Love is a Fallacy
Max Shulman
1 Charles Lamb, as merry and enterprising a fellow as you will meet in a month of Sundays, unfettered the informal essay with his memorable Old China and Dream's Children. There follows an informal essay that ventures even
beyond Lamb's frontier, indeed, \describe this essay; \appropriate.
2 Vague though its category, it is without doubt an essay. It develops an argument; it cites instances; it reaches a conclusion. Could Carlyle do more? Could Ruskin ?
3 Read, then, the following essay which undertakes to demonstrate that logic, far from being a dry, pedantic discipline, is a living, breathing thing, full of beauty, passion, and trauma --Author's Note
4 Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute and
astute--I was all of these. My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, as precise as a chemist's scales, as penetrating as a scalpel. And--think of it! --I was only eighteen.
5 It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, for
example, Petey Butch, my roommate at the University of Minnesota. Same age, same background, but dumb as an ox. A nice enough young fellow, you
understand, but nothing upstairs. Emotional type. Unstable. Impressionable. Worst of all, a faddist. Fads, I submit, are the very negation of reason. To be swept up in every new craze that comes along, to surrender yourself to idiocy just because everybody else is doing it--this, to me, is the acme of mindlessness. Not, however, to Petey.
6 One afternoon I found Petey lying on his bed with an expression of such distress on his face that I immediately diagnosed appendicitis. \said. \ 7 \
8 \ 9 \
10 I perceived that his trouble was not physical, but mental. \want a raccoon coat?\
11 \known they'd come back when the Charleston came back. Like a fool I spent all my money for textbooks, and now I can't get a raccoon coat.\
12 \raccoon coats again?\
13 \ 14 \Campus
15 He leaped from the bed and paced the room, \coat,\
16 \shed. They smell bad. They weight too much. They're unsightly. They--\
17 \do. Don't you want to be in the swim?\ 18 \
19 \Anything!\
20 My brain, that precision instrument, slipped into high gear. \I asked, looking at him narrowly.
21 \
22 I stroked my chin thoughtfully. It so happened that I knew where to set my hands on a raccoon coat. My father had had one in his undergraduate days; it lay now in a trunk in the attic back home. It also happened that Petey had
something I wanted. He didn't have it exactly, but at least he had first rights on it. I refer to his girl, Polly Espy.
23 I had long coveted Polly Espy. Let me emphasize that my desire for this young woman was not emotional in nature. She was, to be sure, a girl who excited the emotions but I was not one to let my heart rule my head. I wanted Polly for a shrewdly calculated, entirely cerebral reason.
24 I was a freshman in law school. In a few years I would be out in practice. I was well aware of the importance of the right kind of wife in furthering a lawyer's career. The successful lawyers I had observed were, almost without exception, married to beautiful, gracious, intelligent women. With one omission, Polly fitted these specifications perfectly.
25 Beautiful she was. She was not yet of pin-up proportions but I felt sure that time would supply the lack She already had the makings.
26 Gracious she was. By gracious I mean full of graces. She had an erectness of carriage, an ease of bearing, a poise that clearly indicated the best of breeding, At table her manners were exquisite. I had seen her at the Kozy Kampus Korner eating the specialty of the house--a sandwich that contained scraps of pot roast, gravy, chopped nuts, and a dipper of sauerkraut--without even getting her fingers moist.
27 Intelligent she was not. in fact, she veered in the opposite direction. But I believed that under my guidance she would smarten up. At any rate, it was worth a try. It is, after all, easier to make a beautiful dumb girl smart than to make an ugly smart girl beautiful.
28 \
29 \love. Why?\
30 \mean are you going steady or anything like that?\
31 \
32 \fondness?\
33 \
34 I nodded with satisfaction. \the field would be open. Is that right?\
35 \
36 \closet.
37 \
38 \
39 \couldn't get some money from your old man, could you, and lend it to me so I can buy a raccoon coat?\
40 \bag and left.
