be, how to live safely within and without PERSONAL HIITOIW them. My efforts have been only partly successful: after fifiy-two years, I am left with the melancholy sensation that my PARALLEL PLAY life has been spent in a perperual state of parallel play, alongside, but distinctly A lift time ofrestless isolation explained. apart from, the rest ofhumanity. From early childhood, my memory BY TIM PAGE was so acute and my wit so bleak that I was described as a genius-by my parents, y second-grade teacher never I received a grade of "Unsatisfac by our neighbors, and even, on occasion, M liked me much, and one assign tory" in Social Development from the by the same teachers who gsve me failing ment I turned in annoyed her so extrav Mansfield Public Schools that year. I did marks. I wrapped myself in this mande, of agantly that the red pencil with which not work to the best of my ability, did course, as a poetic justification for behav she scrawled "See me!" broke through not show neatness and care in assign ior that might otherwise have been judged the lined paper. Our class had been ments, did not coOperate with the group, unhinged, and I did my best to believe in asked to write about a recent field trip, and did not exercise self-control. About it. But the explanation made no sense. A and, as was so often the case in those the only positive assessment was that I genius at what? Were other "geniuses" days, I had noticed the wrong things: worked well independently. Of course: so oblivious that they couldrlt easily teli right from left and idly wet their Well, we went to Boston, Mas pants into adolescence? VVhat ac sachusetts through the town of Warrenville, Connecticut on Route counted for my rages and frustra 44A. It was very pretty and there tions, for the imperious contempt was a church that reminded me of I showed to people who were in pictures of Russia from our book that is published by Time-Life. We a position to do me harm? Al arrived in Boston at 9:17. At 11 we though I delighted in younger went on a big tour of Boston on children, whom I could instruct Gray Line 43,made by the Superior Bus Company like School Bus Six, and gently dominate, and I was which goes down Hunting Lodge thrilled when I ran across an adult Road where Maria lives and then willing to discuss my pet subjects, on to Separatist Road and then to South Eagleville before it comes I could establish no connection to our school. We saw lots of good with most of my classmates. My things like the Boston Massacre pervasive childhood memory is site. The tour ended at 1:05. Before I knew it we were going home. We an excruciating awareness of my went through Warrenville again but own strangeness. it was too dark to see much. A few Despite their roseate talk, my days later it was Easter. We got a cuckoo clock. parents and my school put a good dealofeffurtinto £ndingoutpre It is an unconventional but ciselywhatwaswrong-withme. It hardly unobservant report. was obvious that I was not "nor In truth, I didn't care one bit mal," especially by the straitened about Boston on that spting day standards of the early nineteen in 1963. Instead, I wanted to sixties. I have sometimes won learn about Wa...rrenville, a vil dered whether the I. Q scores lage a few miles northeast of the with which I was credited were town ofMansfield, Connecticut, nudged upward by my father, where we were then living. I had who was both a professional edu memorized the map of Mans catorwith a keen interest in gifted field, and knew all the school The author~first and. most powerfol obsession was music. children and the person who ad bus routes by heart-a litany I ministered my most triumphant would sing out to anybody I oould cor then as now, it was all that I could do. examinations. VVhatever the case, while ner. But Warrenville was in the town of - In the years since the phrase became my younger brother and sister soared Ashford, for which I had no guide, and a cliche, I have received any number of through school, academically and socially, I remember the blissful-sense of resolu compliments for my supposed ability to I was consistently at or near the bottom of tion Ifeltwhen I certified that Route 44A "think outside the box." Actually, it has the class, and decidedly out of control- ~ ~ crossed Route 89 in the town center, for been a struggle for me to perceive just half asleep or aggressively aSsertive- i I had long hypothesized that they might what these "boxes" were--whytheywere much of the time. ~ meet there. Ofsuch joys and pains was my there, why other people regarded them as And so, betvveen the ages of seven and ~ childhood composed. important, where their borderlines might fifteen, I was given glucose-tolerance 8
