to paint with my father, who had taken up painting in later life, as many people do.

Arlene and I began to mold each other's personality. She lived in a family that was very polite, and was very sensitive to other people's feelings. She taught me to be more sensitive to those kinds of things, too. On the other hand, her family felt that "white lies" were okay.

I thought one should have the attitude of "What do you care what other people think!" I said, "We should listen to other people's opinions and take them into account. Then, if they don't make sense and we think they're wrong, then that's that!"

Arlene caught on to the idea right away. It was easy to talk her into thinking that in our relationship, we must be very honest with each other and say everything straight, with absolute frankness. It worked very well, and we became very much in love—a love like no other love that I know of.

After that summer I went away to college at MIT. (I couldn't go to Columbia because of the Jewish quota [ Note for foreign readers: the quota system was a discriminatory practice of limiting the number of places in a university available to students of Jewish background]). I began getting letters from my friends that said things like, "You should see how Arlene is going out with Harold," or "She's doing this and she's doing that, while you're all alone up there in Boston." Well, I was taking out girls in Boston, but they didn't mean a thing to me, and I knew the same was true with Arlene.

When summer came, I stayed in Boston for a summer job, and worked on measuring friction. The Chrysler Company had developed a new method of polishing to get a super finish, and we were supposed to measure how much better it was. (It turned out that the "super finish" was not significantly better.)

Anyway, Arlene found a way to be near me. She found a summer job in Scituate, about twenty miles away, taking care of children. But my father was concerned that I would become too involved with Arlene and get off the track of my studies, so he talked her out of it—or talked me out of it (I can't remember). Those days were very, very different from now. In those days, you had to go all the way up in your career before marrying.

I was able to see Arlene only a few times that summer, but we promised each other we would marry after I finished school. I had known her for six years by that time. I'm a little tongue-tied trying to describe to you how much our love for each other developed, but we were sure we were right for each other.

After I graduated from MIT I went to Princeton, and I would go home on vacations to see Arlene. One time when I went to see her, Arlene had developed a bump on one side of her neck. She was a very beautiful girl, so it worried her a little bit, but it didn't hurt, so she figured it wasn't too serious. She went to her uncle, who was a doctor. He told her to rub it with omega oil.

Then, sometime later, the bump began to change. It got bigger—or maybe it was smaller—and she got a fever. The fever got worse, so the family doctor decided Arlene should go to the hospital. She was told she had typhoid fever. Right away, as I still do today, I looked up the disease in medical books and read all about it.

When I went to see Arlene in the hospital, she was in quarantine—we had to put on special gowns when we entered her room, and so on. The doctor was there, so I asked him how the Wydell test came out—it was an absolute test for typhoid fever that involved checking for bacteria in the feces. He said, "It was negative."

"What? How can that be!" I said. "Why all these gowns, when you can't even find the bacteria in an experiment? Maybe she doesn't have typhoid fever!"

The result of that was that the doctor talked to Arlene's parents, who told me not to interfere. "After all, he's the doctor. You're only her fiancé."

I've found out since that such people don't know what they're doing, and get insulted when you make some suggestion or criticism. I realize that now, but I wish I had been much stronger then and told her parents that the doctor was an idiot—which he was—and didn't know what he was doing. But as it was, her parents were in charge of it.

Anyway, after a little while, Arlene got better, apparently: the swelling went down and the fever went away. But after some weeks the swelling started again, and this time she went to another doctor. This guy feels under her armpits and in her groin, and so on, and notices there's swelling in those places, too. He says the problem is in her lymphatic glands, but he doesn't yet know what the specific disease is. He will consult with other doctors.

As soon as I hear about it I go down to the library at Princeton and look up lymphatic diseases, and find "Swelling of the Lymphatic Glands. (1) Tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands. This is very easy to diagnose . . ."—so I figure this isn't what Arlene has, because the doctors are having trouble trying to figure it out.

I start reading about some other diseases: lymphodenema, lymphodenoma, Hodgkin's disease, all kinds of other things; they're all cancers of one crazy form or another. The only difference between lymphodenema and lymphodenoma was, as far as I could make out by reading it very carefully, that if the patient dies, it's lymphodenoma; if the patient survives—at least for a while—then it's lymphodenema.

