687: Small Things Considered

Ira Glass

Of all the things in the movies that could happen to you-- and there's so many, right-- I think getting shrunk down to a miniature size-- I think that is one that nobody would ever choose. It seems dangerous. It seems frightening. How Marvel Comics ever thought that shrinking could be a superpower, that is really totally beyond me. Turning yourself into a person the size of a pencil eraser? It doesn't make anything easier. Everything is harder. In the movie Ant-Man, the first time Ant-Man shrinks--

Ira Glass

--he's instantly in mortal danger. Water in a bathtub nearly drowns him.

[SCREAMING]

People dancing in an apartment almost crush him with their high-heeled shoes. A rat tries to eat him.

[GROWLING]

It's a ridiculous superpower. The writers actually have to cheat and give Ant-Man a whole second power, mind control over armies of ants, or he'd never get anything accomplished. But these stories of tiny people, you know, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, The Borrowers-- when I was young, I loved the film Fantastic Voyage-- I do get the appeal of them. They give you this feeling of what if. What if I was so small that I could stand between the wafers of an Oreo cookie, that I could climb onto an insect?

Last year, when she was in fourth grade, Chloe thought about this a lot. She's a kid in suburban New Jersey. Now that she's in fifth grade, she finds this a little embarrassing. But last year, every night when she'd go to bed, she'd prepare for the possibility that magic might strike while she was asleep, and that she would shrink down to the size of her dollhouse. Those preparations included--

Ira Glass

That way, if she shrunk in the middle of the night, she would be on the bed and not on the pillow, which seemed way more treacherous to her. She also took a slap bracelet, which can stretch out like a ruler, and positioned the ruler very carefully, like a little bridge, from--

Ira Glass

The little hammock, which she made for herself to sleep on, which is basically a bracelet of intertwined rubber bands suspended in air on a frame of Q-tips.

Ira Glass

Under the hammock was a calculator that she could step on, like a little footstool, to get up onto the hammock. And next to the couch was a Post-it folded in half with a note to her parents explaining that she had shrunk, all ready to be unfolded when this really happened to her for real. And finally, every night when she went to bed--

Ira Glass

That beeping that you're hearing-- Chloe was being recorded on a telephone whose batteries started dying at this point in the interview, making that beeping noise.

Ira Glass

Once you start to think about the world this way, small stuff can become really transfixing. The sheer tinyness of tiny things can have a kind of mesmerizing power to it. We were talking about this at our office last week, and Bim took the most extreme stand on this. I dragged her into the studio to talk about this.

Ira Glass

It's Bim who told me about the radically tiny tubs of Vaseline you can buy, which have the exact design of the bigger jars.

Ira Glass

They're just things for the pleasure of smallness and staring at smallness.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, "Small Things Considered," we have stories of people overlooking what is so great about the tiny, the minuscule, the peewee, the bite size, and the teensy-weensy. Also, some very dramatic examples of the power of smallness, including, for instance, the power to end health insurance as we know it for millions of people.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. My voice is affected by some sort of tiny, tiny bug this week. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1, Coming Up Short.

So a while ago, we got an email from a physician who was starting to see a trend that disturbed her, among her patients. She wanted us to look into it. We thought our contributor Scott Brown would be the best person for the job for reasons that'll become clear as he proceeds. Here's Scott.

Scott Brown

So this doctor told us that all of these parents have been coming to her, scads of them-- she used the word inundated-- with the same problem. Their kids were short, not dramatically short. They were just below average height for their age. We're talking 9-, 10-, 11-year-old kids. And what these parents wanted was for this doctor to prescribe them human growth hormone injections to make their kids taller.

These are daily injections that cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. It's usually affluent privileged families, this doctor says, who already have all the advantages. She went as far as to call the desire for growth hormone among these folks an epidemic.

Scott Brown

This doctor want it to be completely anonymous, by the way. She feels like she's whistleblowing. In fact, this isn't her real voice. We swapped her voice for an actor's in our recording of the interview. Since I can't identify her, I'll refer to her from here on as Short Throat. All we can say is she's a pediatric endocrinologist-- that is, a children's doctor, specializing in stuff like diabetes, thyroid problems, and growth.

She says she got into medicine to treat sick kids, but fully half of her patients are coming to her just for the growth part.

