The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(90)

There was another problem—the dramatic new difference in their relative status was coming between them. When Amos visited the University of British Columbia, he seemed to be lowering himself. Danny went up to Palo Alto and Amos came down to Vancouver. “Amos was a contemptuous person, and I could sense how provincial he thought the place was,” said Danny. One night as they talked, Amos blurted out that the difference he felt being at Stanford was the difference of being in a place where everyone was first-rate. “That was a first,” recalled Danny. “I knew he really did not mean a thing by it and that he probably regretted saying it—but I remember the thought that it was simply inevitable that Amos would feel some condescending pity and that I would be hurt by it.”

But Danny’s overwhelming feeling was of frustration. He’d gone the better part of a decade having all his ideas more or less in Amos’s presence. There was no time at all between the moment either of them had some idea and the moment he shared it with the other. The magic was what happened next: the uncritical acceptance, the joining together of their minds. “I have a feeling that I initiate a lot, but the product is always out of my reach,” Danny would one day tell Miles Shore. Now he was back to working alone, sensing an absence of thoughts that would improve his own. “I was having an enormous number of ideas, but he wasn’t there,” said Danny. “And so those ideas were wasted, because they didn’t have the benefit of the kind of thinking that Amos was capable of putting into things.”

A few months after Danny wrote his memo to Amos, in April 1979, he and Amos delivered a pair of talks at the University of Michigan. The occasion was the prestigious annual Katz-Newcomb Lecture Series, and the striking thing about it, to Danny, was that both of them had been invited, not just Amos. Danny’s impression that Amos might be feeling low on new ideas was confirmed when Amos took for the subject of his talk their joint work on framing. Danny’s was his first public unveiling of ideas he had cooked up in their nine months apart. “The Psychology of Possible Worlds,” he called it. “Because we feel ourselves to be among friends,” he began, “Amos and I have decided on what otherwise would be a risky choice for this lecture. A topic that we have only recently begun to study, and about which we still have much more enthusiasm than we have knowledge. . . . We shall explore the role of unrealized possibilities in our emotional response to reality and in our understanding of it.”

He then explained the rules of undoing. He had created more vignettes to test on subjects—in addition to a banker who was killed in a car crash by a drugged-out boy, there was another unlucky man, who had died of both a heart attack and from failing to hit the brakes on his car. Most of them he’d dreamed up late at night in Vancouver. He’d been awakened so often by his thoughts on the subject that he’d kept a notepad by his bed. Amos might be the superior mind, but Danny was the better talker. Amos might be getting the lion’s share of the rewards of their relocation to North America, but that couldn’t last forever: People would see his contribution. The audience was enthralled—he could see that. And when he was done, no one was in a hurry to leave. They were standing around together, and Amos’s old mentor Clyde Coombs approached them with genuine wonder in his eyes. “The ideas, so many ideas, where do they come from?” he asked. And Amos said, “Danny and I don’t talk about these things.”

Danny and I don’t talk about these things.

That was the moment when the story unspooling in Danny’s mind began to change. Later he would point to it and say: That is the beginning of the end of us. He would later seek to undo the moment, but when he did, he did not say, “If only Clyde Coombs had not asked that question.” Or: “If only I felt as invulnerable as Amos.” Or: “If only I had never left Israel.” He said, “If only Amos was capable of self-effacement.” Amos was the actor in Danny’s imagination. Amos was the object in focus. Amos had been handed on a platter a chance to give Danny credit for what he had done, and Amos had declined to take it. They’d move on, but the moment had lodged itself in Danny’s mind and would refuse to leave it. “Something happens when you are with a woman you love,” said Danny. “You know something happened. You know it’s not good. But you go on.” You are in love, and yet you sense a new force pulling you out of it. Your mind has lit upon the possibility of another narrative. You half hope something comes along to stabilize or reenergize the old one. In this case, nothing came along. “I wanted Amos to lean back against what was happening and he was not doing it, nor did he accept that he had to do it,” said Danny.

After Michigan, Danny gave talks about the undoing project and neglected to mention Amos. He’d never done that sort of thing before. For a decade, they had had a hard-and-fast rule against inviting others anywhere near areas of mutual interest. At the end of 1979, or perhaps in early 1980, Danny began to talk to a young assistant professor at UBC named Dale Miller, sharing his ideas about the way people compared reality to its alternatives. When Miller asked about Amos, Danny said that they were no longer working together. “He was in Amos’s shadow and he was very worried about that, I think,” said Miller. It wasn’t long before Danny and Miller were working on a paper together that might just as well have been called “The Undoing Project.” “I thought that they had agreed to see other people,” said Miller. “And he was insistent that his days of collaborating with Amos were over. I remember a lot of fraught conversations. At some point he said to be gentle with him, because this was his first relationship after Amos.”