Anxiety cubed by one Hungarian!
by HUNSOR Online

The great Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi was once asked if he believed in extraterrestrials. "Sure I do," he said. "I know a lot of them personally. They're called Hungarians."


What Fermi was saying was not that Hungarians are strange, though they are; what he meant to say was that Hungarians are too damn smart to be human. If you've studied the history at all, you know that 20th-century physics and mathematics are pretty much Hungarian conspiracies, not to speak of music and cinema (Szell, Solti, Ormandy, Dohnanyi: can even the Germans throw up four greater 20th-centuryorchestral conductors?).

The currency trader George Soros, perhaps the single most powerful man in existence, is a Hungarian. Ernie Kovacs, the most cerebral and inventive television comedian who ever lived, was a Hungarian. You've used a Schick razor? Schick was Hungarian. You've heard a ballpoint pen called a "biro"? Biro was Hungarian. A Hungarian, John von Neumann, invented game theory and was the first to apply binary numbers to problems in computing. And today, who manufactures the brains for the computers I'm using to type this and you're using to read it? That's right--Intel, a company founded by crypto-Hungarian Andrew Grove.

Hungarians are especially ubiquitous in math; crack a college math textbook, and you'll most likely find a smattering of Frenchmen, a rather greater number of Germans, a few Brits and Japanese, and, most of all, Hungarians--Hungarians beyond counting, except by Hungarians, who are better at this sort of thing than we mere mortals. Von Neumann, Bolyai, Kalman, Polya, Turan, Szego, Peter, Erdos, Reisz, Fejer...the torrent of goulash never ends...
...which is why I think Erno Rubik must be a pretty sad guy, even though he's unbelievably rich. He's a math professor and all that, but what are they going to put on his tombstone? Can he claim to be "Father of the hydrogen bomb," like his countryman Edward Teller? Can he call himself "Director of Casablanca, the most beloved of all Hollywood films," like Michael Curtiz? Can he say "I was the greatest war photographer of the 20th century," like Robert Capa? No. He's going to have that little cube on his tombstone. In fact, his tombstone is probably going to be shaped like a Rubik's Cube.

"But, Malcolm," I hear you saying, "Erno Rubik is one of the wealthiest men in Hungary! What makes you think he's sad?" Well, take a look for yourself at his website, which is at www.rubiks.com. "As was to be expected, after the sale of over 100 million puzzles in three years, the Cube went out of fashion," recalls the great man, looking back to his annus horribilis of 1984. "Although it disappeared from the shops for a while, the Cube never lost the affection of the puzzlers once they got it into their hands. Now I am happy to say the Cube is again back in the shops, taking its rightful place among the permanent classics in company with a whole range of puzzles and games which I have created in the meanwhile. With the increasing importance of the Net and the coming of age of a whole new generation of Cubers, I feel this is the right time to establish my own official Rubik site on this unique road junction of the information highway."

Yes, well. Denial, as they say, ain't just a river in Egypt. (They also say, with equal wisdom, that writing is not the Hungarians' strong suit.) 15 years after everybody got permanently sick of Rubik's Cube, the good professor is still looking forward to a "new generation of Cubers?" It seems to me he knows what fate is in store for him--he knows that the name he shares with his ancestors is not going to be associated with a symphony, a natural law, or an equation, but with a vaguely ridiculous 1980s fad. His room in Valhalla is not with von Neumann, Grove, and Franz Liszt; he'll be seated next to Ms. Pac-Man.

Waca, waca, waca.

Bitter? I am, a little. Erno Rubik's beguiling little puzzle made my life miserable for a good long time back in the '80s. And I know I'm not the only one. Did any single person contribute more to the sum total of human misery in the 1980s than Dr. Erno Rubik? Other than Bobby McFerrin, I mean. Look: I was what they used to call a "gifted child." In the 1990s, we would probably speak of a child with spina bifida or cerebral palsy as being "gifted," just to avoid hurting their feelings. "I'm afraid Billy can't play kickball today, boys; he's gifted with cystic fibrosis." Back in the more social-Darwinian '80s, however, the term "gifted child" meant "a child so smart that he disrupts classes and gets intolerably sarky with the teachers."

I don't like to complain about my background as a "gifted child", because it's a stupid thing to complain about. I'm sure the Prince of Wales' kids have a pretty rough life, too, but who wouldn't trade places with them? To whom much is given, much is expected. In my case, I was given a big IQ--big enough that I became a special object of study for the boondocks head-shrinkers (whose advice, thank God, was mostly ignored by my parents).

A big IQ is nice: you can read subway maps, do sums in your head, write deathless prose, that sort of thing. But if people know you have one, watch out. You can never again misplace a comma or lose your socks at the laundromat. "Eh, look at you! IQ the size of Kilimanjaro and you can't even clean a spoon properly! You must be the most retarded super-genius who ever lived." Even now, I don't really have a response to that, but when you're a kid this sort of thing gets to you even more. Not to speak of the hatred of your peers and the routine pummelings. It ain't all gravy. (This have I learned about life: even gravy ain't all gravy.)

