“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

One time I was over at Jerry’s for his birthday, and one of these dopey arguments lasted until 3:00 AM. The next morning I called him up: “Listen, Jerry,” I said, “the reason we have these arguments that never get anywhere is that you don’t know a damn thing about science, and I don’t know a damn thing about art. So, on alternate Sundays, I’ll give you a lesson in science, and you give me a lesson in art.”

“OK,” he said. “I’ll teach you how to draw.”

“That will be impossible,” I said, because when I was in high school, the only thing I could draw was pyramids on deserts—consisting mainly of straight lines—and from time to time I would attempt a palm tree and put in a sun. I had absolutely no talent. I sat next to a guy who was equally adept. When he was permitted to draw anything, it consisted of two flat, elliptical blobs, like tires stacked on one another, with a stalk coming out of the top, culminating in a green triangle. It was supposed to be a tree. So I bet Jerry that he wouldn’t be able to teach me to draw.

“Of course you’ll have to work,” he said.

I promised to work, but still bet that he couldn’t teach me to draw. I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run “behind the scenes” by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s a feeling of awe—of scientific awe—which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.

Jerry turned out to be a very good teacher. He told me first to go home and draw anything. So I tried to draw a shoe; then I tried to draw a flower in a pot. It was a mess!

The next time we met I showed him my attempts: “Oh, look!” he said. “You see, around in back here, the line of the flower pot doesn’t touch the leaf.” (I had meant the line to come up to the leaf.) “That’s very good. It’s a way of showing depth. That’s very clever of you.”

“And the fact that you don’t make all the lines the same thickness (which I didn’t mean to do) is good. A drawing with all the lines the same thickness is dull.” It continued like that: Everything that I thought was a mistake, he used to teach me something in a positive way. He never said it was wrong; he never put me down. So I kept on trying, and I gradually got a little bit better, but I was never satisfied.

To get more practice I also signed up for a correspondence school course, with International Correspondence Schools, and I must say they were good. They started me off drawing pyramids and cylinders, shading them and so on. We covered many areas: drawing, pastels, watercolors, and paints. Near the end I petered out: I made an oil painting for them, but I never sent it in. They kept sending me letters urging me to continue. They were very good.

I practiced drawing all the time, and became very interested in it. If I was at a meeting that wasn’t getting anywhere—like the one where Carl Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a psychology department—I would draw the other people. I had a little pad of paper I kept with me and I practiced drawing wherever I went. So, as Jerry taught me, I worked very hard.

Jerry, on the other hand, didn’t learn much physics. His mind wandered too easily. I tried to teach him something about electricity and magnetism, but as soon as I mentioned electricity,” he’d tell me about some motor he had that didn’t work, and how might he fix it. When I tried to show him how an electromagnet works by making a little coil of wire and hanging a nail on a piece of string, I put the voltage on, the nail swung into the coil, and Jerry said, “Ooh! It’s just like fucking!” So that was the end of that.

So now we have a new argument—whether he’s a better teacher than I was, or I’m a better student than he was.

I gave up the idea of trying to get an artist to appreciate the feeling I had about nature so he could portray it. I would flow have to double my efforts in learning to draw so I could do it myself. It was a very ambitious undertaking, and I kept the idea entirely to myself, because the odds were I would never be able to do it.

Early on in the process of learning to draw, some lady I knew saw my attempts and said, “You should go down to the Pasadena Art Museum. They have drawing classes there, with models—nude models.”