Malcolm Gladwell

It occurs to me today that yesterday's diary entry--since we are now, at week's end, at the meta-analysis phase--was an utterly forgettable effort. Whiny! Pathetic! The forced and clumsy attempts at humor! I read through the "Fray" responses again, and it seems my support has now dwindled to a few Canadians sticking with me out a sense of patriotic obligation. My only defense is to offer the incredibly obvious and banal--and yet somehow strangely soothing--observation made years ago by the baseball analyst Bill James. James pointed out that if you break down the averages of .300 hitters--that is, the very best hitters in baseball--they almost never hit .300 in any individual week. They hit .400, then .450, then .150, then .050, then .500--and so on. Hitting is an extraordinarily variable activity: Part of what it means to be a good hitter, in other words, is that you are occasionally and inevitably a very bad hitter--for at least as long as a week. See my point? Even if you consider every one of my entries to be utterly forgettable, there's still a theoretical chance I'm a .300 hitter. I just had a bad week, is all.

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I'm going home to Canada tomorrow, because my father is getting an award for his mathematics. The ceremony is in Ottawa, and my mother and I plan to get very dressed up for the occasion. (Whether my father will do the same remains to be seen.) My comments in Wednesday's entry notwithstanding, it's actually quite a strange thing to have your father be honored for something that you don't understand. It's more than that actually: It's not just that I can't follow the mathematics that he does, it's that I don't know what it feels like to do mathematics. My mother, for example, is a writer and I think I have a basic understanding of what it means for her to do what makes her happiest professionally. What part of attacking a math problem makes my father happy? How do the pulleys and levers in his brain move when he figures something out? I have no idea. When I write something I really like I usually get up and dance around my room and watch ten minutes of ESPN as a reward. As far as I can tell, my father does not do this, but even if he did, it really wouldn't answer the question. I remember as a child my father coming home from work and telling us that he solved a problem that day that he had been working on for 15 years. Could anyone ever adequately explain to anyone else the particular feelings of joy and accomplishment that must come from doing that?

This is always the stumbling block I hit when I try to write a profile. I want to try and understand that feeling--but of course you never can. The closest I came was with Charlie Wilson, a man I wrote about earlier this year, who is one of the world's great neurosurgeons. Somehow Wilson immediately understood that's what I wanted from him, and after we met he began to send me a stream of e-mails--each one more fascinating and articulate than the last--in which he came closer and closer to a description of the emotional state he reaches after a successful operation. It wasn't boastful or arrogant. It was just beautiful, in the way that all perfectly true writing is beautiful. Wilson may be the smartest person I've ever met, or at least he seemed to have a better understanding of how he was and what he did than anyone I've ever met. Of course, fool that I am, I spent the story giving my understanding of Charlie Wilson. I would have done better just quoting his e-mails. Oh well, everyone has a bad day sometimes.

Next week, Lance Martin files from self-imposed exile in Ayden, N.C.

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