On hearing this, Tom’s classmates whistled and stamped their feet in scorn while he smiled and traced circles, opening wider and wider, to show the alternate versions of the truth under different conditions. Because experience was insufficient, it was necessary to create theoretical fictions, exemplum fictum.
“For example, the possibility of an invisible cat existing in this room depends on the reality that we presuppose.”
And that, when viewed today, was his earliest approach to the decision that would lead him to become the most wanted criminal in United States history.
Thomas Munk’s health seemed “precarious,” and he always gave the impression of “being at risk.” He didn’t listen to anyone except for his brother, who would often come to visit and spend several days with him, talking in his room or at a bar or walking along the banks of the Charles River.
The people who knew him back then were defending him, and their testimonies, along with the stories of his time as a student, reinforced the feeling of incredulity that everyone felt when confronted with his actions. How could that young man have turned into a terrorist? He wasn’t a radical loser, as Enzensberger would characterize terrorists some years later, and he wasn’t a social outcast or a marginalized person but a young, successful North American man; nor was he a religious fanatic or a Marxist.
During his years at Harvard, Tom developed an interest in sports and music. He went to Boston Red Sox baseball games with his brother and stayed in his room all day listening to “Take This Hammer” and other country songs by East Coast proletarian musicians, especially Woody Guthrie, the kind who played in roadside bars and concert halls for families from the towns of Pennsylvania. They also frequented a bar called The Bear, a bohemian stronghold in Boston, and all of this seemed to contribute to his learning, like he was an outsider who knew nothing about the culture of the country and had to learn everything by mimicking the locals he lived around and their way of life. For his brother, Peter, it was natural to follow his generation’s path of proletarian experience and authentic living, but Tom looked like an undercover agent because his serious expression and grim smile never wavered, even if he was tapping his foot to the beat of a song by Hank Williams or Johnny Cash.
One evening he met a girl at one of those dance halls around the port in Boston. She was a skinny blonde from a family of New York professionals who was studying at Vassar and wore a tartan skirt with a large safety pin fastened below and black stockings. They went to the drive-in theater, played Scrabble, went to motels and made love in the afternoon heat. The girl was very happy with her life and loved him, though she did notice he was a bit strange and rather absentminded.
One summer they went to live in a house in the country and she took a surprise trip to visit her parents, but when she returned, she realized that Tom hadn’t noticed her absence. “Ah, you were gone,” he said, when he saw her come in at midnight with her bag and a T-shirt as a gift.
It was in that moment she decided that Tom wasn’t for her, the woman stated to the media; she always thought he was a wonderful boy, who deserved the best of luck, but he was just too wrapped up in his own mental life. They’d drifted apart peaceably, and the woman, whose name wasn’t released, stated that she sometimes used to receive postcards from Tom with greetings and very specific questions. She showed one to the reporter from the New Sun: “When we went to the Aquarium in Massachusetts, were you wearing a yellow rubber jacket? Please let me know, it’s a very important detail,” he’d written. He was investigating the precision of memories, it seemed, and was working on something he called uncertain memory and the unforgettable images of events we’ve never actually experienced.
He was concentrating on a series of experiments intended to devise a theory of choice. What were the conditions necessary to infer the truth? As an example, he posed the issue of how many children Lady Macbeth had, a problem that Shakespeare’s play didn’t resolve. He considered the matter to be a hypothetical case, the same as any other uncertain fact of real life. After a couple of weeks working on fuzzy sets, he came up with a hypothetical solution (“they had three children”) based on what he called the uncertain decision. With that project (Lady Macbeth’s Children, or the Theorem of Uncertain Series), he was the first undergraduate student—after Noam Chomsky—to succeed in having his junior thesis considered a contribution to the field and published in a specialized journal of high academic standing. It became a national reference point in the promising science of hardware programming. He was eighteen years old, and the publication of the paper was considered sufficient qualification for him to advance directly to his doctorate. In fact, he became a graduate student at Harvard before he even applied and almost didn’t realize that his status had changed until they invited him to live in the graduate college residence on the campus at Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Concentration on theory imposes a complete detachment from worldly affairs, resulting in an exclusion from all social distraction or exchange. Thomas Munk extended that theoretical asceticism to all aspects of his academic life: he published sparsely and succinctly and did not accept invitations to lectures or conferences.
Malcolm Anderson, his thesis adviser, urged him not to wait until he had solved every
