[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hello?

ERROL MORRIS: Hello.

JAD: Hi. Is this Errol Morris?

ERROL MORRIS: I think it's me.

JAD: [laughs] Hello, this is Jad from—from Radiolab.

ERROL MORRIS: Hi. Thank you for your very, very nice but somewhat disturbing email.

JAD: [laughs] What disturbed you in the email?

ERROL MORRIS: The term "truth fascist."

ROBERT KRULWICH: You called Errol Morris a truth fascist? What were you thinking?

JAD: I was—I was trying to—I wrote him an email to try and get him to come talk to us. And I don't know why I used that ...

ERROL MORRIS: What is a truth fascist?

JAD: That was meant lovingly, I should say.

ERROL MORRIS: Ah!

JAD: It wasn't exactly the right choice of words. Fundamentalist?

ERROL MORRIS: Oh, I like it!

JAD: But really what I meant is that, like, this is a guy who's always trying to get to the bottom of things. So he made all these documentaries Thin Blue Line. Got a guy off death row, actually, in The Thin Blue Line. He made The Fog of War.

ROBERT: He made Vernon, Florida.

JAD: Yeah. But I contacted him because, you know, I'd recently seen him give this talk about this one investigation of his that for me is like the purest example of the thing that drives him, the thing that's in all of his films, this desire, a relentless desire to figure things out, to get to ...

ERROL MORRIS: Truth! [laughs]

JAD: And it all starts with a photograph.

ERROL MORRIS: One of the very, very first photographs of war, 1855.

JAD: Which war?

ERROL MORRIS: This is the Crimean War. It involved Great Britain, France, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and, believe it or not, Sardinia.

JAD: The fighting took place in what is now basically the Ukraine. The Russians were on one side, everybody else was on the other. Half a million people died. It was incredibly brutal.

ERROL MORRIS: And there's this photograph titled, "The Valley of the Shadow of Death." It's black and white. It shows a dirt road cutting through this landscape.

JAD: Just one dirt road between two hills.

ERROL MORRIS: There's nobody in the photograph.

JAD: No birds, no trees, no people.

ERROL MORRIS: There's really nothing living in the photograph.

JAD: Not even grass.

ERROL MORRIS: Nothing.

JAD: But as you stare at this road a little more closely, you realize why nothing is living in this photograph. Because this road is ...

ERROL MORRIS: Littered with cannonballs. Cannonballs everywhere.

JAD: As soon as you notice it, the photograph springs to life.

ERROL MORRIS: You imagine this fuselage of artillery fire raining down on this landscape. This is one really fascinating thing about photography. It's a time machine. There's a physical connection between that photograph and that world.

JAD: Because you're holding this piece of film that was literally ripped right out of that world.

ERROL MORRIS: But the context is gone.

JAD: And more importantly, in this case, you don't even know if that picture is true.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

ERROL MORRIS: It turns out that this photograph is one of a pair. There is a second photograph exactly the same as the first photograph.

JAD: Exact same camera position.

ERROL MORRIS: But in this other photograph, the cannonballs that were on the road are gone.

JAD: So one has cannonballs on the road and one has cannonballs not on the road, but otherwise, they're completely identical.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes.

JAD: He thought, "That's weird. Let me look into that."

ERROL MORRIS: And there was a passage in ...

JAD: And he ends up reading this essay by Susan Sontag ...

ERROL MORRIS: ... where she talks about these photographs as though it's just obvious what was going on.

JAD: He was like, "Ugh, that word."

ERROL MORRIS: Well, I don't like the word "obvious."

JAD: Susan Sontag was basically arguing that the guy who took the picture, Roger Fenton, came to an empty road, put the cannonballs on the road—he staged it.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes.

JAD: It's obvious.

ERROL MORRIS: But ...

JAD: That word ...

ERROL MORRIS: Nothing's so obvious that it's obvious. And so I started investigating.

JAD: And so began a ludicrous, obsessive, dogged—but kind of sublime—pursuit of the slippery little fact that actually inspired this whole hour.

ROBERT: So today on Radiolab we are going to wrestle with a series of seemingly simple facts that turn out to raise complicated questions.

JAD: Like what is truth? Is is just a pile of facts?
ROBERT: And how much does the fact of the matter matter?

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Back to Errol Morris.

ERROL MORRIS: I tracked down Fenton's letters from the Crimea journals, written records of soldiers who were in that area at that given time.

JAD: Didn't find much.

ERROL MORRIS: I interviewed five historians. Two ordered the photographs in one way.

JAD: Saying yes, it's obvious he posed the pictures.

ERROL MORRIS: Two ...

JAD: And this is a bit of a surprise.

ERROL MORRIS: ... ordered the photographs in the opposite way.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: They told him it is actually very possible that Fenton saw the cannonballs, took the picture, and then soldiers came along, took the cannonballs off the road to recycle them so they could fire them back at the Russians.

ERROL MORRIS: Exactly.

JAD: Was that kind of recycling a common practice?

ERROL MORRIS: Yes, indeed, it was, actually.

JAD: So he had a tie. Two historians saying he faked it, two saying he didn't.

ERROL MORRIS: And the fifth ...

JAD: Tie-breaker.

ERROL MORRIS: ... jumped back and forth. [laughs]

ROBERT: I like that you called it—tried to call him the tie-breaker, but he didn't break the tie.

ERROL MORRIS: Well of course none of these things is subject to a vote. Truth isn't something that you vote on.

JAD: At this point he says he says he was feeling a very familiar ...

ERROL MORRIS: Irritation.

JAD: He thought, you know what, forget historical interpretations.

ERROL MORRIS: What if I could, from the photograph itself, the very photograph itself, determine which photograph came first?

JAD: From just the photos.

ERROL MORRIS: So I started AB-ing the photographs.

JAD: Just sort of superimposing them on each other and flipping back and forth.

ERROL MORRIS: AB, BA, AB, BA. Et cetera, et cetera.