Like every other child in the known universe, I received a Rubik's Cube in my Christmas stocking in 1981. Actually, it wasn't a Rubik's Cube; my dollar-conscious parents bought one of those Taiwanese knockoffs (Super Fun Joy Brainteaser!). Aside from the dingy colours, the knockoff was actually better than the original, whose parts were machined to very close tolerances. Manipulating the real Rubik's Cube took some elbow grease; using the fake was nice and easy because the pieces were so loose.

Even before I took the Cube out of its wrapper, I knew enough to have mixed feelings. I loved puzzles then, and I still do. Puzzles are one of the four intellectual food groups for a gifted child (music, art, and continual browbeating are the others), and my parents did make sure I was awash in them. I grew up reading Games magazine and revering the names of immortal puzzlesmiths (God help me, that's what they're called) like Sam Loyd, Martin Gardner, and Raymond Smullyan.
And I've found, as an adult, that other survivors of gifted childhoods are instantly recognizable, because they know these names. No one else seems to.

There is such a thing as a puzzle esthetic; a great puzzle is simple, its solution demands insight and patience, and it is beautiful. Well, the Rubik's Cube has all these qualities in such abundance that it had a whole world asking itself "Now why didn't I think of this?" Has any object or concept so simple and elegant ever commanded such a fanatical following? Fads are almost always about status, and status is almost always about subtle distinctions; you'd be hard-pressed to explain the real differences between a Mercedes and a Volvo to an extraterrestrial visitor, but everybody recognizes the status distinction just the same. The Rubik's Cube wasn't like this. It was a meritocratic status fad; either you could solve it or you couldn't. It wasn't hierarchical; there were no subtle gradations to speak of; the object was there in front of you, and you defeated it, or it defeated you. It was, perhaps, the first pass/fail fad in the history of the Western World.

For the brainiac son of a heavy-duty mechanic living in a depressing agricultural village, it ought to have been the very Rapture. A status symbol you didn't need money to acquire! You only needed brains!
What could be better than that?

Well, of course, I couldn't solve the bloody thing. I'm not very good at chess or Starcraft, either--at any sort of spatial game, I'm rather ordinary. Not that I was a total washout. I played with the Cube that afternoon as my parents looked on, and it didn't take me long to figure out how to get one side all the same colour. Soon I was able, with great difficulty, to get two sides. That was the limit. I tussled with the Cube for hours, pushing my attention span well past its normal bounds. Then it came time for Christmas dinner, and the relatives started arriving.

"Ooh, look! A Rubik's Cube! Do you know, the deaconess at my church bought one for her five-year-old daughter, and she solved it in twenty minutes! Well, I'm sure little Malcolm won't have any trouble with it."

I played with my Fisher-Price Adventure People and tried not to say anything.
My Uncle Garth showed up. "Oh, you bought Malcolm a Rubik's Cube--that figures. So how many times has he solved it so far?...None? Well, imagine that. A bright boy like him." Garth, a born-again homeopathic-remedy salesman from Flin Flon, Manitoba, picked up the Cube and gave it a few twists, solving it in less than a minute. "See? It's not so hard."

I sat very still and bit my nails until they bled. Over the next few weeks, dozens of adults trooped through the doors of our house, bringing with them tales of emphysematous grandparents and diaper-wearing infants who could solve Rubik's Cube blindfolded. On TV, I watched a Vietnamese guy with bad skin solve the Cube in 22 seconds on "That's Incredible." (I took some consolation: at least Fran Tarkenton didn't solve it.)

I sank into a deep funk. My parents tried to help--they bought me one of those "How to Solve Rubik's Cube" books. The book was much harder to master than the puzzle. It was full of long strings of what looked like computer assembly language: "R-U+DD-L=LL++RDU..." I put the book away. Sometimes I'd get the Cube out and solve one side to cheer myself up. Eventually I learned--didn't we all?--how to take it apart and reassemble it with the colours in the right places. This satisfied me in the way cutting the Gordian knot satisfied Alexander, and once the word was out to the general public that you could take the Cube apart, the prestige of having a solved Cube dwindled to nothing. It destroyed the status element, and once that was gone, the fad was not long for this world.

Eventually, I overachieved, just for a change. I won essay contests and physics and math prizes--there are no Hungarians in my native region, nor any Asians either--and I even acquitted myself fairly well on a famous Canadian quiz show for spotty-faced adolescents. But you can't escape the past. I was talking to my friend Spike on the phone the other day and I told her I'd been thinking about Rubik's Cube and visiting Dr. Rubik's website.

"Rubik's Cube is beautiful," she said. "I left mine behind when I moved out of town. I wish I had it here with me. I'd play with it right now."
"I don't have mine, either," I said. "Suits me. I never did solve the thing. Caused me no end of grief."
"Don't worry, puddin'," she said. "I'll teach you how to solve it sometime."
For a moment, I believed her. I imagined us sitting together on a comfortable couch somewhere; in the vision, she tutored me patiently and kindly and we had hours of fun and eventually I did conquer Rubik's Cube. And we laughed like children watching the sunrise from the heights of some dewy Acropolis. And then, in the next instant, I had another vision, a vision of me blind with rage, taking the Cube in a meaty fist and blacking both of Spike's eyes and then knocking her charming teeth down her throat along with a few stray Cube pieces.

"I'll take a rain check, puddin'," I said. "But I appreciate your faith in me." And I did. I wish I could have said it in Hungarian.