At any rate, I read through all the lymphatic diseases and decided that the most likely possibility was that Arlene had an incurable disease. Then I half smiled to myself, thinking, "I bet everybody who reads through a medical book thinks they have a fatal disease." And yet, after reading everything very carefully, I couldn't find any other possibility. It was serious.

Then I went to the weekly tea at Palmer Hall, and found myself talking to the mathematicians just as I always did, even though I had just found out that Arlene probably had a fatal disease. It was very strange—like having two minds.

When I went to visit her, I told Arlene the joke about the people who don't know any medicine reading the medical book and always assuming they have a fatal disease. But I also told her I thought we were in great difficulty, and that the best I could figure out was that she had an incurable disease. We discussed the various diseases, and I told her what each one was like.

One of the diseases I told Arlene about was Hodgkin's disease. When she next saw her doctor, she asked him about it: "Could it be Hodgkin's disease?"

He said, "Well, yes, that's a possibility."

When she went to the county hospital, the doctor wrote the following diagnosis: "Hodgkin's disease—?" So I realized that the doctor didn't know any more than I did about this problem.

The county hospital gave Arlene all sorts of tests and X-ray treatments for this "Hodgkin's disease—?" and there were special meetings to discuss this peculiar case. I remember waiting for her outside, in the hall. When the meeting was over, the nurse wheeled her out in a wheelchair. All of a sudden a little guy comes running out of the meeting room and catches up with us. "Tell me," he says, out of breath, "do you spit up blood? Have you ever coughed up blood?"

The nurse says, "Go away! Go away! What kind of thing is that to ask of a patient!"—and brushes him away. Then she turned to us and said, "That man is a doctor from the neighborhood who comes to the meetings and is always making trouble. That's not the kind of thing to ask of a patient!"

I didn't catch on. The doctor was checking a certain possibility, and if I had been smart, I would have asked him what it was.

Finally, after a lot of discussion, a doctor at the hospital tells me they figure the most likely possibility is Hodgkin's disease. He says, "There will be some periods of improvement, and some periods in the hospital. It will be on and off, getting gradually worse. There's no way to reverse it entirely. It's fatal after a few years."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I say. "I'll tell her what you said."

"No, no!" says the doctor. "We don't want to upset the patient.. "We're going to tell her it's glandular fever."

"No, no!" I reply. "We've already discussed the possibility of Hodgkin's disease. I know she can adjust to it."

"Her parents don't want her to know. You had better talk to them first."

At home, everybody worked on me: my parents, my two aunts, our family doctor; they were all on me, saying I'm a very foolish young man who doesn't realize what pain he's going to bring to this wonderful girl by telling her she has a fatal disease. "How can you do such a terrible thing?" they asked, in horror.

"Because we have made a pact that we must speak honestly with each other and look at everything directly. There's no use fooling around. She's gonna ask me what she's got, and I cannot lie to her!"

"Oh, that's childish!" they said—blah, blah, blah. Everybody kept working on me, and said I was wrong. I thought I was definitely right, because I had already talked to Arlene about the disease and knew she could face it— that telling her the truth was the right way to handle it.

But finally, my little sister comes up to me—she was eleven or twelve then—with tears running down her face. She beats me on the chest, telling me that Arlene is such a wonderful girl, and that I'm such a foolish, stubborn brother. I couldn't take it any more. That broke me down.

So I wrote Arlene a goodbye love letter, figuring that if she ever found out the truth after I had told her it was glandular fever, we would be through. I carried the letter with me all the time.

The gods never make it easy; they always make it harder. I go to the hospital to see Arlene—having made this decision—and there she is, sitting up in bed, surrounded by her parents, somewhat distraught. When she sees me, her face lights up and she says, "Now I know how valuable it is that we tell each other the truth!" Nodding at her parents, she continues, "They're telling me I have glandular fever, and I'm not sure whether I believe them or not. Tell me, Richard, do I have Hodgkin's disease or glandular fever?"

"You have glandular fever," I said, and I died inside. It was terrible—-just terrible!

Her reaction was completely simple: "Oh! Fine! Then I believe them." Because we had built up so much trust in each other, she was completely relieved. Everything was solved, and all was very nice.

She got a little bit better, and went home for a while. About a week later, I get a telephone call. "Richard," she says, "I want to talk to you. Come on over."

"Okay." I made sure I still had the letter with me. I could tell something was the matter.

I go upstairs to her room, and she says, "Sit down." I sit down on the end of her bed. "All right, now tell me," she says, "do I have glandular fever or Hodgkin's disease?"