JAD: Nothing. And then he thinks ...

ERROL MORRIS: I know what I can do. I can start studying the shadows.

JAD: Which meant ...

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah, let's go to the Crimea. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] Are you serious?

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah.

JAD: His reasoning was, I can't study the shadows unless I know the exact direction the camera was pointing on that day in 1855, which means I need to find the exact spot where Fenton stood.

ERROL MORRIS: And I had terrible trouble finding this place.

JAD: Is it marked?

ERROL MORRIS: No! All the guides kept taking me to the charge of the light brigade, that site where Tennyson wrote about the Valley of Death. No no no no no, not the Valley of Death! The Valley of the Shadow of Death! But finally ...

JAD: A guide named Olga ...

ERROL MORRIS: She was fabulous.

JAD: ... helps him locate the spot.

ERROL MORRIS: It's completely desolate, undeveloped.

JAD: Still, after 150 years. With some trial and error, he's able to figure out that Fenton was facing north when he took those photos. And then he goes off to the Crimean War Museum and asks them ...

ERROL MORRIS: Could I borrow some cannonballs?

ROBERT: Oh, man.

ERROL MORRIS: I take the cannonball, take it out to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and I photograph it ...

JAD: ... at different times of the day, hoping that he'd be able to see subtle differences in the shadows cast by those cannonballs that could help him order the photos.

ERROL MORRIS: But, nothing.

ROBERT: Nothing?

ERROL MORRIS: There was endless questions about cloud cover, whether you could even measure the shadows on these photographs.

JAD: In fact, he now suspects that the shadows in those old pictures may not have been shadows at all ...

ERROL MORRIS: But just artifacts of how the prints were made. And on and on.

JAD: So was the trip useful at all?

ERROL MORRIS: Not so much. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] Oh, man. That's a vacation moment right there.

ROBERT: How many days—how many days did you spend photographing and examining the photographs of cannonballs on the road?

ERROL MORRIS: I was there for about a week.

JAD: And then he went home with no answer to his question, only that continuing ...

ERROL MORRIS: Irritation.

JAD: But he was like, no.

ERROL MORRIS: No!

JAD: Not done yet!

ERROL MORRIS: Look, when you investigate anything, I don't care what it is, whether it's a Fenton photograph or Abu Ghraib or the murder of a Dallas police officer, yes, complications result. Thinking causes complications, I'm sorry. But it's part of that process that we go through of trying to figure out what's out there in the world, what really happened. This is about truth. Absolute truth. And the pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity. [laughs] So yes, the Fenton photographs worried me, that I might not be able to resolve it to my satisfaction.

JAD: But then he's at a party, and he bumps into a friend of his, a guy by the name of Dennis Purcell.

ERROL MORRIS: Who is very, very good with Photoshop.

JAD: We called him up.

DENNIS PURCELL: Hello.

JAD: Turns out ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Well, I'm an optical engineer.

JAD: So he's not just good at Photoshop. He actually builds high-tech cameras. In any case, they were talking at this party ...

DENNIS PURCELL: And the Fenton picture came up.

JAD: Errol told him ...

DENNIS PURCELL: He had this problem of wondering which came first and said, "Could you take a look at these?"

JAD: Dennis takes the pictures home, puts them in his computer ...

DENNIS PURCELL: And I immediately started to compare them.

JAD: Right away, he starts noticing differences between the two.

DENNIS PURCELL: The light changed. The weather was different. Shadows.

JAD: But he comes to pretty much the same conclusion as Errol, that those things ultimately don't help. So he just starts flipping between the photos.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flipping them back and forth.

ROBERT: Back and forth between the two photographs.

JAD: On the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: Off the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: On the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: Off the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: He's doing this for hours. Off the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: On the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: And then he sees it.

DENNIS PURCELL: The rocks on the left-hand side.

JAD: This little group of pebbles up on the left bank. Every time he flipped back and forth ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip, flip.

JAD: Those little rocks ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Popped out.

JAD: They moved. Just a little bit. And when he zoomed in, he could see that there were five of them.

DENNIS PURCELL: Fred, George, Oswald, Lionel, and Marmaduke.

ERROL MORRIS: We named them, yes.

JAD: These five guys shifted from one photo to the next. And here's the key. In the picture where the road was empty, they were a little bit higher on the hill. When the road was full of cannonballs, those little rocks shift down.

DENNIS PURCELL: Maybe eight inches or nine inches.

ERROL MORRIS: And from the direction of that movement, you could order the photographs.

JAD: It's basically like this. You could say, some rocks fell down the hill. They went from up on the hill to down. Up goes before down. And if the up photo is the empty road and the down photo is the road full of cannonballs, well, then ...

DENNIS PURCELL: The one with the cannonballs on the road was the second picture.

ERROL MORRIS: Imagine the scene.

JAD: Fenton comes upon an empty road, but he sees cannonballs on the hill. So he and ...

ERROL MORRIS: Whoever was helping him would have walked along the sides of the road and lifted up cannonballs, moved them onto the road. In that process, they would have invariably knocked into rocks ...

DENNIS PURCELL: And rocks don't fall uphill.

JAD: They only fall downhill.

ERROL MORRIS: It's gravity.

JAD: So case closed? This has—this has been resolved?

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah. [laughs] I think it has.

JAD: So Susan Sontag was right.

ERROL MORRIS: For the wrong reasons.

JAD: She was right. Fenton staged the photograph. So in addition to being one of the first photographs of war, this is one of the first photographic lies.

ERROL MORRIS: I guess he just figured it was a better photo.

JAD: Yeah. Or, you could say ...

ERROL MORRIS: Fenton was a coward.

JAD: Maybe he didn't want to get too close to the actual fighting, so he ...

ERROL MORRIS: Put the cannonballs on the road to make it look a lot more dangerous than it would have otherwise.

JAD: Or maybe he was after some kind of ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Emotional truth.