3G THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 20, 2007 tests, anti-seizure m~dications, electroen the condition; which had been recog cephalograms, and an occasional Mega nized by the American Psychiatric Asso don to shut- me down at night. I suffered ciation only six years earlier. Neverthe through a summer ofBible camp; exercise less, the diagnosis was one of those rare regimens were begun and abandoned; and clinical confirmations which are met the school even brought in a psychiatrist mostly with relie£ Here, finally, was an to grill me once a week Somehow, every objective explanation for some of my June, I was promoted to the next grade, strengths and weaknesses, the simulta having accomplished little to deserve it. neous capacity for unbroken work and Meanwhile, the more kindly homeroom all-encompassing recall, linked inextrica teachers, knowing that I would be tor bly to a driven, uncomfortable pmonal mented on the playground, permitted me ity. And I learned that there were others to spend recess periods indoors, where I like me--people who yearned for steady memorized vast portions ofthe 1961 edi routines, repeated patterns, and a few tion of the World Book Encyclopedia. cherished subjects, the driftwood that A brown carton in my basement con keeps us a±loat. tains most ofthe surviving documents of The syndrome was identified, in 1944, my childhood, and they present a pretty by Hans Asperger, a Viennese pediatri fair portrait of my pre-teen obsessions. cian, who wrote, "For success in science There are meandering and implausible or art, a dash of autism is essential" Yet stories, none with happy endings; in Oliver Sacks makes a clear distinction be tricately detailed street maps of make tween full-fledged autism and Asperger's believe cities on which I worked silently syndrome. In The New Yorker some years for hours; and countless crayon drawings ago, Sacks wrote that "people with As of grinning girls with shoulder-length perger's syndrome can teli us of their ex hair and U -shaped smiles, their stick periences, their inner feelings and states, figures fleshed out only by exaggerated whereas those with classical autism can biceps. Other children collected coins or not. With classical autism there is no baseball cards; I tore obitnaries ofSophie 'window,' and we can only infer. With Tucker and David 0. Selznick from the Asperger's syndrome there is self-con Hartford Courant and pasted them slop sciousness and at least some power to in pily into a scrapbook trospect and report." In my darker moods, I think that the In his 1998 book "Asperger's Syn rest of my life can be encapsulated in a drome: A Guide for Parents and Pro single sentence: I grew up and grew into fessionals," Tony Attwood observed, other preoccupations, some of which "The person with Asperger's syndrome have served me well I became a music has no distinguishing physical featnres critic and culture writer, first for the SoHo but is primarily viewed by other people News, and then for the Times, Newsday, as different because of their unusual and theWashington Post. In the middle quality of social behavior and conversa l of all this, I became enamored of the tion skills. For example, a woman with American author Dawn Powell, whose Asperger's Syndrome described how as life and works I absorbed in much the a child she saw people moving into the same manner I had the World Book, and house up the street, ran up-to one ofthe I spent five years editing her novels, short new kids and, instead of the conven r, stories, plays, diaries, and letters and vvrit tional greeting and request of 'Hi, you ,_ ing her first biography. I look back on want to play?,' proclaimed, 'Nine times :d these projects with a certain mystified sat nine is equal to 81.' " l- isfaction; fm glad they were done, but it David l\1amet, in his recent book nt is as though they had been accomplished ''Bambi vs. Godzilla," discerned redeem le by somebody else, for the particular furies ing qualities in the condition. Consider ,d and fevers that impelled them have long ing filmmakers past and present, he ly, since evapm:ated. stated that "it is nodmpossible that As of perger's syndrome helped make the mov -~ n the fall of2000, in the course ofwhat ies. The symptoms of this developmen -,;f I had become a protracted effort to tal disorder include early precocity, a e identifY-and, ifpossible, alleviate-my great ability to maintain masses ofinfor nd ~ lifelong unease, I was told that I had As mation, a lack of ability to mix with 1ce u perger's syndrome. I had never heard of groups in age-appropriate ways, igno- ranee of or indifference to social norms, We are informally referred to as "As wanted them-was a bewildering pro high intelligence, and difficulty with pies," and ifwe are not very, very good at cess. I felt like an alien, always about to be transitions, married to a preternatural something we tend to do it very poorly. exposed. Or, to adapt another hoary but abilit}r to concentrate on the minutia of Little in life comes naturally-except for useful analogy, not only did I not see the the task at hand." our random, inexplicable, and often un forest for the trees; I was so intensely dis The Asperger's spectrum ranges from controllable gifts---and, even more than tracted that I missed the trees for