64 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019
materials for a financial group. I’d fool-
ishly got involved in drafting the an-
nual report, which wasn’t something
you could just wing, given the legal
framework. Being away from the office,
on account of my undiagnosable ail-
ment, hadn’t made it any easier. The
substance of the job was handling var-
ious stupidities, my own included.
I was at that time a stupidist, and
probably still am. Stupidism is the the-
ory that people are stupid in the mea-
sure of their most powerful agency.
They’re stupid precisely when we need
them not to be stupid. Much as I didn’t
want to be a stupidist—it’s dispiriting,
for starters—I recognized that it im-
proved my grasp on things. Whereas I
used to listen with great respect to what
the Treasury Secretary or the C.E.O.
of a booming conglomerate or even
your regular talking head had to say,
now I presumed that they were full of
it. It was revelatory. The world makes
a lot more sense when you accept that
it’s run by dingbats. And once you’ve
recognized the nature of stupidity—
that it expresses a relation between a
person and that person’s situation; that
it describes the gap between what ought
to be understood and done and what
is, in fact, understood and done—you
begin to recognize the magnitude of
the problem. Stupidity isn’t inevitableor constant, of course, but in the long
run it almost always prevails. Alan
Greenspan? Stupid, ultimately. Barack
Obama? Not as smart as he needed to
be, at the end of the day. Joe Schmo?
Amazingly stupid.
The subject had a very personal rel-
evance. There was something down-
right stupid about a flying human being.
I felt, above all, stupid.W
ith this organizing principle in
my mind—not to be stupid—I
followed up on Pam’s suggestion about
insurance. She put me on to a friend
of hers, Naomi Patel, who had one of
those cute little offices in the Empire
State Building. Naomi, according to
Pam, specialized in boutique perils. I
made an appointment. Viki said doubt-
fully, “I guess that makes sense.”
It was my first excursion since that
fateful near-miss on York Avenue. Viki,
who had left work early, held my hand
as we walked to and from the taxi. She
did this in order to keep me anchored
to the ground as well as to convey love.
Naomi Patel was our age—late-ish
thirties—and had a very reassuring and
competent manner. Her office was on
the seventy-sixth floor and offered a
view of a silvery and gleaming Hud-
son River and a silvery and gleaming
New York Harbor. I cleaned my glasses
to get a better look, because it was that
order of spectacle—the order that re-
minds you of words like “argentine”
and “numinous.”
She listened conscientiously, mak-
ing notes on a yellow pad. When I’d
finished, she put down her pen and re-
moved her glasses and said, to Viki,
“Have I understood this correctly? Your
husband”—a little ironically, it seemed
to me, she checked her notes—“has
the power of flight?”
“Um, yes,” Viki said. She was mak-
ing the face that we’d agreed she would
make, namely, a face signalling to the
insurance broker that she should humor
the eccentric husband. We didn’t want
the broker to believe that I was truly
an aeronaut.
Naomi Patel said, “That is unusual.”
She continued, “I’ve handled a lot of
dangerous activities—skydiving, wing-
suit flying, really far-out stuff—but
never this. Huh.”
She reflected for a moment, calcu-“I think what he’d like from you is a pledge to
help fund his new nonprofit.”