JAD: And that's what Dennis Purcell thinks.

DENNIS PURCELL: It's obvious why he did it.

JAD: There's that word again.

DENNIS PURCELL: To make it look the way it felt. To put those cannonballs on the road is how you felt when you were there.

JAD: In which case he would argue that the second photo, the one he posed, is more authentic than the first.

ERROL MORRIS: But forget all of that. Who in hell knows what Fenton was thinking? I really don't know what his motivation was.

JAD: But isn't that kind of the question at the end of the day?

ERROL MORRIS: Do I really care whether he put the cannonballs on the road or not?

ROBERT: I hope so.

JAD: Well, I hope you do. Don't you?

ERROL MORRIS: I do and I don't.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: Why would you go through all this then?

ERROL MORRIS: I guess this is what I take from it. In flipping back and forth between those two photographs ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: He says you see the rocks move.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: And when you see the rocks move ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: ... you imagine feet kicking those rocks.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: And when you imagine feet ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: ... kicking those rocks ...

ERROL MORRIS: You feel the soldiers walking, like really feel it. You feel them hitting into the rocks. You feel, on some deep sense, for me, the reality of that scene in a way that I would not have felt otherwise. It's almost as if you've walked through a pinhole camera into the past. That world in which the photograph, that strange, temporal, evanescent world in which we live is gone.

ROBERT: But if you can step between these photographs, you are permitted a brief trespass into something that you thought was lost.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. My father died when I was two years old, and perhaps the deepest—one of the deepest—mysteries of my life: who was he? There were all these photographs around the house. I was very, very young. I have no memories of him. There's a mystery about this man who is central to my life in so many ways but who I don't know. And who I never will know.

JAD: Errol Morris' latest book is called A Wilderness of Error. This story was taken from his book, Believing is Seeing. I also want to thank Ira Glass for helping us to connect with him.

ROBERT: It’s interesting to think about what Errol Morris did, because it—it’s kind of heroic in a way because we all live in the arrow of time as best we can tell, least in the world where we live, time seems to move only in one direction, that is forward into the future, you never see milk suddenly fly out of the tea back into the milk pouring pitcher, it just doesn’t happen. But people do try. We met, who was it? 

JAD: Neuroscientist, David Eagleman.

ROBERT: Yes. David Eagleman. 

JAD: I mean, it was more of a thought experiment, really, something he had heard about, but he was thinking aloud about how might one recover like a set of ideas, like a lost language, right? I think the stat is something like every 14 days a language is lost, because the last speaker of that language dies and, you know, takes the language. 

ROBERT: Dies with her. Yeah.

JAD: Exactly. So how might you—you recover something like a dead language, a long dead language, and he just tossed this one out?

DAVID EAGLEMAN: For example, nobody knows what Latin sounds like, right? It’s dead because all the people who spoke Latin there weren’t tape recorders around when they were doing it. And so, essentially we all say all right that’s—it’s dead. It’s gone. But it turns out somebody made a proposal that probably wouldn’t work but it’s so stunning in its creativity, that I thought it was very interesting, which is, he said, “Look. Sometimes these Roman pottery makers, if you can imagine these wheels that turn, these pottery wheels and you have a little stylus against the piece of pottery to make the line that spirals down. He said if there were people talking in the room while that was happening there might be micro-vibrations that caused the stylus to move in and out and as a result, it essentially could act like a record, and if you could play it back from these pieces of roman pottery you could actually hear the people in the room talking in Latin.

JAD: Ah-ha! 

JAD: I mean you could play a vase like an—like an LP and then hear Prothetheus, you know, the Potter, you could hear his voice?

DAVID EAGLEMAN: Precisely. Now, the thing is it probably won’t work exactly like that, but what’s interesting about the idea is that we’re constantly coming up with new technologies where then we can retrieve things that we once thought were dead. In other words, we thought the information sort of scattered off into the universe and then we’re finding with the new technology we’re able to [sucking in sound] bring it all back together.

ROBERT: Whoa. What was that? What was that we just heard?

JAD: Those are dead languages coming back.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: I don’t know what that is. It was probably from a sound library.

ROBERT: Oh, I see so all those languages that were disappearing, that’s their return?

JAD: It was a gesture. I was trying to evoke the sense of languages returning from the cosmos. 

ROBERT: Brilliantly done.

JAD: We’ll be right back. 

JAD: Hey, I’m Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I’m Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and today we’re talking about hidden truths.

ROBERT: Some of the truths that we gather, by the way, are hidden in letters sent to Dr. Oliver Sacks in New York City, and he occasionally lets us, in essence, read through his mail. He gets people sending him stories and problems all the time, and this thing you’re about to hear, which is part of a live show we did called In the Dark, this one comes from Royce Hall in Los Angeles, is essentially mined from Oliver’s mailbox, it’s about—well, let’s let you hear what it’s about. 

JOHN HULL: Hello, WNYC?

ROBERT: I want to introduce you to someone.

PAT WALTERS: Hello, John?

JOHN HULL: Hello, this is John Hull.

PAT: Hi John. This is Pat Walters. We have been emailing.

ROBERT: I had our producer Pat Walters get John Hull into a studio.

JOHN HULL: Oh, Pat! I for some reason imagined you as a woman called Patricia. [laughs]

ROBERT: Yeah, this happens to Pat all the time. So so many of his blind dates end just suddenly. Anyway, John Hull is a theory—theology professor in England and he is blind. But he hasn't always been blind.

JOHN HULL: No. No, I was born with a condition, an inherited condition, and I developed cataract when I was a boy of 13.

ROBERT: And then things got cloudy in ...?

JOHN HULL: Exactly. A milky whiteness.

ROBERT: But it happened slowly. At first, his life really wasn't bad at all. He lived a pretty normal existence. He went to college, he got married, he had kids. But eventually, cataracts developed and they got worse. It was gradual, but over the years his world kept getting darker and then darker and darker, until when he was 35 his world went totally dark.

