The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(26)
Even so, most of the stories people told about Amos had less to do with what came out of his mouth than with the unusual way he moved through the world. He kept the hours of a vampire. He went to bed when the sun came up and woke up at happy hour. He ate pickles for breakfast and eggs for dinner. He minimized quotidian tasks he thought a waste of time—he could be found in the middle of the day, having just woken up, driving himself to work while shaving and brushing his teeth in the rearview mirror. “He never knew what time of the day it was,” said his daughter, Dona. “It didn’t matter. He’s living in his own sphere and you just happened to encounter him there.” He didn’t pretend to be interested in whatever others expected him to be interested in—God help anyone who tried to drag him to a museum or a board meeting. “For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like,” Amos liked to say, plucking a line from the Muriel Spark novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. “He just skipped family vacations,” says his daughter. “He’d come if he liked the place. Otherwise he didn’t.” The children didn’t take it personally: They loved their father and knew that he loved them. “He loved people,” said his son Oren. “He just didn’t like social norms.”
A lot of things that most human beings would never think to do, to Amos simply made sense. For instance, when he wanted to go for a run he . . . went for a run. No stretching, no jogging outfit or, for that matter, jogging: He’d simply strip off his slacks and sprint out his front door in his underpants and run as fast as he could until he couldn’t run anymore. “Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment,” said his friend Avishai Margalit, “and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it.”
What all those who came to know Amos eventually realized was that the man had a preternatural gift for doing only precisely what he wanted to do. Varda Liberman recalled visiting him one day and seeing a table with a week’s worth of mail on it. There were tidy little stacks, one for each day, each filled with requests and entreaties and demands upon Amos’s time: job offers, offers of honorary degrees, requests for interviews and lectures, requests for help with some abstruse problem, bills. When the new mail came in Amos opened anything that interested him and left the rest in its daily pile. Each day the new mail arrived and shoved the old mail down the table. When a pile reached the end of the table Amos pushed it, unopened, off the edge into a waiting garbage can. “The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.” “I would say to Amos I have to do this or I have to do that,” recalled his old friend Yeshu Kolodny. “And he would say, ‘No. You don’t.’ And I thought: lucky man!”
There was this beautiful simplicity to Amos: His likes and dislikes could be inferred directly and accurately and at all times from his actions. Amos’s three children have vivid memories of watching their parents drive off to see some movie picked by their mother, only to have their father turn up back at their couch twenty minutes later. Amos would have decided, in the first five minutes, whether the movie was worth seeing—and if it wasn’t he’d just come home and watch Hill Street Blues (his favorite TV drama) or Saturday Night Live (he never missed it) or an NBA game (he was obsessed with basketball). He’d then go back and fetch his wife after her movie ended. “They’ve already taken my money,” he’d explain. “Should I give them my time, too?” If by some freak accident he found himself at a gathering of his fellow human beings that held no appeal for him, he’d become invisible. “He’d walk into a room and decide he didn’t want anything to do with it and he would fade into the background and just vanish,” says Dona. “It was like a superpower. And it was absolutely an abnegation of social responsibility. He didn’t accept social responsibility—and so graciously, so elegantly, didn’t accept it.”
Occasionally Amos offended someone—of course he did. His darting pale blue eyes were enough to unsettle people who didn’t know him. Their constant motion gave them the impression he wasn’t listening to them, when the problem, often, was that he had listened too well. “For him the main thing is the people who don’t know the difference between knowing and not knowing,” says Avishai Margalit. “If he thought you were a bore and there was nothing there, he could cut you like nothing.” Those who knew him best learned how to rationalize whatever he had said or done.
It never occurred to him that anyone with whom he wanted to spend time wouldn’t want to spend time with him. “He expected first of all to charm you,” said Samuel Sattath. “Which was odd for such a smart person.” “He sort of invited people to love him,” said Yeshu Kolodny. “When you were on the good side of Amos he was very easy to love. Extremely easy. There was a competition around him. People competed for Amos.” It was a very common thing for Amos’s friends to ask themselves: I know why I like him, but why does he like me?
* * *
Amnon Rapoport did not lack for admirers. He’d been famously brave in battle. Israeli women, taking in for the first time his blond hair and tanned skin and chiseled features, often decided he was the best-looking man they’d ever laid eyes on. One day he’d earn his PhD in mathematical psychology and become a highly regarded professor, with his pick of the world’s universities. And yet he, too, when he sensed that Amos liked him, wondered why. “I know that what attracted me to Amos was how clever he was,” said Amnon. “I don’t know what attracted him to me. I was supposed to be very handsome, maybe that.” Whatever its source, the attraction was strong. From the moment they met, Amnon and Amos were inseparable. They sat side by side in the same classes; they lived in the same apartments; they spent summers hiking the country together. They were famously a pair. “I think some people thought we were homosexual or something,” said Amnon.