"You have Hodgkin's disease." And I reached for the letter.

"God!" she says. "They must have put you through hell!"

I had just told her she has a fatal disease, and was admitting that I had lied to her as well, and what does she think of? She's worried about me! I was terribly ashamed of myself. I gave Arlene the letter.

"You should have stuck by it. We know what we're doing; we are right!"

"I'm sorry. I feel awful."

"I understand, Richard. Just don't do it again."

You see, she was in bed upstairs, and did something she used to do when she was little: she tiptoed out of bed and crawled down the stairs a little bit to listen to what people were doing downstairs. She heard her mother crying a lot, and went back to bed thinking, "If I have glandular fever, why is Mother crying so much? But Richard said I had glandular fever, so it must be right!"

Later she thought, "Could Richard have lied to me?" and began to wonder how that might be possible. She concluded that, incredible as it sounded, somebody might have put me through a wringer of some sort.

She was so good at facing difficult situations that she went on to the next problem. "Okay," she says, "I have Hodgkin's disease. What are we going to do now?"

I had a scholarship at Princeton, and they wouldn't let me keep it if I got married. We knew what the disease was like: sometimes it would get better for some months, and Arlene could be at home, and then she would have to be in the hospital for some months—back and forth for two years, perhaps.

So I figure, although I'm in the middle of trying to get my Ph.D., I could get a job at the Bell Telephone Laboratories doing research—it was a very good place to work—and we could get a little apartment in Queens that wasn't too far from the hospital or Bell Labs. We could get married in a few months, in New York. We worked everything out that afternoon.

For some months now Arlene's doctors had wanted to take a biopsy of the swelling on her neck, but her parents didn't want it done—they didn't want to "bother the poor sick girl." But with new resolve, I kept working on them, explaining that it's important to get as much information as possible. With Arlene's help, I finally convinced her parents.

A few days later, Arlene telephones me and says, "They got a report from the biopsy."

"Yeah? Is it good or bad?"

"I don't know. Come over and let's talk about it."

When I got to her house, she showed me the report. It said, "Biopsy shows tuberculosis of the lymphatic gland."

That really got me. I mean, that was the first goddamn thing on the list! I passed it by, because the book said it was easy to diagnose, and because the doctors were having so much trouble trying to figure out what it was. I assumed they had checked the obvious case. And it was the obvious case: the man who had come running out of the meeting room asking "Do you spit up blood?" had the right idea. He knew what it probably was!

I felt like a jerk, because I had passed over the obvious possibility by using circumstantial evidence—which isn't any good—and by assuming the doctors were more intelligent than they were. Otherwise, I would have suggested it right off, and perhaps the doctor would have diagnosed Arlene's disease way back then as "tuberculosis of the lymphatic gland—?" I was a dope. I've learned, since then.

Anyway, Arlene says, "So I might live as long as seven years. I may even get better."

"So what do you mean, you don't know if it's good or bad?"

"Well, now we won't be able to get married until later."

Knowing that she only had two more years to live, we had solved things so perfectly, from her point of view, that she was disturbed to discover she'd live longer! But it didn't take me long to convince her it was a better circumstance.

So we knew we could face things together, from then on. After going through that, we had no difficulty facing any other problem.

When the war came, I was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project at Princeton, where I was finishing up my degree. A few months later, as soon as I got my degree, I announced to my family that I wanted to get married.

My father was horrified, because from the earliest times, as he saw me develop, he thought I would be happy as a scientist. He thought it was still too early to marry—it would interfere with my career. He also had this crazy idea: if a guy was in some difficulty, he used to always say, "Cherchez la femme"—look for the woman behind it. He felt that women were the great danger to a man, that a man always has to watch out and be tough about women. And when he sees me marrying a girl with tuberculosis, he thinks of the possibility that I'm going to get sick, too.

My whole family was worried about that—aunts, uncles, everyone. They brought the family doctor over to our house. He tried to explain to me that tuberculosis is a dangerous disease, and that I'm bound to get it.

I said, "Just tell me how it's transmitted, and we'll figure it out." We were already very, very careful: we knew we must not kiss, because there's a lot of bacteria in the mouth.

Then they very carefully explained to me that when I had promised to marry Arlene, I didn't know the situation. Everybody would understand that I didn't know the situation then, and that it didn't represent a real promise.