JOHN HULL: When I lost my sight, I suffered a lot from boredom.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JOHN HULL: You know, I just didn't know what to think about. I mean, when you're sighted you've always got something to think about. You know, the waves are rising and falling on the beach. The girls are walking past. There's always something. But when you're blind, what do you think about? What fills your mind? That was a problem for me at first.

ROBERT: But one night at a party with his wife Marilyn, something happened that got him thinking.

JOHN HULL: I was at a party, and an old friend came up to me and said, "John, there's something I think you should know." I said, "What is it?" He said, "I think you should know that Marilyn is looking particularly beautiful tonight."

ROBERT: [laughs]

JOHN HULL: Now I felt, how dare this man put his eyes on my wife and have the cheek to come and tell me that he thinks she's beautiful, huh? He went on to say, "In a way, John, you're fortunate. To you, she will always be as beautiful as the day you married her." Now I told Marilyn that story after the party was over. She said, "Some of my female friends are telling me the same thing. One of them said the other day, you know Marilyn, in a way you are—you are fortunate. John will never see those little gray hairs."

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JOHN HULL: "Those little wrinkles." and then I thought, Robert, what is it like to be a beautiful woman and not to be able to display yourself to the man you love, huh?

ROBERT: Huh.

JOHN HULL: No point in getting new clothes, no point in going to the hairdresser. Okay there's perfume, but half the time the bastard doesn't notice.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JOHN HULL: You see what I mean? Our worlds were becoming so profoundly different. I had to say to myself—and this is the crux of my experience—how am I to live with this woman? Am I to live in nostalgic memory every time I'm with her? And I said no, I will not live in nostalgia. I will live with this woman as a living sighted woman, I as a living blind man. We will live together in the present moment. We will accept each other as we are, across the abyss which divides us.

JAD: But how exactly does he do that?

ROBERT: Well, he didn't want to picture his wife as she used to be, you know, 20 years ago. So he made a willful and conscious decision to stop picturing her all together.

JOHN HULL: That was how I faced the future as a blind man.

ROBERT: He decided that he would live without pictures at all. So any time a picture would pop into his head, he would consciously push it away. And this became his routine.

JOHN HULL: When I meet a new person, I don't any longer wonder what they look like. I don't know what my house looks like.

ROBERT: You don't picture corridors, rooms, windows?

JOHN HULL: It's funny how much the visual memories are attached to those words. Even as you say "corridor," I can see it going away in front of me with its perspectives disappearing.

ROBERT: Yes.

JOHN HULL: And yet when I'm walking along a corridor. I don't have that picture.

ROBERT: Wow!

JOHN HULL: When I'm standing in front of a window, I don't have that picture.

ROBERT: When you are talking to your kids ...

JOHN HULL: Yeah?

ROBERT: Do you see them? Or what's going on?

JOHN HULL: I don't see them. I hear them. I feel them. But I have no idea, frankly, what they look like. See, it's more profound than that, Robert. I have to try to remember what you mean by "look like." I've not only lost the contents of that concept, I've lost the concept.

ROBERT: And he says he's lost it by choice.

JAD: Which is strange. So he says he chooses not to see his wife or his kids.

ROBERT: Yeah, because he says, "You know, all in all what I'm doing here is I'm just honoring the truth. And the truth is I can't really know what my wife looks like. I could put my hand on her face and try to feel my way across, but any image that I conjure up wouldn't be real, really. Wouldn't have all the details. In effect, it would be a lie. And when it comes to my wife, I can't bear the idea of a lie." So ...

JAD: I just can't imagine, though, not wanting to imagine your wife's face.

ROBERT: Well, other blind people obviously do this differently. And in fact when John wrote a book about this stuff, he heard from a bunch of other blind people who said, you know, this makes very little sense. In fact, it's just ridiculous.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

ROBERT: So meet Zoltan Torey.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Z-O-L-T-A-N. It's a Hungarian name. Zoltan Torey. And I'm a clinical psychologist.

ROBERT: And like John, Zoltan was not born blind. He had an accident. He was working in a factory.

ZOLTAN TOREY: It was a battery factory.

ROBERT: And he was getting this huge drum of acid down from a shelf.

ZOLTAN TOREY: And it had a plug which was—the screw was worn away on that plug, and it—when I was undoing it, it just flew open and the whole damned 44 gallons poured out into—more or less into my face.

ROBERT: Oh my heavens!

ROBERT: And the acid burned his face and then it went into his throat. And it burned his vocal cords, and of course it went into his eyes.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Almost immediately, the acid began to eat itself into the cornea.

ROBERT: Within minutes ...

ZOLTAN TOREY: This ghastly, charcoal-gray fog was so thick that I really couldn't find my way anywhere.

ROBERT: Once Zoltan was out of the hospital and learning to live as a blind person, he says ...

ZOLTAN TOREY: I was advised to concentrate on touch and on hearing and all the other senses and forget about sight. But this was not acceptable to me.

ROBERT: Because for Zoltan, images were essential. For one thing, his dad had been a filmmaker.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Head of motion picture studios.

ROBERT: And when Zoltan was a boy, his dad would give him movie scripts.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Movie scripts to read and to visualize and to memorize.

ROBERT: And to him, looking at scripts and imagining them in his head, that was his form of play. So when Zoltan lost his sight he thought, "Well, I'm gonna do now what I used to do then with the scripts. I may not be able to see the world anymore, but I can certainly imagine the world."

ZOLTAN TOREY: And I decided to repopulate the world with images and reconstruct reality for myself.

ROBERT: So now when Zoltan walks into a room and he puts his hand on a couch or chairs or a table ...

ZOLTAN TOREY: I see the furniture correctly in the manner in which you would see it from the corner of your eye.

ROBERT: He paints pictures of everything that he touches, everything that he hears, even smells in a room help him visualize the room.