41 \the suitcase and revealed the huge, hairy, gamy object that my father had worn in his Stutz Bearcat in 1925.
42 \raccoon coat and then his face. \times.
43 \
44 \came into his eyes. \ 45 \
46 \ 47 \
48 He flung the coat from him. \
49 I shrugged. \business.\
50 I sat down in a chair and pretended to read a book, but out of the corner of my eye I kept watching Petey. He was a torn man. First he looked at the coat with the expression of a waif at a bakery window. Then he turned away and set his jaw resolutely. Then he looked back at the coat, with even more longing in his face. Then he turned away, but with not so much resolution this time. Back and forth his head swiveled, desire waxing, resolution waning . Finally he didn't turn away at all; he just stood and stared with mad lust at the coat.
51 \steady or anything like that.\
52 \
53 \ 54 \
55 \ 56 \
57 He complied. The coat bunched high over his ears and dropped all the way down to his shoe tops. He looked like a mound of dead raccoons. \he said happily.
58 I rose from my chair. \ 59 He swallowed. \
60 I had my first date with Polly the following evening. This was in the nature of a survey; I wanted to find out just how much work I had to do to get her mind up to the standard I required. I took her first to dinner. \a delish （=delicious） dinner,\to a movie. \theater. And then I took her home. \she said as she bade me good night.
61 I went back to my room with a heavy heart. I had gravely
underestimated the size of my task. This girl's lack of information was terrifying. Nor would it be enough merely to supply her with information First she had to be taught to think. This loomed as a project of no small dimensions, and at first I was tempted to give her back to Petey. But then I got to thinking about her abundant physical charms and about the way she entered a room and the way she handled a knife and fork, and I decided to make an effort.
62 I went about it, as in all things, systematically. I gave her a course in logic. It happened that I, as a law student, was taking a course in logic myself, so I had all the facts at my finger tips. \next date, \
63 \would go far to find another so agreeable.
64 We went to the Knoll, the campus trysting place, and we sat down under an old oak, and she looked at me expectantly. \about?\ 65 \
66 She thought this over for a minute and decided she liked it. \(=magnificent),\
67 \can think correctly, we must first learn to recognize the common fallacies of logic. These we will take up tonight.\
68 \
69 I winced, but went bravely on. \Dicto Simpliciter.\
70 \
71, \generalization. For example: Exercise is good. Therefore everybody should exercise.\
72 \builds the body and everything.\
73 \
unqualified generalization. For instance, if you have heart disease, exercise is bad, not good. Many people are ordered by their doctors not to exercise. You must qualify the generalization. You must say exercise is usually good, or exercise is good for most people. Otherwise you have committed a Dicto
Simpliciter. Do you see?\Do morel\
75 \she desisted, I continued: \Listen carefully: You can't speak French. I can't speak French. Petey Burch can't speak French. I must therefore conclude that nobody at the University of Minnesota can speak French.\
76 \
77 I hid my exasperation. \too hastily. There are too few instances to support such a conclusion.\
78 \than dancing even.\
79 I fought off a wave of despair. I was getting nowhere with this girl absolutely nowhere. Still, I am nothing if not persistent. I continued.
80 \Every time we take him out with us, it rains.\
81 \Becker, her name is, it never falls. Every single time we take her on a picnic--\ 82 \She has no connection with the rain. You are guilty of Post Hoc if you blame Eula Becker.\
83 \me?\
84 I sighed deeply. \ 85 \
86 \
87 \
88 I frowned, but plunged ahead. \Premises: If God can do anything, can He make a stone so heavy that He won't be able to lift it?\
89 \
90 \ 91 \stone.\
92 \
93 She scratched her pretty, empty head. \ 94 \
contradict each other, there can be no argument. If there is an irresistible force, there can be no immovable object. If there is an immovable object, there can be no irresistible force. Get it?\