I never had that feeling, that crazy idea that they had, that I was getting married because I had promised it. I hadn't even thought of that. It wasn't a question of having promised anything; we had stalled around, not getting a piece of paper and not being formally married, but we were in love, and were already married, emotionally.

I said, "Would it be sensible for a husband who learns that his wife has tuberculosis to leave her?"

Only my aunt who ran the hotel thought maybe it would be all right for us to get married. Everybody else was still against it. But this time, since my family had given me this kind of advice before and it had been so wrong, I was in a much stronger position. It was very easy to resist and to just proceed. So there was no problem, really. Although it was a similar circumstance, they weren't going to convince me of anything any more. Arlene and I knew we were right in what we were doing.

Arlene and I worked everything out. There was a hospital in New Jersey just south of Fort Dix where she could stay while I was at Princeton. It was a charity hospital— Deborah was the name of it—supported by the Women's Garment Workers Union of New York. Arlene wasn't a garment worker, but it didn't make any difference. And I was just a young fella working on this project for the government, and the pay was very low. But this way I could take care of her, at last.

We decided to get married on the way to Deborah Hospital. I went to Princeton to pick up a car—Bill Woodward, one of the graduate students there, lent me his station wagon. I fixed it up like a little ambulance, with a mattress and sheets in the back, so Arlene could lie down in case she got tired. Although this was one of the periods when the disease was apparently not so bad and she was at home, Arlene had been in the county hospital a lot, and she was a little weak.

I drove up to Cedarhurst and picked up my bride. Arlene's family waved goodbye, and off we went. We crossed Queens and Brooklyn, then went to Staten Island on the ferry—that was our romantic boat ride—and drove to the city hall for the borough of Richmond to get married.

We went up the stairs, slowly, into the office. The guy there was very nice. He did everything right away. He said, "You don't have any witnesses," so he called the bookkeeper and an accountant from another room, and we were married according to the laws of the state of New York. Then we were very happy, and we smiled at each other, holding hands.

The bookkeeper says to me, "You're married now. You should kiss the bride!"

So the bashful character kissed his bride lightly on the cheek.

I gave everyone a tip and we thanked them very much. We got back in the car, and drove to Deborah Hospital.

Every weekend I'd go down from Princeton to visit Arlene. One time the bus was late, and I couldn't get into the hospital. There weren't any hotels nearby, but I had my old sheepskin coat on (so I was warm enough), and I looked for an empty lot to sleep in. I was a little worried what it might look like in the morning when people looked out of their windows, so I found a place that was far enough away from houses.

The next morning I woke up and discovered I'd been sleeping in a garbage dump—a landfill! I felt foolish, and laughed.

Arlene's doctor was very nice, but he would get upset when I brought in a war bond for $18 every month. He could see we didn't have much money, and kept insisting we shouldn't contribute to the hospital, but I did it anyway.

One time, at Princeton, I received a box of pencils in i he mail. They were dark green, and in gold letters were the words "RICHARD DARLING, I LOVE YOU! PUTSY." It was Arlene (I called her Putsy).

Well, that was nice, and I love her, too, but—you know how you absentmindedly drop pencils around: you're showing Professor Wigner a formula, or something, and leave the pencil on his desk.

In those days we didn't have extra stuff, so I didn't want to waste the pencils. I got a razor blade from the bathroom and cut off the writing on one of them to see if I could use them.

The next morning, I get a letter in the mail. It starts out, "WHAT'S THE IDEA OF TRYING TO CUT THE NAME OFF THE PENCILS?"

It continues: "Aren't you proud of the fact that I love you?" Then: "WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK?"

Then came poetry: "If you're ashamed of me, dah dah, then Pecans to you! Pecans to you!" The next verse was the same kind of stuff, with the last line, "Almonds to you! Almonds to you!" Each one was "Nuts to you!" in a different form.

So I had to use the pencils with the names on them. What else could I do?

It wasn't long before I had to go to Los Alamos. Robert Oppenheimer, who was in charge of the project, arranged for Arlene to stay in the nearest hospital, in Albuquerque, about a hundred miles away. I had time off every weekend to see her, so I would hitchhike down on a Saturday, see Arlene in the afternoon, and stay overnight in a hotel there in Albuquerque. Then on Sunday morning I would see Arlene again, and hitchhike back to Los Alamos in the afternoon.