ZOLTAN TOREY: The smell of the place would tell me about cleanliness or the use of the place. The echo would give me an estimation of windows and open spaces and alcoves. I really live with a kind of continuously-produced film strip.

ROBERT: And Zoltan says, "I am now so good at this kind of thing, so good at recreating the world in my Technicolor head," that he believes that what he sees up here is actually and literally and verifiably in the world, and he says he would risk his life and does risk his life daily on this proposition.

JAD: He would risk his life on it?

ROBERT: That's what he said.

JAD: What does that mean?

ROBERT: Well, he has a house. It's a multi-storey house. And there's some tiles on the roof that periodically need replacing. And, you know, to him it doesn't matter whether he fixes it nighttime or daytime because he's blind, so he'll—he'll go up on the roof, and he has this idea that just by touch in the middle of the night and careful feeling and remembering, he can do what he has to do.

ZOLTAN TOREY: I thought, "Hell, why shouldn't I try to do this?" First I repaired the guttering, and then large sections of the roof.

ROBERT: Well, wait a second. You're—you're blind though, right? You're totally blind.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Totally.

ROBERT: So then ...

ZOLTAN TOREY: Totally, totally blind.

ROBERT: Well then, what are you doing on a roof is my question?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Well, this is what my neighbors asked. They thought I was crazy, you know?

ROBERT: All right, so now here we have two very different ways of being blind. You got one guy who fills his mind with pictures, vivid, vivid, vivid pictures, and the other guy says, "I won't do that. I think the only way to live in the world honestly is to choose—it's a kind of double blindness, really." Not only are you dark on the outside, you go dark on the inside as well. So we wondered, wouldn't it be, like, more than cool to get these two guys together to duke it out, not to mention how politically incorrect that would be. So we decided to put them together by phone. So even though one of them works and lives in the United Kingdom and the other in Australia, we worked through the very radical time differences and we brought them together.

JOHN HULL: Can you hear me?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Yes, I can hear you.

JOHN HULL: We've done it. Hooray!

ZOLTAN TOREY: Yes, hooray.

ROBERT: Wow. Okay.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Good, good, good, good.

ROBERT: So here's what I'd like to do. Zoltan, can you just describe, since you're sitting there with your wife, what you know about her face?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Well, this is not a problem at all. I've known her for, what, 40-50 years now? And just through the touch, it is very, very easy to reconstruct her mouth and her turned-up nose and smile and her curly hair and ears. It's like a living image.

JOHN HULL: But tell me, when was the last time you actually saw her face with your eyes?

ZOLTAN TOREY: I never saw her face with my eyes.

JOHN HULL: Never?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Never. No, I met her only about five, six years after I lost my sight.

JOHN HULL: I see.

ZOLTAN TOREY: But this doesn't matter, John. This doesn't matter at all. The reconstruction is so vivid for me, I actually see it.

JOHN HULL: Well, I'm just lost for words. I—Zoltan tell me, are you totally blind?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Yes.

JOHN HULL: No light sensation?

ZOLTAN TOREY: None whatsoever.

JOHN HULL: Your wife's eyes, what color are they?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Brown.

JOHN HULL: Is that ...

ZOLTAN TOREY: Slightly flecked with little yellow spots in it. And they are also large, expressive.

JOHN HULL: She tells you her eyes are expressive.

ZOLTAN TOREY: No, no, no, no, no, John. There's more to it than that. I have years and years and years worth of experience, and other people's responses get all factored into the construction of a complex image.

JOHN HULL: But you cannot actually literally see her, you can only imagine that you can see her, so why does it matter?

ZOLTAN TOREY: Because emotionally, we do not react and cannot react properly to things that we cannot visualize. The whole human organism is constructed to react to pictures.

JAD: Yeah, I think he has—he has a point when he says that.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

JAD: Well, because I can't—if I think about it, I can't actually imagine having a feeling without a picture first.

ROBERT: Well, I can help you out. "I'm cold," I say. You don't have to see, like, icicles coming off my nose, you know that cold—you know what it means without—or this is a hard table. You don't need to see me hit it with a mallet.

JAD: No, I—that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about relationships. Like, don't you actually, in order to have a relationship with somebody, don't you have to first imagine them as a being in the world with a form that you can then attach your feelings to?

ROBERT: Well, only very vaguely. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of you out there who listen to Radiolab if you do and heard it for a while, and you had a vague sense of who was talking what they looked like, but it wasn't important. It didn't ...

JAD: I think it was important. I don't think they had this -- this image. I sort of hope they didn't, in a way. But—but I think you—I mean, you have to have some picture. I mean why is it, that quintessential experience when you listen to the radio and then suddenly you see the person on the radio and you're like, [gasp], you know? Like, that's—that's a classic experience. And I think it's because in that moment you realize you had been picturing somebody, and you have to picture that person in order to relate to them.

ROBERT: You have to?

JAD: Yeah, you can't relate to a blank.

ROBERT: Well, John would say that you're being a little narrow-minded, and that is exactly what he said to Zoltan.

JOHN HULL: Zoltan, you are trying to impose a visual totalitarianism upon the human brain.

ZOLTAN TOREY: No, no, no, no, John, It isn't I. We are visual creatures.

JOHN HULL: Blind people are not visual creatures.

ZOLTAN TOREY: Oh, come on. Come on, John. You said that you lost the visual world. Actually, I think that you just let it go. Now, I ...

JOHN HULL: I didn't just let it go, I extinguished it for the sake of a greater reality.

JAD: What is the greater reality, though?

ROBERT: John, he's gotten onto the truth.

JAD: Oh, come on, though. That's not—that's like accountants' version of truth. That's not a real truth.

ROBERT: Well ...

JAD: If a truth is blank, then why would it be a greater reality than the opposite? A fantasy or whatever, a lie perhaps, but at least it allows you to be in the world with other people.

ROBERT: Oh, a lie. So you find a lie is a useful standard for how ...?