Scott Brown

That window is real. Parents have to start their kids on the drug by the time they're hitting puberty. Short Throat has been practicing for about seven years, but she works closely with other doctors who've been at it for decades.

Scott Brown

40th percentile, meaning 40% of the rest of the country is shorter than they are, so just below average.

Scott Brown

Oh, I get it. I've gotten it my whole life. This is probably the point in the story where I should level with you, if I could-- short joke! I'm just under 5' 3", which puts me right around the first percentile of American males by height, shorter than 99% of the men in this country. For years, I thought I was 5' 4"-- the second percentile. But a recent doctor visit confirmed that I'd been rounding up.

I've always been the smallest guy in the room, consistently smaller than other kids, for as long as I can remember. There are some downsides, sure. But I think I have a pretty good life. My successes and failures-- I do not leave them at the tiny feet of my shortness. My height is just one thing about me, not the thing, not the defining thing.

But recently, I wrote a young adult novel about a 16-year-old boy who's 4 foot 11" and struggling with his identity. And I found myself thinking every day about being short-- what it meant to me, what it might have meant, what I might have missed. And then I hear from this doctor about all of these parents who think having a son my size is unacceptable and come to her to fix it, to fix them.

Short Throat tells the families who just want to enhance their kid's height that she won't do that, but that doesn't always stop them.

Scott Brown

Among the things that bother her the most, a lot of the parents seem oblivious to the possibility of side effects. But really, the biggest bee in Short Throat's growth hormone bonnet is the fairness aspect. The full treatment over four or five years can cost $300,000 or more.

And even though most of these families are rich, they find ways to get it covered by insurance when some of her diabetic patients can't even get the latest insulin pump covered. She also says she's seen rich families take advantage of patient assistance programs the drug companies offer to needier folks.

Scott Brown

It's important to say, Short Throat does treat some kids with growth hormone-- kids who aren't producing enough of it or any of it on their own. That's a serious health problem. But she'll also treat them if a kid is just going to be really, really short, like way, way below average, like way down in those basement percentiles where I am.

Using growth hormone is kosher in cases like this according to the FDA. That's because there's a diagnosis for people like me. I learned about it while researching my book. It's called Idiopathic Short Stature, ISS. Sounds scary, but all it means is I'm short, and no one knows why. And because I fit that diagnosis, I could have been one of Short Throat's patients.

So yes, even our whistleblower, who believes this stuff is overused, would've treated me if I'd come to her, if my parents had wanted it. And as one of those otherwise healthy kids who are just short, and who kind of resents the use of the word otherwise, I'd add, all of this looks not a whole lot like medicine. It looks cosmetic, like a boob job for kids, short kids.

But before I went off on a Napoleonic rage bender over the claims of this one rogue grow doctor, I thought I'd run those claims by Dr. David B. Allen, another pediatric endocrinologist, and arguably, the leading expert on this topic. He sat on the panel that wrote the recent guidelines for growth hormone treatments for kids. He's been writing papers about it for three decades, specifically, about idiopathic short stature.

Scott Brown

He said he didn't think unnecessary growth hormone treatments for kids was an epidemic, per se. The reluctance of insurance companies to cover such an expensive and iffy treatment keeps widespread use tamped down. But sure, there are lots of families in more image-conscious, wealthy places who put their kids on it.

When he writes about using growth hormone for height, not health, the phrase he uses is cosmetic endocrinology. And he told me this story. Back in the day, growth hormone was used almost exclusively on kids who were growth hormone-deficient, the way you give insulin to a diabetic. And the only source for this stuff back then was the pituitary glands of cadavers, dead people, so the supply was limited.

Unfortunately, because it came from cadavers, some of it was tainted with a brain disease similar to Mad Cow. It was a freak thing. This was in the '80s. Dozens of young people got sick. Some of them died. But that same year, synthetic growth hormone became available. Now there was lots of the stuff-- lab-made, safe from contamination. Dr. Allen told me and my producer, Sean Cole, that the drug industry and doctors started looking around for other uses, like, say, making idiopathically short kids less idiopathically short.

Scott Brown

And also, why are we treating shortness like it's a disease? Because when you look into it, as researchers have, there's no evidence tying being short to having a bad life. Studies show short kids get teased, bullied. They're often treated as younger than they are. But there's no direct connection between being small and failing at life. I, for instance, did not end up depressed and alone, living in a tiny cardboard box behind Bob's Big Boy, at least, not because of my height.