the spe people barely more abstracted than a ste most children, we assemble our person cies oflichen on their bark. reotypical "absent-minded professor'' to alities unevenly, piece by piece, almost My first and most powerful obsession the full-blown, albeit highly functioning, robotically, from models we admire. was music-the same records played autistic. Symptoms of Asperger's have (I remember the deliberate decision to again and again while I watched them been attributed ex: post facto to success appropriate one teacher's mischievous spin, astonished at their evocation of ful figures, but these are the fortunate grin and darting eyes, which I found aural worlds that I not only instinc ones-persons able to invent outlets for so charming that I thought they might tively understood even as a toddler but their ever-welling monomanias. Many work for me, too.) in which I actually felt comfortable. I are not so lucky, and some end up insti So preoccupied are we -with our inner was both terrified of and tantalized by tutionalized or homeless. (In the late imperatives that the outer world may death (which was absolutely real to me nineteen-seventies, I saw a ragged, overwhelm and confuse. What anguished from earliest childhood), and by the way haunted man who spent urgent hours pity I used to feel for pinatas at birthday recordings restored Enrico Caruso and dodging the New York transit police to parties, those papier-mache donkeys with Nellie Melba to life for a few minutes, trace the dates and lineage of the Haps their amiable smiles about to be shattered ghostly visitors who had returned to burg nobility on the walls ofsubway sta by little brutes with bats. On at least one sing for me at 78 r.p.m., through a hiss tions.) For some-----record collectors with occasion, I begged for a stay of execution of shellac and antiquity. every catalogue number at hand, theatre and eventually had to be taken home, YVhen I was ten, I became fascinated buffs with first-night casts memorized, weeping, convinced that I had just wit by silent films, the visual complement to cbildren who draw precise architectural nessed the braining of a new and sympa my old records. I spent hours at the li blueprints of nineteenth-century silk thetic acquaintance. brary ofthe University of Connecticut, a mills-a cluster of facts can be both lu Caring for ina.:'1imate objects came few minutes' walk from home, research minous and lyric, something around easily. Learning to make genuine connec ing the lives of actors and actresses on which to construct a life. tions with people-muclb as I desperately microfilm, and .recall the genuine sense of mourning that came over me when I saw Barbara LaMarr's sad, youthful face on an obituary page from 1926. Notsur prisingly, "Sunset Boulevard" was my fa vorite "talkie" (I actually called them that-in 1965!), and I'd regularly set the alarm and wake in the middle of the night to watch Chester Conklin or Lou ise Dresser take On minor roles in some B movie that the Worcester, Massachu setts, UHF station put on when nobody else was watching.
"Idespise the Beatles and their ilk," this remarkably Blimpish young man proclaimed in a school paper shortly after the first Ed Sullivan show, when other boys my age were growing their hair long and learning to play the guitar. My favorite pop musician then was the Scottish comedian Harry Lauder, a star in vaudeville and music halls at the beginning of the last centuty, who told obscure jokes in brogue and sang through exaggerated hiccups in a state ofpretend intoxication. The depth of my admiration for Lauder now baffles me as much as the steady diet of hore hound drops I adopted as snack food, or my insistence, much of one autumn, that I wear a rabbit's foot in each but embedded among the strongest kids, to poked myself repeatedly through my tonhole of my shirt, which I kept tighdy provide some chance of even battle. In pocket with a pin-anything to keep fastened up to the neck. But nobody memory, it is forever bases loaded with my mind engaged. But it was impossi could have persuaded me to abandon two outs when my turn at the plate ble: a leaf would fall outside the open these quirks, and any attempt to do so comes, and I am as well suited as a giraffe window, orrd notice the pattern of the would have been taken as a physical to meet the big red ball that rolls toward veins on a girl's hand, or a shout from threat and reduced me to hysteria. me with frightening speed. the playground would trigger a set ofir A friend published a sweet autobiog Still, for a moment the same people resistible associations that carried me raphy entitled ''Thank You, Everyone," who generally disdained or bullied me back to another day. in which she expressed gratitude to ev became my friends, cheering me on to And then the dream was ruptured by erybody who had influenced her, rang hitherto unsuspected athletic the sound of a bell; the class ing from Woody Allen to my sister glory: "You can do it, Tim!" If was irrevocably over, and