JAD: No. I just mean you want to live in the world, and you want to connect and be—okay.

ROBERT: I ...

JAD: Supposing he does it how he says he does ...

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: Like, how do you even do that? How do you connect with something or someone that is absent, that is intentionally held as a blank? How do you do it?

ROBERT: Well, you know, that is actually a hard question. I couldn't quite figure it out for myself. So—so I asked him.

JOHN HULL: It's quite a difficult thing to describe. When our little boy Joshua, when he was about a year, 12 months old, 15 months maybe, my wife and I were at home and we had a visitor. Marilyn said to me—that's my wife, she said to me, "Tell me darling, what does Joshua look like?" I had to say, "Darling, you know he doesn't look like anything to me." She said, "Yes, yes. But what does Joshua mean to you?" And I said, "Well, Joshua to me is that giggling, thrilling, jumping, kicking bundle of boyhood that I throw over my shoulder. Joshua's those little feet that kick me in the chest. He's that beautiful, warm face that I lay my hand on when he's asleep."

ROBERT: And that is how John does it. That is John's way. 

JAD: Yeah, seriously, every time I hear that story I—a—all the memories of sitting on stage just come flooding back to me, it’s so funny.

ROBERT: It was very, very fun to do and we ...

JAD: We’re gonna do it again, actually.

ROBERT: Yes, we are touring with a new show, it’s called Apocalyptical and it’s—it’s about—well, I don’t want to—it’s gonna be a lot of fun ...

JAD: Yeah, you shouldn’t give it away, it’s gonna be. The name, kind of, I think says something about what’s gonna happen on that stage.

ROBERT: And if you’re in Ohio and you’re living in Columbus or Cleveland, or you’re in—in Toronto, Ontario ...

JAD: I’ve never been to Toronto, so that’s gonna be fun. 

ROBERT: Anarbor, or Detroit, or Milwaukee, or ...

JAD: Chicago ...

ROBERT: Yeah, the windy city ...

JAD: My hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. 

ROBERT: Atlanta Georgia, New York (my hometown) or Boston or Hartford, or Denver ...

JAD: Or Dallas, or Austin, or Houston, or Oakland, or Cupertino ...

ROBERT: We’ve been meaning to go to Austin, so yes. Cuper—even little Cupertino, and big, fat, Los Angeles, Portland ...

JAD: And Seattle. 

ROBERT: Seattle. All those places if you live near or around or will be passing through those towns in October and November of this year you might want to come and visit us, because that would be very lovely. 

JAD: Yeah, so the place to go if you’re interested is Radiolab.org. All the dates are listed there with links to tickets. Radiolab.org. [laughs] In stereo. 

PAT WALTERS: I don't really know where Tim is, so we're just gonna try ...

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and today we're talking about truth and facts.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Facts of the matter.

ROBERT: So recently, our producer Pat Walters and I, we were trying to get in touch with a guy, Tim Kreider.

PAT: Hello, Tim? Nope. Not there. I think if we just shout very loudly ...

ROBERT: Out the window ...

ROBERT: We wanted to talk to Tim because Tim is—not only is he a wonderful writer.

JAD: And before that a cartoonist ...

ROBERT: He has this essay which kind of gets to the heart of a very different kind of truth than we've tackled so far, and that is, can you truly know somebody, even after everything you thought you knew ...

JAD: Turns out to be wrong?

PAT: Hello, Tim?

TIM KREIDER: Yes.

PAT: [gasps] There you are. You sound great, too.

JAD: We should say, this is a story not about Tim, but about his friend, who he names Skelly, just to protect his identity.

PAT: So let's—let's try, if it's okay with you, if we could maybe just talk about Skelly as if we were just kind of hanging out at a bar, even though you're in a tiny booth ...

TIM KREIDER: [laughs] If I had a beer in this tiny room that would be easier.

PAT: Tell us how you met this guy.

TIM KREIDER: He was part of a group of friends I made when I was working a post-collegiate job going door-to-door for the environment, to knock on doors with clipboards and get people to donate.

ROBERT: Like vacuum salesman, knock-knock kind of thing?

TIM KREIDER: Yeah, you're dropped off by a van in a suburban neighborhood, and I can still faintly feel the dread of—of having to knock on your first door of the night, which was always the worst. But, you know, like—like being in the army, it was a bonding experience.

ROBERT: Especially because the knocking on the door stuff was just really, you know, a few hours a day.

TIM KREIDER: Then there's going out to the bars afterwards, which became as much a part of the job for us as anything else.

ROBERT: And one of those nights out drinking with friends, he got to talking with Skelly.

PAT: What'd he look like, by the way?

TIM KREIDER: You know I, I—he forbade me ever to draw him. I used to put my friends in my cartoons all the time, and I did that once to him and he interdicted me from doing that again.

ROBERT: So you don't want to draw him on the radio?

TIM KREIDER: [laughs]

PAT: No, he's about to.

ROBERT: Oh, he's about to. Okay, I'm sorry.

TIM KREIDER: He had this great mop of curly hair, glasses that were literally held together by duct tape. The overall effect was warmth and intelligence.

ROBERT: But from the beginning, he says, basic facts about this guy were a little hard to pin down.

TIM KREIDER: It wasn't really clear at first whether he belonged to our camp, the hippy-ish young people, or whether he was someone slightly older whose first life hadn't worked out. As it turned out, he was the latter. He had been a practicing lawyer and he had quit being a lawyer for reasons that remain unknown to me. I mean, I'm not sure it was entirely voluntary quitting.

ROBERT: But Tim says, at the time, he liked the guy.

TIM KREIDER: Yeah.

ROBERT: For one thing, women seemed to like him.

TIM KREIDER: They were charmed by him. Right away, all my girlfriends always liked him.

ROBERT: And beyond that ...

TIM KREIDER: You know, he and I were two of the readers in the group. We each always had a book with us.

ROBERT: So they began to swap books and as they got to be good friends, Skelly even showed him his writing.