During the week I would often get letters from her. Some of them, like the one written on a jigsaw-puzzle blank and then taken apart and sent in a sack, resulted in little notes from the army censor, such as "Please tell your wife we don't have time to play games around here." I didn't tell her anything. I liked her to play games—even though she often put me in various uncomfortable but amusing conditions from which I could not escape.

One time, near the beginning of May, newspapers mysteriously appeared in almost everybody's mailbox at Los Alamos. The whole damn place was full of them— hundreds of newspapers. You know the kind—you open it up and there's this headline screaming in thick letters across the front page: ENTIRE NATION CELEBRATES BIRTHDAY OF R.P. FEYNMAN!

Arlene was playing her game with the world. She had a lot of time to think. She would read magazines, and send away for this and that. She was always cooking up something. (She must have got help with the names from Nick Metropolis or one of the other guys at Los Alamos who would often visit her.) Arlene was in her room, but she was in the world, writing me crazy letters and sending away for all kinds of stuff.

One time she sent me a big catalog of kitchen equipment—the kind you need for enormous institutions like prisons, which have a lot of people in them. It showed everything from blowers and hoods for stoves to huge pots ,md pans. So I'm thinking, "What the hell is this?"

It reminded me of the time I was up at MIT and Arlene sent me a catalog describing huge boats, from warships to ocean liners—great big boats. I wrote to her: "What's the idea?"

She writes back: "I just thought that maybe, when we get married, we could buy a boat."

I write, "Are you crazy? It's all out of proportion!"

Then another catalog comes: it's for big yachts—forty-loot schooners and stuff like that—for very rich people. She writes, "Since you said no to the other boats, maybe we rould get one of these."

I write, "Look: you're way out of scale!"

Soon another catalog comes: it's for various kinds of motor boats—Chriscraft this and that.

I write, "Too expensive!"

Finally, I get a note: "This is your last chance, Richard. You're always saying no." It turns out a friend of hers has a rowboat she wants to sell for $15—a used rowboat—and maybe we could buy it so we could row around in the water next summer.

So, yes. I mean, how can you say no after all that?

Well, I'm still trying to figure out what this big catalog for institutional kitchen equipment is leading to, when another catalog comes: it's for hotels and restaurants—supplies for small and medium-sized hotels and restaurants. Then a few days later, a catalog for the kitchen in your new home comes.

When I go down to Albuquerque the next Saturday, I find out what it's all about. There's a little charcoal broiler in her room—she's bought it through the mail from Sears. It's about eighteen inches across, with little legs.

"I thought we could have steaks," Arlene says.

"How the hell can we use it in the room, here, with all the smoke and everything?"

"Oh, no," she says. "All you have to do is take it out on the lawn. Then you can cook us steaks every Sunday."

The hospital was right on Route 66, the main road across the United States! "I can't do that," I said. "I mean, with all the cars and trucks going by, all the people on the sidewalk walking back and forth, I can't just go out there and start cookin' steaks on the lawn!"

"What do you care what other people think?" (Arlene tortured me with that!) "Okay," she says, opening a drawer, "we'll compromise: you don't have to wear the chefs hat and the gloves."

She holds up a hat—it's a real chefs hat—and gloves. Then she says, "Try on the apron," as she unfolds it. It has something silly written across it, like "BAR-B-Q KING," or something.

"Okay, okay!" I say, horrified. "I'll cook the steaks on the lawn!" So every Saturday or Sunday, I'd go out there on Route 66 and cook steaks.

Then there were the Christmas cards. One day, only a few weeks after I had arrived at Los Alamos, Arlene says, "I thought it would be nice to send Christmas cards to everybody. Would you like to see the ones I picked out?"

They were nice cards, all right, but inside they said Merry Christmas, from Rich & Putsy. "I can't send these to Fermi and Bethe," I protested. "I hardly even know them!"

"What do you care what other people think?"—naturally. So we sent them.

Next year comes around, and by this time I know Fermi. I know Bethe. I've been over at their houses. I've taken care of their kids. We're all very friendly.

Somewhere along the line, Arlene says to me, in a very formal tone, "You haven't asked me about our Christmas cards this year, Richard ..."

FEAR goes through me. "Uh, well, let's see the cards."

The cards say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from Richard and Arlene Feynman. "Well, that's fine," I say. "They're very nice. They'll go fine for everybody."

"Oh, no," she says. "They won't do for Fermi and Bethe and all those other famous people." Sure enough, she's got another box of cards.

