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In just the past few weeks we have doubled in size and we are beginning to get some broader interest. I love it when a plan comes together!
My last two posts have covered some early Gunkel lists and I’d like to hang in this space of Gunkel’s early years a little longer before moving on.
As a junior in high school, Gunkel made the extremely consequential decision to drop out. Not only were his grades in the dumps, but he was bored with school and wanted to spend his time working so that he could earn enough money to amass a magisterial library that would represent his progress as an intellectual.
This is a common pattern for neurodivergent geniuses, although I’m not sure how many get bored and drop out before they even graduate high school.
These days, the pattern seems to be designing a minimal viable product in college, getting offered tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding, and going straight into the role of CEO—no higher education necessary.
But let’s not compare Gunkel, a many-sigma outlier, with those of the uncommon crowd, who are merely a few standard deviations from the norm.
Gunkel’s product was almost always intellectual.
And though he may have imagined himself, vaguely, as the CEO of some future high-tech ideation empire, his personal workflow was usually a virtuous feedback loop consisting primarily of reading, thinking, writing, and playing with his cat.
The High School Revolutionaries
Published in 1970—the same year Gunkel got his big break with MIT computer science professors Ed Fredkin and Marvin Minsky—The High School Revolutionaries includes as its final chapter what is very likely Gunkel’s first published work, an essay called “The Year 3000.”1
Gunkel’s writing was almost certainly included in the book thanks to his friend Bob Clark, who is cited on the book’s acknowledgements page.
A 1990 Boston Globe profile of Clark connects him with both Gunkel and Marc Libarle, one of the two editors of The High School Revolutionaries.2
A blurb on the book’s cover seems to frame the book as a first-person explainer regarding the dramatic cultural changes in America during the late 1960s, stating:
“Students speak out about their schools, their culture, their politics, and about their war with an America they refuse to inherit.”
Source: Amazon.com
Gunkel’s essay is the last one in the book.
His section is titled, very appropriately, “The High School Drop-Out as Intellectual.”
But in true fashion when confronted with Gunkelian writing, the book’s editors clearly wrestled with what Gunkel was really talking about, and may even have wondered why Clark was so enthusiastic about the young man.
“To the untutored mind,” the editors write, “[Gunkel’s] essay may seem abstract, difficult to follow, and even boring.”
Of all the nerve!
To invite a genius like Gunkel to contribute to your essay collection, then hide his writing in the back and throw him under the bus in your introduction?
Surely the editors missed the point…?
“Abstract, Difficult to Follow, and Even Boring”
One of the first of many hurdles to overcome as a Gunkel scholar is the recognition that you’re going to have to accept the goods with the bads, and that you will frequently encounter the bads.
The editors of The High School Revolutionaries are right about Gunkel’s essay, I’m afraid.
By couching their criticism with a suggestion the reader’s intellect is, perhaps, untutored, they were giving themselves (and Gunkel) a way to save face.
The only problem here is that I’m extremely tutored—in Gunkel more than any other topic—and frankly I just cannot make much sense of what he’s talking about.
For example, in trying to describe a future state with more educational opportunities and access to information, Gunkel writes:
People are going to know a lot and as much as each other, regardless of national or local boundaries. Those boundaries are going to be very seriously questioned. There has never been a society in which the populace possessed a "four-dimensional" view of itself and an ability to understand everything political. One way or another, men are going to become conscious of the hellishness of their state. Like it or not, this world is going to become an organism of motives with philosophic conscience conquered.
It goes on like this for several pages.
Mind you, the arc of the essay is relatively easy to follow—Gunkel was bored with high school and decided to drop out; he read a bunch of stuff about the future, saw where things were headed, and decided to spend the rest of his life living as though humanity had already arrived at the threshold of transcendence.
But the central question, at least in most reader’s minds—does the anticipation of these technological advances that will transform society and the human mind provide adequate justification for dropping out of high school—remains largely unanswered.
Indeed, if the quality of the writing itself provides any indication, the “hyper intellectual” (as the editors described him) Gunkel does not provide a great view of his program of self-education.
In fact, after my own experience of reading transcriptions of Herman Kahn’s tape-recorded monologues, the essay almost seems like a less coherent version of the sort of digressive rants for which Kahn, who Gunkel considered to be his mentor, was known.3
As the essay approaches its conclusion, Gunkel unleashes a deluge of what he surely considered poetic writing, invoking youth-centric clichés about the spirit of the times:
The old people don't own this world, the oncoming generations do. The really important things are objective, not solipsistic; they are poetic, not fixed. People need much nonchalance and comity. It's unnecessary to wince at a supposedly "ugly" person or maintain all of the meaningless distinctions of prejudice that we do; the lovely eye sees the world as lovely, or a challenge to compassion. Most people talk too much: they should look, feel, have sex, and cry over the absurdity of their ways. One day promiscuity and homosexuality will be seen and used as virtues.
A Cautionary Tale
Readers who encountered “The Year 3000” in 1970 may have scratched their heads and assumed that marijuana was involved.
I’ve never identified Gunkel as using marijuana.
So while that might be a possibility, there’s also the distinct possibility that Occam’s Razor has it right, and rather than struggling for a more “tutored” explanation, we simply ought to see this essay as the output of a young, brilliant mind that was still lurching all over the place.
Gunkel himself acknowledged that his early writing was not good, and that his path as a writer involved decades of maturation.
Nor did Gunkel seem interested in developing a close reading habit that allowed him to produce any work with an essential literary quality.
“I seldom read books,” Gunkel wrote in a 2003 email, “but rather in the manner of an intellectual grasshopper who hops about, by purpose, chance, or pleasure, and absorbs a great deal from the whole that he does not from the particular.”4
The lack of high school diploma haunted Gunkel for the remainder of his life.
Though his achievements were remarkable in spite of his lack of formal schooling, the decision to drop out from high school is one that he wrestled with well into his 50s, as numerous archival emails show.
References:
(1) The High School Revolutionaries. Marc Libarle; Tom Seligson, eds. Random House. 1970.
(2) See “An Unconventional Traditionalist as the New Dean in the Contentious Environment of Harvard Law School, Robert Clark Is Learning the Perils of Challenging the Status Quo.” Boston Globe. March 4, 1990.
(3) See, e.g., Herman Kahnsciousness by Jerome Agel (1973).
(4) Author’s original archival research.