TIM KREIDER: I still have it somewhere. In longhand, even. Beautiful longhand. He was clearly a sort of kindred spirit.

ROBERT: But then some questions popped up. One day, Skelly told Tim ...

TIM KREIDER: That he had written a novel, and that it had been accepted for publication.

ROBERT: Tim was like, "Wow!"

TIM KREIDER: I was excited for him.

PAT: You probably thought that, "You got published. That's amazing. I want to do that."

TIM KREIDER: Yeah. So, you know, I kept bugging him about, "Well, when's your book coming out?"

ROBERT: Skelly would say, "Well, you know, in a few months." And then the few months would pass, and Skelly would say, "Well, they just pushed it back. It's coming."

TIM KREIDER: And, you know, we had a close little group of friends, and, like all people on Earth, we talked about each other behind each other's backs, and maybe someone else sort of clued me in, like, "Tim, there's no book." I mean, maybe he wrote a book, but it's not being published.

ROBERT: Initially, Tim thought, "Well, hmm, there's probably some truth to it."

TIM KREIDER: You know, even if the truth was only the kind of truth that's contained in dreams.

ROBERT: But then there were other stories.

TIM KREIDER: One of his stories was about having been married briefly in France and having a daughter over there. And there was a time, at least one time, when he was on vacation from the environmental canvass, and he supposedly was gonna be in France, visiting his daughter who lived with her maternal grandparents there, and our boss saw him walking on Charles Street in Baltimore during that time. Obviously he was not in France.

JAD: And they were never like, "Uh, dude, someone saw you in Baltimore. Were you really in France?"

TIM KREIDER: No. We didn't say that. And, you know, I—I've met, I mean I've spent—I've logged a lot of time hanging out in bars, and you do meet pathological liars in that line of work. And, and, you know, I'm always duly impressed by their stories when I first hear them, until they pile up, and they're always able to one-up your story. You know, they've always met someone more famous than you. Something more tragic has always happened to them. And then they start to seem creepy and repellent. And all I can say is he didn't feel that way.

ROBERT: He just seemed like a really good guy who happened to lie more than most. In any case, after they left the canvassing job, they both stayed in Baltimore, and they stayed close.

TIM KREIDER: We frequently ended up crashing on the same floors together, closed down the bars together every night.

ROBERT: They'd take road trips together, blasting classic rock.

TIM KREIDER: He loved Led Zeppelin. [laughs]

ROBERT: And after a while, those stories ...

TIM KREIDER: Like, "I've published a novel," or, "I have a daughter in France," we didn't hear that stuff anymore. Our—our theory is that he did not expect that we would end up being friends for the next 20 years and he would have to maintain these stories, and, you know, we liked the guy so much that it would have been unthinkably mean-spirited to bring this stuff up. So we just sort of pretended we'd never heard it.

ROBERT: And he says they kept themselves from asking too many questions. Like, they knew he had a job at the opera house, you know, fundraising, but he was always broke, always hitting them up for money, and he was—he was—they wondered, why was he always house-sitting and spending the night at the library?

TIM KREIDER: You just never knew. You did have to— [laughs] you did have to triangulate from the few facts available. And, you know, in a way, it was fun. It was fun to speculate about and fun to tease him about—only behind his back, of course.

ROBERT: For example, Tim told us about one time he and his friend Nick were up at their cabin near the Chesapeake Bay ...

TIM KREIDER: Which is about an hour outside Baltimore, and we had had a lovely afternoon eating oysters, drinking beers overlooking the bay. And we're supposed to drive to a train station about 20 minutes, half an hour away to pick Skelly up. He's gonna take the train up there and join us. And so we break away from our pleasant set-up on the water, and we drive down to the train station to pick him up. The train comes and goes. He's not on it. And we're both a little peeved at having been torn away from our afternoon to come get him, only to be stood up at the train station. So my friend checks his cellphone to see if maybe there's a message, and indeed there is. And the message goes like this: "Hey guys, this is Skelly. I missed the train!" First of all, there's the background noises of what is clearly a bar—glasses clinking, the TV on. Unmistakably, the Mt Royal Tavern, a lowly dive near ...

PAT: How did you know it was the Mt Royal? How did you know that?

TIM KREIDER: We just knew. [laughs] And he says, "So I'm really sorry about this, but I was in a meeting that ran a little longer than I expected, and, [belches]. I tried to catch it, but I was, like, three minutes too late, but I checked, and there's another train at 7:20, gets in 7:45. I'll definitely be on that one. So hopefully y'all get this message and be there to meet me. Uh, okay, again, sorry about that. Hope I'll see you soon." And then there's 30 or 45 seconds of him fumbling to figure out how to hang up this borrowed cellphone.

ROBERT: [laughs]

TIM KREIDER: Throughout which we can hear the sounds of the bar clearly in the background. And I listened to this message, and I just smiled and shook my head and handed it speechlessly to my friend Nick.

ROBERT: Do you have any sense of what's—when you're not being told something, do you have any feeling for what you're not being told, or do you just think it's just silly details?

TIM KREIDER: No, you know, I don't—he was just a very secretive guy. And we got the sense that—I mean, he told me once, you know, "The less people know about you, the better off you are." I mean, we weren't supposed to know for a long time that he lived at home with his mother, you know, which is not unheard of, but an embarrassing thing when you're a grown man. And it became really obvious that he did, because if you called his house sometimes, you got his mother. And he had a complex cover story about how, oh, well, if the phone rang enough times at his house, it was forwarded to his mother's to pick up, which, you know, I had never heard of that. I didn't know the phone company offered that service. So, you know, we knew the deal, but we weren't gonna challenge him on it, because it so clearly was something he was embarrassed about and eager to conceal. I think he probably saw himself and was worried that others would see him as—as, you know, marginal or pathetic or loser-ish, and, you know, we didn't see him that way. We loved the guy. He was just one of us. You know, there are conditions that come with every friendship. People are weird, and most of the people who are really worth being friends with are weird, and you learn to accept that there are unspoken rules in certain friendships.