I Betsy. Ifi were to create a similar book, I could make the ball lose its knew no more about quadratic I would call it "Sorry, Everyone," and gravity, as my best pal, Annie, equations or beryllium than I apologize for my youthful cluelessness: did so effortlessly with those did an hour before. Failure To the girl in seventh grade with the balletic whomps from her long was now assured, and the protruding jawbone (it never occurred to legs, I might redeem myself. countdown began to the Dies me that she would not share my enthu Our gym teacher, Miss B. Irae, when my report card siasm for her unusually simian features). scowling, beefjr, and, after four would land me in trouble To the boy who came over to my house decades, the only person in the again, for my father was in in the middle of my Caruso phase and world I just might swerve to credulous that a boy who endured a precious weekend afternoon hit on a deserted road-had no such il blithely recited the names and dates of comparing recordings of"Celeste Aida." lusions and waited for the inevitable, the United States' Presidents and their To the perplexed young women from with her festering contempt and ready wives couldn't manage to pass elemen early adolescence who might have be whisrle. Grinning stupidly, shirttail out tary math and science. I grew enormously come lovers had I understood that their and flapping, underwear pulled halfWay fond of my father in later life, but he ter sudden friendship and proximity had up my back, I would lope toward the ball, rified me then. He lived until2005, long any sort of physical impetus. Instead, I which would eventually collide with my enough to recognize, through my diag chattered on about this and that, rarely ankle or heel and then bounce off into· nosis, some of the problems that had making eye contact, and soon they van the woods or into the waiting arms ofthe vexed him throughout his own career and, ished, in search of more game and catcher. My chance was up, and I was a better yet, to know and delight in my grounded potential partners. Sorry, ev freak once more. three children, to whom he showed a se eryone. I didn't understand. "So?" I wanted to scream. 'There are rene gentleness. It was hard for me to be touched. I things that I know; things that I can do. My grades, always disastrous, only froze when I was hugged by anybody Can you name the duet from La Bo worsened as I grew older and more was who was not a relative, and I made love heme that Antonio Scotti and Geraldine expected ofme. Nevertheless, by the age like the Tin Man until I was well into Farrar recorded in Camden, New Jersey, of twelve I was able to storm through id adulthood. Like many children before on October 6, 1909? What was the New iosyncratic renditions ofmost of the eas and since, I recoiled when fundamental York address of D. W. Griffith's first ier Chopin pieces and ofthe simpler pas facts about the reproduction of the spe studio? How many books by David Gra sages in his larger works. That was also cies were explained to me (there was, ham Phillips have you read? Who was the year that I finished my first novel typically for the time and the place, no Adelaide Crapsejl I learned to play the fifry pages ofit, filled with a narrative in suggestion that new pleasures might be entire Chopin Prelude in E Minor in a -vention that fve never been able to recap involved, and the physical act, examined single night!" And then tears, of course, ture. The manuscript was lost long ago, through an anxious, pre-sexual eye, and the taunts redoubled. but I do recall that I killed off my central sounded bizarre). Shordy after this en The class work, hardly less humiliat character, a cat, by having him eat "badly lightenment, my parents threw a party, ing, was at least more private. Ifi wasn't prepared fish_" I am still in possession of attended by their closest friends. l deeply interested in a subject, I couldn't a school report on "Making a Living in watched their athletic, fortyish bodies, concentrate on it at all-those dreadful the Amazon," which we had been re properly clothed, in mortified amaze algebra classes, those Bunsen burners, quired to work on for a week My contri ment, and then took a recount of their the mystifYing and now deservedly ex bution read, in its entirety, "In the dense, children. Oh, my God, I thought. They tinct slide rule! Late in each semester, rainy, rain forest, it is hard to make a liv did that three times! when it became obvious to me that I ing. One way is fishing in the river that is Anything related to the human body had no idea what I was supposed to from a mile wide to a 100 miles wide. seemed to me bad news. In the fourth have learned, r d attend some makeup Brazil nut collecting is another way. You grade, when my affiiction was most in classes and try desperately to pay atten can gather manioc. You are very limited tense, I would be herded out to play tion. As the teacher rattled on, I would as to what to do for a living in the Ama kickball during our physical-education grind my teeth, twirl the tops of my wn rain forest." classes. Teams were chosen, and I was socks around my index finger---once I Byway ofcomparison, here is the be-
