A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
0393354776
Michael Lewis
Amos Tversky
…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 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 of 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 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.”
A lot of things that most people 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 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.”
“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.’”
A human being who finds himself stuck at some boring meeting or cocktail party often finds it difficult to invent an excuse to flee. Amos’s rule, whenever he wanted to leave any gathering, was to just get up and leave. “Just start walking and you’ll be surprised how creative you will become and how fast you’ll find the words for your excuse” he said.
His attitude to the clutter of daily life was of a piece with his strategy for dealing with social demands. “Unless you are kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away, you are not throwing enough away,” he said.