Another thing Dr. Allen said is that the use of synthetic growth hormone in kids is generally agreed to be safe. But he said, it just hasn't been on the market long enough for us to know yet. There could be an increased risk of cancer down the road. One study, and only one, points to more instances of stroke among adults who took the drug as children.

Thing is, we won't really know how dangerous this stuff is until 30, or 40, or 50 years down the line. Also, on average, kids who take growth hormone might gain three inches, a little less than half an inch per year, but that's average. Your heightage may vary a lot, could be more, could be less. I'll just note that less than a little less than 1/2 inch a year would be a very sad title for a country song.

The darkest irony here is Dr. Allen says the kids you'd think need the drug the most, kids with short parents, are the ones who benefit the least.

Scott Brown

Not a conundrum for me. The health effects are unknown, benefits uncertain, and even if you get taller, you're not necessarily happier? Then I'm not putting my kid on it, not for a maximum 3 inches total, not for 1/2 inch a year. Who would choose that for their kid? I decided to find out.

Scott Brown

I can't tell you any of these folks' names, either. They're in Southern California. I'll call the dad Jeremy. He's a doctor. He's 5 foot 8". The mom, who I'll call Laura, is 5 foot 4". She's a personal development coach. There are two kids, Dylan and Marnie, also not their real names. Dylan's been taking growth hormone injections for five years. We asked Laura why they wanted to be anonymous.

Scott Brown

They all live in a big, beautiful house with a pool that contains what I'm fairly sure is a water polo goal. Dylan's on the team. The living room is immaculate, like the lobby of a luxury hotel. When we got there, there was a dog-grooming van sitting out front in which their dog was being groomed. She looked nice afterwards.

Laura's been worrying about Dylan's size since he was a baby. He was born preemie-sized, even though she carried him full-term. He spent four or five days in the NICU. And as he got older, it just seemed like he was having a hard time catching up to his friends in the height department. He was the smallest in his team photos, class photos, always an outlier. So when she found out there was something that might help fix that, it just felt like the right call.

Scott Brown

Again, this is Jeremy. He's a doctor, so you'd expect him to come at this from a medical necessity point of view, too, and he does. But he's totally upfront about his less doctor-y reasons.

Scott Brown

Just to point out, the risk of diabetes from pediatric growth hormone use is more theoretical than anything else. Doctors monitor for it, but so far, there's no causal link.

Scott Brown

Better than fine, Jeremy says. The drug seems to be working, and he's satisfied.

Scott Brown

That stopped the conversation. I offered to stand up for him.

Scott Brown

Which is where Jeremy and Laura's opinions about the whole thing line up a lot more. Laura used to blanch when people would ask if Dylan and his little sister were twins. She's two years younger. And Laura hated that her son wore clothes made for boys two years younger. But all of that's in the past now.

This is Dylan.

Scott Brown

15 years old. He came home from school in the middle of the interview still wearing his school uniform-- white polo, shorts. He's 5 foot 6" now. My producer, Sean, sensitive soul that he is, had us stand back-to-back in the living room.

Here's the thing. Measuring yourself directly, bodily, against another human being-- it's not a natural situation. As a 43-year-old man standing back-to-back with a 15-year-old, I felt this almost primal humiliation. And just for a second, I thought, did I miss out on something? I felt a little jealous.

Laura had spread out the charts on the coffee table, inches versus years, Dylan's whole history of growing up, and up, and up from elementary school on, in a laggardly parabola that takes off like a rocket around the time he started the growth hormone. Each dot is a measurement. You know how I'm in the first height percentile for men in America? Dylan started off parked between the third and fifth percentile and ended up nearly at the 50th, almost average. It made him feel proud.

Scott Brown

I've never thought about it that way. What height do I want to be? How average would I like to be? This demand-side attitude about height was alien to me. And standing there, between this giant 5 foot 6" child's mastodon-like shoulder blades, I thought about what had brought me here underneath my indignation, my short identitarianism.

Here's the thing I've glossed over a bit-- the downsides of being short. I took some hard punches to the stomach in elementary school. I often feel taken less seriously by taller people in professional situations. I prefer phone meetings for that very reason. I pretty much know that I've had friendships with women that might have been more than friendships if I'd been a few inches higher off the dance floor.

