TNY weekend reader: eureka
Who am I kidding? I’ll be doing my reading at the laundromat. (Image: carolita johnson)
The article of the week for me was Jonah Lehrer’s (not online, unfortunately) “Eureka Hunt.” It re-awakened memories of a puzzle that had been given to me years ago as I fled Paris to Madrid, broke. Stuck in Madrid, separated from the strange mathemetician who had given me the puzzle (and with whom I’d suddenly, naturally, fallen in love with just before leaving), I diverted all my spare neurotic energy (of which I had plenty to spare) to its solution. To be exact, he didn’t give me the puzzle (he never gave me a thing, the sweet poor slob), but rather gave me instructions for the making of the puzzle, which, in my spare time between discovering the beauty and oddity of the world and bewailing the impetuousness that had led me to leave Paris, I duly constructed. It turns out this puzzle is known as the “yoke puzzle,” and is as old as the hills.
Well, you’d think that having constructed the puzzle myself, I’d have been in a superb position to solve it, too. But no. I could not figure it out. The object was to move one bead from it’s position on one side of the puzzle, to the other side, next to the other bead, on the same string. I wracked my poor brain over the puzzle (and it was a poor brain at the time, having been addled by five years of modelling, which turned it to mush, basically) for weeks, then months… The puzzle became the metaphor for the state of my love life. Finally, the mysterious mathemetician who had given me the puzzle advised me (in the course of a surreptitious telephone call made on someone else’s dime, or peseta) to “drink a few glasses of wine and try it again.”
I did as instructed, and lo and behold, I had my eureka moment!
And therein, I’m sure, lies many a tale of alcoholism and genius. (Not on my part, unfortunately! I remained on the wagon, and not quite a genius, alas!)