Free Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself by Alan Alda Page B

hearing. I’ve always been a little more creative than necessary.
    A couple of years later, Dan called and invited me to give a talk at Monticello. I certainly like hearing myself talk, but I had no idea what I’d say. “Thanks,” I said, “I’m fascinated with Jefferson, but I don’t think I know enough about him to give a talk.” He hinted that I could just speak for a few minutes about how much I admired Jefferson. People would be glad to hear whatever I had to say. Who would these people be? I wondered. Who would be listening to me? “Oh,” he said, “the board of trustees and some Jefferson scholars. A few historians.”
    I froze.
    He was asking me to talk about Jefferson in front of historians? Wouldn’t that be sort of insane?
    “Sure,” I said. “That sounds like fun.”
    I put down the phone and started making notes on what I knew about Jefferson. After a few minutes, I had a mostly blank page. But I had five months to get ready. I went to a bookstore and bought everything with Jefferson’s name on the cover. I especially liked one book by Silvio Bedini that concentrated on Jefferson as a scientist. I was having a great time reading about him, but after a while, a thought crept over me like a cat’s paws on your lungs just before it squeezes the life out of you.
These people have not only read this stuff, they probably wrote some of it.
How could I say anything they hadn’t heard before? How could I make it worth their while to sit there while I opened and closed my mouth? This was going to be impossible. There was no way I could come up with something new or interesting.
    And that was when I understood why I had agreed to talk: exactly because it terrified me.
    Terrifying myself, it turns out, is one of the ways I have of feeling alive. It gives a sense of accomplishment to my life.
    Nothing feels as good to me as doing something I know how to do. But if I do it too many times, it feels easy and a little slick; it loses some of its pleasure. So I have to keep looking for things that are just a little harder. This produces a feeling that’s very close to accomplishment—
if
I can actually do it, of course. And this time, as the months went on, the pages stayed white.
    I wanted to say something new, but not so new that it wasn’t true. I didn’t want to get overly creative, as when I sat in Jefferson’s wingback chair, inventing things for him he hadn’t invented himself. A few months on, I got a call from Dan, gently checking up on me. “How’s it going? Can we give you any help with background material?”
    “Well, I’ve got a lot of stuff here.”
    “What are you reading?”
    “A lot. I like the Bedini book.”
    “Bedini is good. You’re safe with Bedini.”
    His tone was cheerful, but it was becoming clear that, although the invitation was to say anything I liked about Jefferson, I wasn’t supposed to say something stupid. That seemed like a good idea to me, too.
    I tried one tack after another. I knew I should somehow make a personal connection to Jefferson, but what would it be? He had lived so long ago; he was a genius in so many ways. Aside from helping found a country and becoming its secretary of state, its vice president, and twice its president, he was an inventor, educator, musician, mathematician, geographer, philosopher, botanist, physicist, linguist, agronomist, archaeologist, meteorologist, paleontologist—and either he made important contributions to these fields or he
created
them. He was one of our greatest writers; he could fit the dreams of a nation into a handful of words and make them ring down through two centuries. Where, exactly, did my life intersect with his?
    The months started flying by like the scene in a 1940s movie where the pages fly off the calendar, and I was getting nowhere. Finally, I noticed I was having a recurring daydream in which I stood in front of an imposing gathering of historians on the grass in front of Monticello, and as I looked down