I've watched the libido drain from my date's eyes as we stand up from the restaurant table after dessert. I've been judging these people, these parents, trying to check every box, buy every advantage. But there was a moment a long time ago when my parents thought about putting me on growth hormone when I was little-- littler-- and they didn't.

I have this really strong memory of their telling me they'd looked into it. We were in a car. This would have been the mid-'80s in Virginia. I remember an apple orchard on our left, a fairground on our right, and my mom telling me they'd considered it and decided against it. I remember thinking, why are you telling me this?

It's like the moment I became short, the first time I really knew. It was official. Doctors had been consulted, powerful elixirs considered. Maybe none of that should have come as a surprise. I'm the outlier amongst my siblings. My brother Robert is 6 foot 1". Even my little sister Holland is taller than I am. They take after my dad, who, at 5' 11", is a full foot taller than my mom.

In all these years, we've never talked about that decision. Why didn't they want me to get taller? Why didn't they make the choice Dylan's parents did? I went home, and I asked my mom about that conversation in the car.

Scott Brown

My parents were trying to protect me by doing nothing, the same way Laura and Jeremy were trying to protect Dylan by doing something, something elemental, making him bigger.

But for my mom, there's something else. She doesn't think of what might have happened if she'd made me bigger. She thinks about what might have been lost if she had.

Scott Brown

They're familiar to me too. I remind myself of people I've known-- my grandfather, my uncle, my mom. I've got their bodies. I'm built on their blueprints, reliable blueprints that delivered several generations of tiny living things from primordial slime to this crazy, risky, present moment. That's no small thing. All I know is this is the box I came in, and I like it in here, I think.

Ira Glass

Scott Brown is a writer producer on the Hulu series Castle Rock. His young adult novel about a super short kid who grows freakishly tall in a year is called XL.

Coming up, when something shrinks, and shrinks, and shrinks, it can undo a 900-page law, and more about the power of tinyness. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, "Small Things Considered," stories in defense of the little and the Lilliputian. We've arrived at Act two of our show.

Ira Glass

Act Two, Let's give them nothing to talk about.

David Kestenbaum has this story about something that got shrunk to exactly as small as something could possibly be shrunk with huge consequences that are playing out right now, this very moment. Here's David.

David Kestenbaum

This thing that got made small? It's a tax. A couple years ago, the government set it to zero-- 0 dollars, 0 cents-- which makes what follows so remarkable. How could a tax so small it doesn't actually exist cause any trouble? But before I explain-- and since this show is about the importance of small things-- let me just confess here how much I love zero.

It's unlike any other number in its capacity for destruction. 0 times anything is 0. No matter how big, it always wins. And even better is dividing. When I was a kid in math class, I'd like to put 1 divided by 0 into my calculator. It would show E for Error, because 1 divided by 0? There is no answer to that. It's undefined. Divide by any other number, and you're fine. 1 divided by 2, for instance, or 57, or 693.

But put a zero in, and it just blows up. Mathematicians call this kind of situation a singularity, where the math is not well-behaved. In fact, it stops making sense. There are singularities inside black holes, but I never heard of a real world example outside of that until December 14 last year.

David Kestenbaum

Maybe you remember this. A judge in Texas ruled that the entire Affordable Care Act violated the US Constitution. This was big news, and it immediately got appealed. But the signature domestic policy achievement of the entire Obama presidency, the thing that right now is giving millions of Americans health insurance, that whole thing, this judge was saying, it was unconstitutional, had to go. And the thing that set all this off? A zero.

David Kestenbaum

Let me explain how a zero could blow up an entire law. When Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, was written almost a decade ago, it included this thing that people called the mandate, which basically said, you have to have health insurance. And if you don't, you've got to pay a fine. In 2016, the average fine paid was a little over $700.

Opponents of the health care law took issue with that part saying, the government can't just force people to buy something they may not want. All this went to the Supreme Court, which ruled it was OK because-- and this is key-- the mandate could be viewed as a tax. The government has lots of taxes. This is one of them, which felt like the end of it.

And it was, until this other thing happened that seemed unrelated. In 2017, Republicans passed their big tax cut bill. And one of the taxes in there that they cut-- this was just a sentence-- was the mandate, the fine that you have to pay if you don't have insurance. They cut it to zero. It really does seem like most lawmakers in Congress did not understand that this one little change could be the basis for getting all 900-plus pages of the ACA ruled unconstitutional.

