That night, as he told one of his peers at the time, he was so discouraged that he decided to call his brother and ask him to come pick him up. Peter took him to New York, and on the way they got into a bitter argument, so violent that the highway police stopped them because they were driving with the interior lights of the car turned on. They looked like two mannequins in a lit-up display window, and they had to explain to the officer in detail what they’d been arguing about (the Vietnam War) so that he’d let them go. “Don’t argue while you’re driving,” the patroller advised them. In fact, it was there, in the police station of an obscure town on the way from Boston to New York, that he started to develop his theory on pronominal series. “I think: but the other does not believe me” was one of his premises. Every pronominal sequence (I/you/we/they) presupposed a distinct reality and a different system of belief.
When he published his thesis, he received the Fields Medal, the highest distinction a mathematician can aspire to. He was twenty-five.
“He’s passionate, profound, intense, and domineering. He possesses a kind of purity that isn’t matched by anyone else I’ve known. Thomas Munk is perhaps the most perfect example of genius such as we conceive of it,” his thesis adviser declared.
Many believe that Anderson, number one in his field, was so surpassed by that shadowy student of Polish origins that he retired from the university that very year and shut himself up in his house by the sea in Boston Bay, fenced in with electric wires, and emerged only once to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics and then to present himself as the main witness for the defense in the case that was being prepared against Munk at the time.
“When he was down,” said Anderson, “there was something about him that made him seem like a fool, a confused but friendly young man, who talked in a muddled way and stammered as if he was lost in his own digressions or was unhinged, but when he was in good form he was dazzling, brilliant, unyielding; in thought, he was a hare no winged Achilles could catch.”
This statement from his adviser was one of the arguments that Thomas Munk’s family was using to plead insanity, trying to alter the charges of the case and thus avoid the death penalty.
In 1967, Munk accepted a position as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Mathematics, which at that time was the most prestigious in the country.
Some analysts indicated that it was in California where Tom discovered anti-technological philosophy and started to dream of escaping into the wilderness. Maybe he decided to teach at Berkeley as a way to view the growing anti-capitalist movements up close and to observe the actions of anarchist groups in San Francisco Bay.
“He was extraordinary as a professor,” said Mike Uberman, a prominent researcher at MIT, “even though he was often absent when his headaches acted up or because he’d gone on one of his obligatory nighttime walks and gotten lost until well into the morning, which meant he wouldn’t make it to class. We suffered from headaches as well, as if the intensity of thought was accompanied by an experience in the walls of the skull.”
During that time his brother Peter was deployed and spent eighteen months in Vietnam, and when he came back from the war he was addicted to opium. Tom had been excused from service for medical reasons, and his brother went to war convinced that it was the greatest experience a writer could aspire to, until he landed there on the battlefield. Then he changed his mind, but it was already too late.
When Peter returned, Tom was waiting for him at the airport and saw him coming, dressed in his light brown uniform, carrying a blue bag that held all of his belongings, a strapping, burly young man with a scar that gave him a surly and stern expression. It was then, according to Peter, that his brother started to talk about the decision to change his life. He couldn’t stand the academic world; he felt smothered. Slowly, Peter’s experience in war moved into the background, and the conversation pivoted around Tom’s goals and his choice to live in isolation, dedicated to his research. He would distance himself from the world for a few years in order to delve further into his work on mathematical philosophy and also so that his way of life would operate directly on his thinking. “I’ve realized,” he said, as his brother recounted, “that idealism and materialism overlap in the sense that it’s only possible to master the world by turning your back on it.”
“The truth overlapped so little with empirical reality,” he later said, “that the only way to preserve your sanity was to move away from everything.” He wanted to isolate himself and prove whether he was capable of realizing a truly meaningful project.
They went to a bar on the side of the highway to eat and drink beer. The place was decorated with the heads of big game animals on the log walls of the room. Tom wasn’t against animal death; he wasn’t a vegetarian or a pacifist, the opposite of Peter, who’d returned from Vietnam with a strong