THE NEW 'tOR.KER., AUGUST 20, 2007 39 Rhine started to play and a flowering drone filled my head; time was suspended, and I was transformed. Much has been made of Wagner's harmonic resdessness--of the way that a work such as 'Tristan und Isolde" led in exorably to the so-called" atonalitj' ofAr nold Schoenberg and his myriad disciples. But what astonished me in "Das Rhein gold," although I couldn't have stated it then, was the opposite quality: the operis unprecedented harmonic stasis, the man ner in which it explored the churning inner life of sustained chords, from the three amazing minutes ofE-Flat Major that set the score in mOtion through the aflinnation ofthe Gods, Valhalla, and the eternal D-F1at Major at the end. Tills was music that one could dwell in, a sort of sonic weather. I loved its re sistance to change, its protracted unfold ing, its mantric sense of pe.tpetual return. ginning of a twenty-five-hundred-word stated reasons for courtesy, gentility, and A large part ofmy career has been devoted story that I 'Wrote the same month, typ scrupulousness-reasons that I could re to writing about music, and I date my first ing it on my father's gray oversized IBM spect, understand, and implement. It more or less mature criticism to the world electric in a single evening: suggested ways to inaugurate conversa premiere of another composition that tions 'Without launching into a lecture, shared some ofthese same qualities, Steve Nobody knew why the rain had not stopped. The weather report had said four in reminded me of the importance of lis Reich's "Music For 18 Musicians,"which ten for light showers in the early morning. But tening as well as speaking, and con I heard in New York, at the Town Hall, here it was: 5 o'clock. And it was pouring. vinced me that manners, properly un inAprilof1976. There was nothing to stop Lady Lieg from leaving the library. She had all the derstood, existed to make. other people I arrived back at my Third Avenue equipment, a fold~up umbrella, galoshes, et~ feel comfortable, rather than (as I had walkup, knowing that I'd never fall cetera and so on. But there was this book on suspected) to demonstrate the practi asleep, with an urgent need to react to Alia Nazimova that just begged to be taken. How could she resist it? tioner's social superiority. I revelled in the work. What I had heard struck me as Post's guidance _and absorbed her les so beautiful and unusual, so distinctly of How indeed? In no way am I mak sons. And, typically, I took them too far: its time but in such radical opposition to ing a case that I possessed any innate tal even today, I would never dream of ad most "new music" of the seventies, that I ent for fiction (although it took a certain dressing a teen-age busboy in a small wrote through the night, attempting to prescience to hypothesize a biography town diner as anything other than "sir." summarize my impressions. Five years ·of N azimova some thirty :fears before I found Emily Post among my moth later, I published a study ofwhat by then Gavin Lambert's volume was published). er's paperbacks, but most of the books I· had come to be known as minimalism, But, amid the usual obfuscating data, read came from the UConn library, and it incorporated some ofwhat I 'WrOte there are flashes ofverisimilitude and un where I was always made to feel at home, that night: derstanding, all ofwhich was new to me. even in high rabbit's-foot regalia. Eve!}' Minerva-like, the music springs to life fully By then, I had discovered Maugham, room held treasures, but my favorite spot formed-from dead silence to fever pitch.... and Hemingway, and Camus, and had was the listening station at the Music Li Imagine concentrating on a challenging mod begun to trace in literature some emo braty, where, one blessed aflernoon, I put ern painting that becomes just a little different every time you shift your attention from one tional pathways that would fulfill me on some bulbous headphones that made detail to another. Or trying to impose a frame infinitely more than the road map of a me look like Mickev Mouse and heard on a running river-making it a finite, en Connecticut town. the prelude to ''Das' Rheingolcf' for the closed wo.rk of art yet leaving its kinetic qual ity unsullied, leaving it flowing freely on all first time. sides. It has been done. Steve Reich has framed ddly, the book that helped pull me The word that yearwas "psychedelic," the river. Ointo the human race was Emily and I had no idea what it meant, although Post's "Etiquette," which I had picked I had gleaned that "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Today, I find myself wondering ifi up in a moment of early-teen hippie Hearts Club Band," Peter Max posters, would have responded so profoundly to scorn, fully intending to mock what certain novels by Hermann Hesse, and this starkly reiterative, rigidly patterned I was sure would be an "uncool" jus the whole city of San Francisco were music had I not hadAsperger's syndrome. tification ofbourgeois rules and regula awash in this new and magical quality. This is not an aesthetic cop-out: I can tions. Instead, the book offered clearly And then Wagner's depiction ofthe River make an intellectual case for minimalism,