I couldn't find any record of lawmakers even mentioning it in the floor debate or the news coverage. One person who did see that, who put together how zero could undo the whole law, was someone not in Washington at all, a guy in Wisconsin, Misha Tseytlin, who then was the state solicitor general. I found him on Facebook. His profile picture was from an Ultimate Frisbee tournament.

He politely declined to comment. But from legal filings, we know his basic argument. Tseytlin's logic was that, if the tax is zero, then there is no tax. And what you're left with in the law is this line that basically says, people shall buy health insurance. That was OK as part of a tax, like, you shall buy health insurance, or pay a penalty. But now the tax was zero, the text of the law was simply telling people to buy health insurance-- unconstitutional.

That is how a tax of zero ends up in a federal appeals court. Most of America's kind of in the courtroom, too-- 18 red states on one side, 16 blue states on the other. I reached out to someone involved in the case, Nick Bagley, professor at the University of Michigan Law School. I talked to him about the part of the case that I find so transfixing.

David Kestenbaum

Bagley, to be clear, thinks the first judge got it totally wrong. He's worked on a brief filed in the appeals case, and he's been writing about it. He pointed out something I honestly had not considered.

David Kestenbaum

I talked to Bagley back in July on the day that the appeals court heard the case. We listened together online. The arguments the lawyers made were all about standing, severability doctrine, the meaning of the word shall. What did Congress intend when it set the tax to zero? It did not go well for the Affordable Care Act, for Bagley's side. You could tell from the judge's questions. Bagley's exact words while we listened included things like--

David Kestenbaum

And--

David Kestenbaum

And finally--

David Kestenbaum

He was truly surprised. He thought the legal argument that zero could take down the whole law was, quote, "weak to the point of frivolousness." To Randy Barnett, though, this all seems totally logical. Barnett is a professor at Georgetown Law and has been vocal on the other side. If the tax is zero, Barnett says, the mandate's unconstitutional. He doesn't think the court can strike out just that one part of the law, so the whole thing has to go.

David Kestenbaum

Short answer, yes, which is to say, liberals have their examples of what they see as activist judges inventing bizarre arguments, and so do conservatives, and libertarians like Barnett, and everyone else.

He told me about this case that he argued before the Supreme Court, and lost 6 to 3. The court ruled that a woman in California couldn't grow medical marijuana at her own house in her own garden to take for her own back pain because of the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

David Kestenbaum

I asked Barnett what he made of the fact that this case is how we are deciding whether millions of Americans will have health insurance, and that it all seemed to stem, in some way, from the weird power of zero.

David Kestenbaum

Here are my feelings. Having big things like this decided in the courts on legal grounds that most people will never understand-- it does not seem ideal to me. The appeals court is supposed to issue its ruling any day now. It seems quite possible this thing is headed for the Supreme Court.

It's like this little tax set to zero has created a legal wormhole with red states gathered on one side, blue states on the other, a vortex of high-level legal math in the middle. I worry it's going to suck us all into some other dimension. We'll cross some event horizon from which there is no return. It'll tear our atoms apart. It'll tear us apart. Either that, or a neatly typed opinion will come out some Tuesday morning in June.

Ira Glass

David Kestenbaum is the executive editor of our show.

Ira Glass

Act 3, What the Eye Can't See.

So we end our show today with this last story of small things that are anything but small from Lilly Sullivan.

Lilly Sullivan

When I was in my early 20s, I spent a lot of my time looking at job postings online. I'd read the qualifications section-- leadership skills, self-starter, results-oriented. And then I'd look at myself-- broke, weird, shy to the point of silence-- and miss the deadline, which is when I stumbled on a story called "The Job Application." It's by this writer, Robert Walser.

The story is told in the form of a cover letter, but instead of selling himself, he just offers an honest assessment of who he is.

"Esteemed gentlemen, I am a poor, young, unemployed person. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I'm not particularly clever. And first and foremost, I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I'm a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. The passion to go far in the world is unknown to me."

I remember thinking, you're not supposed to tell people that stuff. He was being funny and mocking the whole song and dance. But at the same time, he wasn't making it up. He needed a job.

He ends the letter, "Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am. I am sincere and honest, and I'm aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live. So I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen. Your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience."

I know almost nothing about this writer, but I loved him for writing this because the thing is, feeling so worthless at that age-- it was terrifying, when your brain isn't orderly and results-oriented, like an effective human's. I'd have a rough shift temping or waitressing. People can be awful when you're at the bottom. And I'd come home just dreading the rest of my life, and he got that.

I started reading more of his stuff. One of my favorites is a novel about boys in a school where they're training to be servants. He wrote, "In one thing, we pupils are all similar. We are small, small all the way down the scale to utter worthlessness. One thing I do know for certain-- in later life, I shall be a charming, utterly spherical zero."

Robert Walser-- turns out he's Swiss, born in 1878. And for a moment, it looked like he was going to be the next big thing. Kafka, who was younger than him, was a fan. When Kafka came onto the scene, one critic back then explained Kafka by saying, hey, this guy's kind of like Robert Walser. And there was this delighted absurdity to his work.

He'd poke fun at himself for being small, but there was always an edge to it. Worse than being weak, were the people deluded enough to think they're great. It's so pompous. He wasn't mean, exactly, more just entertained by their foolishness. I started to see the world that way, too. But then one day, a few years later, I was at a bookstore, and I saw a new Robert Walser book on the shelf, more of his work translated into English.

I started reading the introduction, and it had all this stuff I hadn't known before about his life. It said that Walser had spent the last third of his life in a mental hospital-- schizophrenia. He lived there for 27 years until he died. I was floored and so sad for him. This was the writer I turned to as a roadmap to remind myself that there are people out there like me, and they're fine, and he was the best of our kind of people.

It freaked me out. Like, that's what life did to him? It turns out Robert Walser had a little early success, but not much after that. Writers liked him, but his books didn't sell well. And he was predictably terrible at marketing himself. After flailing for a while, he left the art scene in Berlin and moved back home to Switzerland. And once he's there, his life starts falling apart.

He couldn't really get his books published anymore. He starts renting out single rooms, month to month, from old ladies, reduces his possessions to a single suitcase. He's unhappy, alone all the time, mentally shaky. He'd get nightmares and stay up all night pacing and muttering to himself. Eventually, he checks himself into a mental hospital. It's 1929.

He asks the staff to put him in the shared dorm because-- this breaks my heart-- he's afraid to be alone. They diagnose him with schizophrenia. He's there voluntarily at first, but later, he gets committed against his will, kicking and screaming as they force him into the car for the transfer. He spends the rest of his life in a sanitarium.

There's a story that, when people encouraged him to write again, he said, I'm not here to write. I'm here to be mad. And the world forgot about him, and then he died, on Christmas Day, actually, in 1956. He goes for a walk outside of his asylum, and he collapses. A couple kids find his body in a field of snow. Someone actually took a photo. Robert Walser is lying face up, one arm outstretched, dark clothes against white snow, his hat a few feet away.

The book I was looking at had something else, something eerie. I didn't know what to make of it. After Walser died, a nurse in one of his hospitals came forward with these strange scraps of paper. His sister had a shoebox full of them too-- hundreds of little scraps, used postcards, business cards, old calendar pages ripped in half. And those little shreds were just covered in ant-like pencil markings, dense little rows of tiny slashes and ticks, packed onto shreds of paper. Everyone thinks it's just mad-man scrawl, and they put the papers away.

A few months later, his friend, who, for years, was one of the only people who really visited him in the hospital, publishes a blown-up photo of one of these scraps in a Swiss literary magazine. "Undecipherable," he writes, "a product of Walser's schizophrenia." But when the magazine comes out, a grad student writes in saying, Wait, I can read this. I think those scratchings are letters.

He got the papers and spent months staring at 24 pages trying to decipher the tiny handwriting. It turned out to be an entire novel. But there were still hundreds more scraps. It wasn't until the 1980s that someone tackled the rest of them, another grad student named Bernhard Echte, 21 at the time. He'd actually been on his way to becoming a doctor. But when he discovered Robert Walser, he stopped that life in its tracks, switched to literature to spend more time with Robert Walser.

Lilly Sullivan

He talked to the archive where the shreds are being kept, and they agreed to let him see them, try to decipher some more. And when he sees them for the first time, he's stunned. The writing is microscopic, each letter just a speck, about two millimeters at first, and as the years go by, they get smaller, down to 1 millimeter-- these tiny bold characters, like miniature Japanese calligraphy.

