Storyteller’s World

I’ve found A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nash’s biography of John Nash, the genius mathematician and Nobel Prize winner, immensely moving and thought-provoking. It’s something of a cliché to talk of there being a fine dividing line between genius and madness. But in this rare insight into the mind of a man whom many considered the most brilliant mathematician of his generation, we see a very human picture of what living on that line means for the sufferer, and for his family, friends and colleagues.

After extraordinary early work in finding startling innovative solutions to problems which many mathematicians had thought insoluble, in his early 30s Nash suddenly descended into schizophrenia, which left him in an academic and personal wilderness for three decades. But astonishingly, he entered a period of remission so complete that it even looks like a cure: such a rare event in cases of schizophrenia that some have even disputed whether Nash’s original diagnosis was in fact correct.

I’ve never read an account of mental disorder that has helped me understand it and identify with it so completely. So many of the most difficult individuals in the parish over the years, become almost comprehensible as I read these chapters and I’m able to recognise their delusions and paranoias, to feel that there’s not a great distance between my mental state (which some would call sanity) and theirs, and so to sympathise more with them.

I’m also struck by the way that, for Nash, “remaining sane” has required constant work and vigilance:

Nash has compared rationality to dieting, implying a constant, conscious struggle. It is a matter of policing one’s thoughts, he has said, trying to recognise paranoid ideas and rejecting them, just the way somebody who wants to lose weight has to decide consciously to avoid fats or sweets.

I think about how this might relate to my own periodic dips into depression. If we can describe depression as a form of irrationality, then (as the cognitive psychs tell us) we can resist it by working at changing our thoughts and behaviours. And when I’m strong enough, this actually works. But it’s also always seemed like a bootstrapping approach. The whole point is that when you’re really depressed you can’t “pull yourself together”. And at the point when you find you can, it’s because you are, by then, already better.

In a similar way to how we learn to understand light as either waves or particles (depending how you look at them), isn’t the mind both something you can control by constant “policing”, and something you have no control over whatsoever?

A great little story from Sylvia Nasar about the time the brilliant mathematician John von Neumann was asked to solve the famous fly puzzle.

Two bicyclists start twenty miles apart and head towards each other, each going at a steady rate of 10 m.p.h. At the same time, a fly that travels at a steady 15 m.p.h. starts from the front wheel of the southbound bicycle and flies to the front wheel of the northbound one, then turns around and flies to the front wheel of the southbound one again, and continues in this manner till he is crushed between the two front wheels. Question: what total distance did the fly cover?
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The excellent Van Doesburg’s of Church Stretton, the local delicatessen just round the corner from our Shropshire home, whose praises I cannot sing too highly, has posted a flyer through our door with descriptions of five cheeses they particularly recommend.

Cheese-tasting obviously has its own arcane mysteries and patois, every bit as esoteric as wine-tasting. One of these cheeses “seems to melt in your mouth, releasing a sweet, caramel flavour with a hint of Brazil nuts and fresh hay.” I don’t suppose, if I were doing the pretentious cheese-tasting talk while rolling one of these creations around my palate, I’d get much beyond, “Hmmm… I’m getting old socks and earwax, with just a hint of burnt eyebrows.”

But surpassing in loveliness even the poetic comparisons, are the names! Who could resist Keens Cheddar? Cornish Yarg? Rosary Goat? This is, undeniably, Shire talk of the highest order. And as for Duddleswell, “a cheerful-looking truckle”, who could imagine it to be anyone other than a cousin-germane of Samwise Gamgee?

truckle orig. dial. a small barrel-shaped cheese.
You see? a perfect name for a family of hobbits!

Driving from Oxford to Shropshire the weekend before the General Election gives you an instructive insight into voting aspirations in different areas.

If you want a compelling reason not to vote Conservative, you’ve only got to look at the houses where its supporters live, or ask yourself why it is that the biggest signs urging you to do so are all in the biggest fields by the side of the road. It’s the landowners, the propertied classes, who want that nice Mr Howard in no 10 Downing Street. There isn’t anything in it for the likes of us who don’t have such an ownership stake in the country.

It starts, of course, as you near Woodstock, where the first over-sized Vote Conservative sign is at the corner of Blenheim Park, where His Grace lives in a huge palace set in enormous grounds, dominating the little town that obsequiously hugs his 20 miles or so of garden walls.

grace n. a privilege, benefit or blessing enjoyed exclusively (i.e. to the exclusion of anyone else being able to enjoy it) by someone who has done nothing whatsoever to deserve it. (SED)