1. There was a myth in college that Renata Adler had come over to America in a suitcase, and that’s how she got her tremor. Students gossiped about her at Bryn Mawr in the 1950s, and so did writers in Manhattan, later on, when she started working for The New Yorker. One man apparently thought that she was an alcoholic, just as some people, meeting her now, have suspected that she has Parkinson’s. But hers is an essential tremor — a familial trait shared with an older brother — and it has dictated small facts of her life since youth. She does not annotate her books. She apologizes for her handwriting. Her system of note-taking is to type emails to herself (she has about seventeen thousand at last count). The problem has added, at any rate, to her shyness. Growing up, there were times that she could not so much as write down her name. When her father sent her to secretarial school, the teachers singled her out and explained, We never say this to anyone, but you really can’t do this. She was quietly and tactfully thrown out. She still types with her two middle fingers. But for all her apologies, her handwriting is beautiful. It comes in two scripts: even rows of printed capital letters, or an elegant, slanting cursive, the kind that depends on detailed childhood training. 2. I asked her once about her hair, which runs in a long braid, almost to her waist. That braid has become somewhat famous, sung by those who meet her, and “immortalized,” as one writer said, in a Richard Avedon photograph. I had seen the Avedon picture and several others of her, and noticed that in practically every single one the braid falls to her right. Once or twice, it runs down her back. But never to the left. That, too, she told me, was a product of the tremor. She can weave her braid from just one side. Everyone has something to say about the braid. There is awe: “the gravity of her long thick braid over her shoulder representing a modern-day Athena.” There is hostility: “a dramatic grey rope that falls just shy of her waist and almost cries out to be stroked — or perhaps yanked.” There is the search for novelty: an “elegant snowy braid,” for one writer, or “spartan,” for Vogue. A “nimbus of blond hair,” a “bellringer’s braid,” a braid “thick as a horse tail.” Or just that “famous gray braid down her back.” After the Avedon portrait, people began to measure her against the still picture. Guy Trebay, a style reporter, delighted to find Adler’s braid “looking just as it did in the famous Avedon photo.” And it still looks that way, only grayer now. The braid endures as a kind of synecdoche for Adler herself, eclipsing all other physical traits: her short stature, her brown eyes, her fastidious style. Friends and critics circle the braid, return to it, freight it with their opinion of the wearer. It is her epithet: “Long-braided Renata,” one might have written in an epic, trying for dactyls. 3. In twentieth-century France, there was an interesting but somewhat cracked writer named Marcel Schwob, who argued that a good biography would “describe a man in all his anomalies.” Schwob disliked the standard accounts of great men that spoke only of their prominent deeds and philosophical thoughts. What mattered most, in his view, were the quirks and the oddities of a person’s character. If the genre of biography could study those, it would become stranger and more beautiful. Schwob latched onto a great insight: only the small things in our lives are distinctive enough to identify and preserve us. He provided a thought experiment. Compare two Greek philosophers: “Thales might have said know thyself as well as Socrates,” Schwob wrote, “but he would never have scratched his leg in precisely the same manner before drinking the hemlock draught.” If you wanted to know who Socrates was, you needed that scratch, and not just the public maxim, which anyone could have taken from the Delphic Oracle. Most biographies have only the occasional mention of a revealing quirk. James Boswell, the most famous example, noted the orange peels that Samuel Johnson mysteriously stored in his pockets. But that is a rare gem, and Schwob wanted the full trove. He found his model, finally, in the late seventeenth-century writer John Aubrey, who kept epigrammatic notes on contemporaries such as Hobbes and Shakespeare. Aubrey’s Brief Lives brim with odd details. Some passages consist almost entirely of sparkling, disconnected facts, which we might now call gossip or trifles. One learns from Aubrey, for example, that Milton “pronounced the letter R very hard,” and that Erasmus “loved not fish, though born in a fish-town.” Marcel Schwob loved all those details. Artistic biography meant finding not the “important” facts, the ones that changed history, but the traits that separate us and mark out our character. The leg-scratch, the hard Rs, the dislike of fish. “Each subject finds, under his pen,” Schwob wrote of Aubrey, “some unique trait distinguishing that man forever among all men.” 4. In the Danbury High School yearbook from 1955, you can find a “senior class prophecy” that tells the future for pairs of graduating students. The prophecy said that in fifteen years one graduate would move to Paris, where she would design hairstyles for Renata Adler. The fame of Adler’s hair started that young: in high school, among her classmates. The tremor was there, too. Adler’s boyfriend from a nearby technical school helped her by teaching her how to shoot, as a primitive therapy. He was the kind of boy who went hunting and trapped muskrats in the Connecticut countryside. Adler got good at shooting with him. “It was the only thing I could do, as far as I knew, without a tremor,” she said. She took off days from school and went up to the pond on her family’s property, where she
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence