The story was quite stale. How, as a young boy, only beginning his education, his teacher asked him to solve that most rudimentary of mathematical questions: What is the sum of two plus two?
The now familiar equation was starkly set in a white chalk on the blackboard. Hearing the question placed solely on his small intellectual shoulders, the boy felt himself shrink, or rather the world grew large. As if the implications of the questions went beyond the didactic and into the consequential.
The sun’s heavy golden rays coated the classroom walls, and the faces of all the boys, and all the girls that surrounded him. The equation on the board pulled on him, tunneling his vision and silencing every thought the boy could possibly have.
Indeed the universe crawled along its unknowable axis and moments barely born, passed quietly into the void, but the boy would not answer, nor make any sound at all. Finally, the dark-suited teacher, hovering incredulously over him, demanded some answer from the boy. Wincing from the man’s voice, the boy managed to express, at last, his dilemma.
“Why does that,” he began, in a voice as small as a pin, pointing directly at the cursive hook and tail. “Why does that mean two?”
In the single setting and rising of the sun, the boy was advanced to the next grade and dubbed ‘an abstract thinker’.
The boy, now a man, often told the story to people whom he’d recently met. It became a shorthand way to display to others just how different he was; just why he should not be weighed in the same balance used for other men.
One night at a small dinner gathering, he told the story again, and it received the usual polite laughs and ‘has’. This time however, he felt different in the telling, and withdrew from the conversation to reflect.
It took him from the entree to end of dessert to realize what was wrong. He had been telling that story for all of his adult life, and never realized that although his teachers had advanced him in grade and taken great pains to let him know he’d done nothing wrong when, they moved him from one class to another – they never did answer his question.