ROBERT: Until the day comes when the rules don't apply anymore. Fast forward a few years, Tim has moved to New York, Skelly still is in Baltimore with his—well, his mother had died, but he was living in the same house.

TIM KREIDER: I still saw him pretty often. He'd take the train up and we'd get some beers and some chicken wings.

ROBERT: And one day ...

TIM KREIDER: I got a phone call from a friend of mine, and he sounded very badly shaken.

ROBERT: Tim's friend said that he'd been worried about Skelly ...

TIM KREIDER: Because he hadn't heard from him for a while, and then he called work, and it turned out he hadn't been there and he knew something was wrong. So he went to his house, and, you know, I think he was able to get the door open enough to see inside, and he called in for him and he heard nothing and he forced his way in and found him.

ROBERT: Lying on the floor.

TIM KREIDER: Dead. The coroner ruled that that death was drug-related. So I went back to Baltimore right away, because I assumed there would be a memorial service and so on, and for a couple of days nothing happened at all, because he had kept his life so thoroughly compartmentalized that no one knew how to get in touch with his family, although at the last minute, the day before his funeral, we got in touch with his extended family, and they were able to send some people up.

ROBERT: Just before they arrived, it occurred to Tim, "Well, maybe we should go through his house."

TIM KREIDER: You know, and just clean up and, you know, find out if there's anything there that we should, you know, disappear before his family shows up. And we were talking to the guy who first found him, and he said, "Yeah, well, here's the thing."

ROBERT: He told them, "You guys, you can go back into that house, but I'm—I'm not going back in there."

TIM KREIDER: He had warned us, but as soon as we stepped in, it was still shocking. And terrible.

PAT: What did you see when you walked in?

TIM KREIDER: There are aspects about that that I will never tell you or anyone else, but suffice to say that as soon as you walked in, you could tell that someone had ceased living like a human being. I mean, there were heaps of things. Heaps. He'd stopped throwing things out. There wasn't electricity. There wasn't working plumbing.

ROBERT: Really, no plumbing?

PAT: At all?

TIM KREIDER: No. No, I don't think so. And words are gonna fail me here. I mean, the simplest way to say it would be to say it was clearly a place where an insane person had lived, or someone who was mentally ill had lived. I don't know if that's what to call it, because most people who are mentally ill don't know to conceal their mental illness. He was just a very gentle, decent, kind-hearted guy, but something horrible had happened. But on some level, he had understood that—I mean, it was a secret that he was keeping, and he kept it locked inside that house. And I think we were all appalled to realize that something had been so drastically wrong with him all this time, and the single most upsetting aspect of it was imagining how utterly alone he must have felt himself to be.

PAT: Did you ever have moments of feeling guilt, like I should have—I should have gotten into that place? I shouldn't have ...?

TIM KREIDER: No, the—I don't think there is anything that anyone could have done for him. I mean, he—he had so clearly determined not to let people into that chamber of his life. And the other thing is that he was so convincing in his dissembling. I mean, we really didn't think there was anything seriously wrong.

PAT: Yeah.

TIM KREIDER: He was his best and most decent and sanest self when he was in our company.

PAT: But you didn't know so much about him.

TIM KREIDER: Mm-hmm.

PAT: And I guess I just, in light of that, I wonder what it means to—to know someone, or who exactly it was that you think you knew.

TIM KREIDER: Yeah. Well, you know, the only person I knew of who ever got mad at him for telling what they would call lies were women. I mean, he was a guy, so he was not above trying to impress girls and, you know, the things he was trying to impress them with were his novel, his storied history, and often when they found out that those things were not, strictly speaking, true, they felt lied to and betrayed. And none of his friends ever felt that way, and I always felt that—perhaps this is patronizing or nasty of me—but I always felt that what those girls were really mad about was that they believed him. They'd fallen for it.

PAT: But in a sense you and your friends fell for something too.

TIM KREIDER: Well, I don't know, I mean, what I would say we fell for was the thousands of hours we spent in that guy's company, which seems to me like a more direct and reliable form of knowing than hearing facts, either made up or real. I mean, there was a day when Skelly and I drove up to my cabin to check on the place because there had been a blizzard, and there was a grove of bamboo trees there, and the weight of all the snow had bent them over the driveway so that they formed a kind of continuous arch. And we parked and we walked down through that arcade and we would tug on every bamboo tree, and it would shake the snow off, and it would suddenly spring up into the air, and it would fling its load of snow 50 feet into the sky. We did that with every tree, walking all the way down the driveway, and it was so beautiful and so much fun that we cracked up like boys.

TIM KREIDER: And I'm the only one who remembers that now. That was a moment that only he and I were there for and he's gone. He shared that with me and nobody else ever will. You're imagining it because I've described it to you, but that's not the same thing, and if you don't know someone by having experiences like that and memories like that with them, then I would submit that you cannot ever know anybody at all.

ROBERT: Thanks to producer Pat Walters and to Tim Kreider, whose book, which includes this story, is called We Learn Nothing.

[TIM KRIEDER: Hi there, this is Tim Kreider, I’ve been asked to call and leave a voicemail recording your credits, here they are. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenda Farrell, Malissa O’Donnell, Dylan Keefe, Andy Mills, Lynn Levy and Shawn Cole. With help from Matt Kielty, Daisy Rosario, and Nigel Wilson.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

[LISTENER: Hi, I’m Madelyn from Lansdale Pennsylvania, support for NPR comes from NPR stations and the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry Magazine, committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in American culture. PoetryFoundation.org. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, dedicated to the idea that all people deserve the chance to live healthy, productive lives, at GatesFoundation.org, and the Melville Charitable Trust, supporting solutions to prevent and end homelessness. On the web at Melvilletrust.org. Bye-bye.]

 

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