Lilly Sullivan

He brought that up a few times. Like, couldn't he sharpen his pencil?

Lilly Sullivan

You can't identify the individual letters, but somehow when you look at them all together, sometimes you can tell what it says. A word will reveal itself. He started working on it full time with a partner. They'd sit at typewriters across from each other in a little room filled with cigarette smoke, bent over these magnifying glasses called thread counters, and they'd stare at the words.

When they'd get stumped on a word, which happened constantly, they had the system where they'd rattle off gibberish and random syllables. Bernhard and the other guy would work separately on a scrap for a while, then they'd compare their guesses. If they had come to the same conclusion, they decided it was right.

The project was supposed to take four years. It ended up taking 20. Bernhard did the last six years alone. He had started when he was 21 and finished when he was 41. And when he'd finally finished, those 526 scraps turned into six volumes of work, The Microscripts, 2,000-some pages of stories, comedy, little dramas, a novel about a robber who doesn't steal much of anything.

I had pictured this writing as sad little notes to no one. But when you read it, it's like Walser's back, happily throwing stones. Like he writes, "I've no use for these graspers. Pleasure-seekers overlook life's true pleasures. They aren't serious, which makes them boring, and they can't help being bored with me, since I'm bored with them."

Some things scholars have figured out-- Walser wrote most of these scraps before the asylum, so this romantic idea of one man alone, writing his masterpieces while locked away, seems like it didn't happen that way.

And it seems like he probably wasn't schizophrenic. Bernhard has studied all the medical records. Walser's own doctor thought he was fine and should go home. Psychiatrists who study him now don't think he was schizophrenic either. He didn't really have the symptoms.

Also, that thing he's famous for saying, "I'm not here to write. I'm here to be mad"-- people who study him think he likely didn't say that, that it's a myth, and that the truth is he got trapped there for the most infuriatingly mundane reason-- medical bureaucracy. Once he lost his rights, he couldn't get them back, couldn't sign himself out.

And during the 27 years he was there, a lot happened in the world-- World War II. That circle of writers who might have known his work, people who might have remembered that he was there, had scattered. Their books were banned. They were living in exile or dying violently. Kafka's family members were killed in the Holocaust.

So some writer no one read anymore, who no one ever really knew in the first place, people had other things to worry about. One scholar told me, she thinks that, at some point, Walser probably could have gotten out of the hospital if he wanted to, but he stopped trying.

I wondered why he spent so many years writing things that even he probably couldn't read. He explained to someone, in those years when he was really depressed, when publishers didn't want his work anymore, he had bad writer's block. He describes it as a cramp in his brain. And he explains that writing this tiny hurts. So he can take the cramp in his brain and put it into his hand, instead. And once he does that, his mind is clear, and he can think again.

On a page of a calendar he'd cut into pieces, he writes about why he did it all in pencil. One day, he figured out that a pen made him nervous-- all those mistakes, cross-outs, in ink.

But if he used a pencil instead and labored over this tiny writing, he explains, "This labor looked to me like a pleasure, as it were. I felt it would make me healthy. A smile of satisfaction would creep into my soul each time, like a smile of amicable self-derision. It seemed to me, the pencil let me work more dreamily, peacefully, cosily, contemplatively. I believe that the process I just described would blossom into a peculiar form of happiness."

Lilly Sullivan

The idea I'd had about his life in the asylum, how he died, how awful it all seemed to me-- Bernhard doesn't see it that way. He's studied Walser his whole life, every letter and document. He even bought the house where Walser once lived, and he lives there now. He knows his life inside and out, and he thinks it's not tragic.

He says, Walser usually seems kind of OK. Not happy, exactly, but content. "Life without success," Walser once wrote, "can also be beautiful." His was. There's power in being OK with being nothing. It's honest. And you can't crush nothing. He made his life smaller and smaller until he almost didn't exist anymore, and then he didn't, an utterly spherical zero.

Ira Glass

Lilly Sullivan is one of the producers of our show. Other details about Walser's life and work in her story came from Susan Bernofsky. Thanks to Susan Bernofsky. She has translated eight of his books, and has just written the first-ever English biography of Walser full of the new information she's uncovered. It'll come out in about a year from Yale University Press.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.