40 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUSf 20, 2007 and I am hardly the only writer who has hounds, and my passions range widely, "neurodiversity," arguing that there are done so. But its initial appeal for me was if spottily, through any number of fields. advantages as well as disadvantages in an purely visceral. As the Qyakers might Laughter, meditation, therapy, Valium, autistic condition. say, this music spoke to my condition. (I antidepressants, liberal helpings of wine I apply Romain Rolland's practical ' would later experience a similar, curiously and beer, loyal and patient friends, for credo---"pessimism of the intelligence; mechanical limbic ecstasy upon a first en giving children, a congenial work situa optimism ofthe -will''-to my aspirations, counter with "Last Year at Marienbad.") tion that allows me to spend much of my but I cannot pretend that Aspergeis has rime alone---all these have helped me to not made much of my existence misera t was never difficult for me to articu carry on. Overstirnuladon remains a pos ble and isolated (how will I get to sleep I late my feelings about anything exter itive horror, and I am most comfortable in tonight?). I hope that young Aspies, in nal rve rarely run short of opinions, well dark or neutral clothing, under gray skies. formed by recent literature on the subject, founded or othexwise. But deeper emo I thrive on routines: I like to walk into the will find the world somewhat less chal tions reduced me (and, to some extent, same restaunmts, sit in the same seats, and lenging than I have. reduce me still) to aching silence, espe order the same meals, and I took it per By now, I am fairly used to myself, and cially when I feared that I wonld be ex sonallywhen the PanAm Building started my symptoms bloom publicly only on rare posed, misunderstood, or ridiculed. I em passing itself off as MetLife. occasions. Waiting for the check after a pathizedwith Rostand's Cyrano (a serious There is no cure for Asperger' s syn Washington lunch in 2005, I realized that rival to Ferdinand the Bull in my private drome, and there is even some ques it was both the hundred and fortieth anni pantheon ofliterary heroes), who was too tion whether it should be considered an versary of Lincoln's assassination and ex terrified to utter the crucial words to the affi.iction or merely a "difference"--one of actly forty years since the murderers ofthe woman he loved. I suffer little stage fright many human variants. The reporter Amy Clutter family ("In Cold Bloocf') were put when it comes to public speaking or ap Harmon wrote in the Times that some to death in Kansas. I doubt that my com pearances on radio or television, but I con autistics view themselves as part of"an ad panion was equally thrilled by this coinci tinue to find unstructured participation in hoc human rights movement," and view dence, especiallywhen elaborated upon in small social gatherings agonizing. It would autism itself as "an integral part of their such sudden, bursting detail in the mid be easier for me to improvise an epic poem identities, much more like a skin than a dle of a lovely spring day, but at least I at a sold-out Yankee Stadium than to ap shell, and not one they care to shed." A controlled the temptation to launch into proach an attractive stranger across the group called Aspies for Freedom runs a lengthy exculpation of Mrs. Surratt. I room and strike up a conversation. a Web site that celebrates what it calls count that as progress. + Falling in love surprised me; I had never imagined sustained contentment, and certainly not in the company of an other person Yet here it was: even mak ing the bed together in the morning, an act that had hitherto struck me as Si syphean, took on meaning, as the pre lude to another gloriously ordinary day, to be followed by tea, the newspapers, a couple hours ofwork, and then lunch in the neighborhood. While it lasted, ev erything was enhanced; I just wish this were the time and place to write that first happy ending. The fact that my understanding of affection, comradeship, and human em pathy has been hard-won rather than being wired in from the start does not make these feelings less genuine. I am still friends with most of the people I was friends with thirty years ago, and I worry about them daily (here I concur with Virgil Thomson, who once said that wony was one form of prayer that he found acceptable). My intimates, new and old, are permanent £xtures in my ex perience, and that some of them-too many-are no longer living has not di minished my devotion. I've transcended Lauder and hore-