She pulls one out. It says the usual stuff, and then: From Dr. & Mrs. R. P. Feynman.

So I had to send them those.

"What's this formal stuff, Dick?" they laughed. They were happy that she was having such a good time out of it, and that I had no control over it.

Arlene didn't spend all of her time inventing games. She had sent away for a book called Sound and Symbol in Chinese. It was a lovely book—I still have it—with about fifty symbols done in beautiful calligraphy, with explanations like "Trouble: three women in a house." She had the right paper, brushes, and ink, and was practicing calligraphy. She had also bought a Chinese dictionary, to get a lot of other symbols.

One time when I came to visit her, Arlene was practicing these things. She says to herself, "No. That one's wrong."

So I, the "great scientist," say, "What do you mean, 'wrong'? It's only a human convention. There's no law of nature which says how they're supposed to look; you can draw them any way you want."

"I mean, artistically it's wrong. It's a question of balance, of how it feels."

"But one way is just as good as another," I protest.

"Here," she says, and she hands me the brush. "Make one yourself."

So I made one, and I said, "Wait a minute. Let me make another one—it's too blobby." (I couldn't say it was wrong, after all.)

"How do you know how blobby it's supposed to be?" she says.

I learned what she meant. There's a particular way you have to make the stroke for it to look good. An aesthetic thing has a certain set, a certain character, which I can't define. Because it couldn't be defined made me think there was nothing to it. But I learned from that experience that there is something to it—and it's a fascination I've had for art ever since.

Just at this moment, my sister sends me a postcard from Oberlin, where she's going to college. It's written in pencil, with small symbols—it's in Chinese.

Joan is nine years younger than I am, and studied physics, too. Having me as her older brother was tough on her. She was always looking for something I couldn't do, and was secretly taking Chinese.

Well, I didn't know any Chinese, but one thing I'm good at is spending an infinite amount of time solving a puzzle. The next weekend I took the card with me to Albuquerque. Arlene showed me how to look up the symbols. You have to start in the back of the dictionary with the right category and count the number of strokes. Then you go into the main part of the dictionary. It turns out each symbol has several possible meanings, and you have to put several symbols together before you can understand it.

With great patience I worked everything out. Joan was saying things like, "I had a good time today." There was only one sentence I couldn't figure out. It said, "Yesterday we celebrated mountain-forming day"—obviously an error. (It turned out they did have some crazy thing called "Mountain-forming Day" at Oberlin, and I had translated it right!)

So it was trivial things like you'd expect to have on a postcard, but I knew from the situation that Joan was trying to floor me by sending me Chinese.

I looked back and forth through the art book and clicked out four symbols which would go well together. Then I practiced each one, over and over. I had a big pad of paper, and I would make fifty of each one, until I got it just right.

When I had accidentally made one good example of each symbol, I saved them. Arlene approved, and we glued the four of them end to end, one on top of the other. Then we put a little piece of wood on each end, so you could hang it up on the wall. I took a picture of my masterpiece with Nick Metropolis's camera, rolled up the scroll, put it in a tube, and sent it to Joan.

So she gets it. She unrolls it, and she can't read it. It looks to her as if I simply made four characters, one right after the other, on the scroll. She takes it to her teacher.

The first thing he says is, "This is written rather well! Did you do this?"

"Uh, no. What does it say?"

"Elder brother also speaks."

I'm a real bastard—I would never let my little sister score one on me.

When Arlene's condition became much weaker, her father came out from New York to visit her. It was difficult and expensive to travel that far during the war, but he knew the end was near. One day he telephoned me at Los Alamos. "You'd better come down here right away," he said.

I had arranged ahead of time with a friend of mine at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs, to borrow his car in case of an emergency, so I could get to Albuquerque quickly. I picked up a couple of hitchhikers to help me in case something happened on the way.

Sure enough, as we were driving into Santa Fe, we got a flat tire. The hitchhikers helped me change the tire. Then on the other side of Santa Fe, the spare tire went flat, but there was a gas station nearby. I remember waiting patiently for the gas station man to take care of some other car, when the two hitchhikers, knowing the situation, went over and explained to the man what it was. He fixed the flat right away. We decided not to get the spare tire fixed, because repairing it would have taken even more time.

We started out again towards Albuquerque, and I felt foolish that I hadn't thought to say anything to the gas station man when time was so precious. About thirty miles from Albuquerque, we got another flat! We had to abandon the car, and we hitchhiked the rest of the way. I called up a towing company and told them the situation.

I met Arlene's father at the hospital. He had been there for a few days. "I can't take it any more," he said. "I have to go home." He was so unhappy, he just left.

When I finally saw Arlene, she was very weak, and a bit fogged out. She didn't seem to know what was happening. She stared straight ahead most of the time, looking around a little bit from time to time, and was trying to breathe. Every once in a while her breathing would stop—and she would sort of swallow—and then it would start again. It kept going like this for a few hours.

I took a little walk outside for a while. I was surprised (hat I wasn't feeling what I thought people were supposed 10 feel under the circumstances. Maybe I was fooling myself. I wasn't delighted, but I didn't feel terribly upset, perhaps because we had known for a long time that it was going to happen.

It's hard to explain. If a Martian (who, we'll imagine, never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures—these humans who live about seventy or eighty years, knowing that death is going to come—it would look to him like a terrible problem of psychology to live under those circumstances, knowing that life is only temporary. Well, we humans somehow figure out how to live despite this problem: we laugh, we joke, we live.

The only difference for me and Arlene was, instead of fifty years, it was five years. It was only a quantitative difference—the psychological problem was just the same. The only way it would have become any different is if we had said to ourselves, "But those other people have it better, because they might live fifty years." But that's crazy. Why make yourself miserable saying things like, "Why do we have such bad luck? What has God done to us? What have we done to deserve this?"—all of which, if you understand reality and take it completely into your heart, are irrelevant .and unsolvable. They are just things that nobody can know. Your situation is just an accident of life.

We had a hell of a good time together.

I came back into her room. I kept imagining all the things that were going on physiologically: the lungs aren't Ceiling enough air into the blood, which makes the brain out and the heart weaker, which makes the breathing even more difficult. I kept expecting some sort of avalanching effect, with everything caving in together in a dramatic collapse. But it didn't appear that way at all: she just slowly got more foggy, and her breathing gradually became less and less, until there was no more breath—but just before that, there was a very small one.

The nurse on her rounds came in and confirmed that Arlene was dead, and went out—I wanted to be alone for a moment. I sat there for a while, and then went over to kiss her one last time.

I was very surprised to discover that her hair smelled exactly the same. Of course, after I stopped and thought about it, there was no reason why hair should smell different in such a short time. But to me it was a kind of a shock, because in my mind, something enormous had just happened—and yet nothing had happened.

The next day, I went to the mortuary. The guy hands me some rings he's taken from her body. "Would you like to see your wife one last time?" he asks.

"What kind of a—no, I don't want to see her, no!" I said. "I just saw her!"

"Yes, but she's been all fixed up," he says.

This mortuary stuff was completely foreign to me. Fixing up a body when there's nothing there? I didn't want to look at Arlene again; that would have made me more upset.

I called the towing company and got the car, and packed Arlene's stuff in the back. I picked up a hitchhiker, and started out of Albuquerque.

It wasn't more than five miles before . . . BANG! Another flat tire. I started to curse.

The hitchhiker looked at me like I was mentally unbalanced. "It's just a tire, isn't it?" he says.

"Yeah, it's just a tire—and another tire, and again another tire, and another tire!"

We put the spare tire on, and went very slowly, all the Way back to Los Alamos, without getting the other tire repaired.

I didn't know how I was going to face all my friends at Los Alamos. I didn't want people with long faces talking to me about the death of Arlene. Somebody asked me what happened.

"She's dead. And how's the program going?" I said.

They caught on right away that I didn't want to moon over it. Only one guy expressed his sympathy, and it turned out he had been out of town when I came back to Los Alamos.

One night I had a dream, and Arlene came into it. Right away, I said to her, "No, no, you can't be in this dream. You're not alive!"

Then later, I had another dream with Arlene in it. I started in again, saying, "You can't be in this dream!"

"No, no," she says. "I fooled you. I was tired of you, so I cooked up this ruse so I could go my own way. But now I like you again, so I've come back." My mind was really working against itself. It had to be explained, even in a goddamn dream, why it was possible that she was still there!

I must have done something to myself, psychologically. I didn't cry until about a month later, when I was walking past a department store in Oak Ridge and noticed a pretty dress in the window. I thought, "Arlene would like that," and then it hit me.

WHAT