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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday January 28, 2002 Volume IV Number 4 |
FOCUS - The Prison House of Pure Logic
There is a fine line that separates genius from madness. That line is not easy to identify. Some of the most innovative minds dance right along that line, stepping across into the Twilight Zone then retreating back into sanity, some with easy grace, others with heart wrenching and tragic consequences.
But it makes for fascinating reading and study, those few who have made their mark on the world out of the dizzying and mind bending whirlwind of IQ off the charts and obsessions that yield works of inestimable value. It is said that Mozart is history’s finest and most prolific composer. He died at age thirty five, his fits of tortured rage were legendary. How about Vincent Van Gogh? Or Ernest Hemingway? Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance)? The list is long.
A new story is getting attention these days. John Nash, John F. Nash, Jr., was a country boy who just didn’t fit. Unlike the other the other children in his West Virginia mining town, John was obsessed with math and science. He devoured his textbooks, reading way ahead of the classroom pace, correcting his teachers and complaining about their shallow understanding and rudimentary expectations. His father, an engineer at the Appalachian Electric Power Company and his mother, a school teacher (her specialty - English and Latin) were both college educated and encouraged John’s academic interests. No one was surprised when he landed a full scholarship to Princeton.
John had it in his mind that the only possible way to distinguish himself in the world was to create, articulate and expound on a truly original idea - one that had never been thought of by another human being – one that would break the sciences through to a new level of understanding. He would be the author of a new paradigm. He set out to achieve that goal. And nothing less.
His obsessions made him an oddity. He lived with the teasing and the rejection of his peers from early childhood. So even at Princeton, he never expected anything more than isolation in his quest for greatness. The other students respected his mind, but his dress, his manner, his bumbling conversations, his social ineptness, left him in the dark corners of the library and the lab and the dormitory, lost in his formulas and theories which no one else really understood, but for John Nash; it was a maze of infinite problem solving and curiosity. He became a world all its own, a reality apart.
In her biography of John Nash, Sylvia Nasar quotes one of Nash’s colleagues, "All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes."
John preferred the former to the latter. He advanced in the heady post-WWII Princeton world (“the war was won by the mathematicians”) dominated by some of the finest mathematical minds in the world, including Dr. Albert Einstein, focusing on the obtuse sector of mathematics called “game theory,” and he applied his ideas to international economics. It won him a Ph.D.
Dr. Nash, lost in his formulas, considered time in the classroom and the student lounge and the local pubs an absolute waste of valuable time. He chose not to associate with anyone who could not keep pace with his mathematical quest. As time passed, candidates for camaraderie dwindled to nearly none.
With the exception of one. A lovely co-ed, a fellow mathematics major, Alicia Larde, who believed that Dr. John Nash possessed a complex but fascinating mind – a beautiful mind.
She became his wife.
* * * * * *
To say that Hollywood is famous for historical revisionism would be an understatement, or at least, a keen sense of the obvious.
Hollywood is in the business of selling tickets and winning big at the box office. Producers have two hours (maybe three) to win over their buyers, and word of mouth is commonly considered the best possible marketing strategy. So films are designed to grab us. Give us a couple hours of escape, run the emotional gamut from fear, to surprise, to grief, to laughter, to a sense of resolution and wholeness. And if we walk out thinking of the people who need to see this movie (Suzie would LOVE this one), then the producers have accomplished their goal.
There is, in movie parlance, a significant distinction between “a true story” and “based on a true story.” Or “based on the book authored by…” In the first case, there is at least an effort to stay true to the facts. In the second, some semblance of the real story is evidenced in the motion picture, but don’t rely on the film as a source for what really happened. What really happened is simply the inspiration for a film version of another story. The screenplay must satisfy the limitations of time, cinematography, the musical score and the location shots to make the movie whole. Re-arranging facts, re-writing events, well, it’s all part of the movie game.
Even a trusted veteran like Director Ron Howard will, of necessity, subordinate truth to fiction if it serves the needs of his film. We can call it cinematic license. Or artistic latitude. Or creative alternative. In any case, when we walk out of a theater, we’ve participated in a story. Not necessarily history.
But sometimes the movie, in spite of the historic inaccuracies, packs a power punch that leaves a long and lasting impression. These stories can teach us about ourselves and about our world in potent ways.
Such is the case with Ron Howard’s new film, A Beautiful Mind.
* * * * * * *
Our toughest day last week was two days after we lost our grandson, Isaac.
It was a Saturday. We spent an emotionally intense day together in the hospital room. We reminisced. We hugged. We prayed. We wept. After a few hours, we actually got lighthearted again. We laughed, the story-telling began. Kris jumped out of her hospital bed for the first time in over a week, complained about the pajamas, disappeared into the restroom and reappeared in her blue jeans and a comfortable top. “That’s more like it,” she said with a welcome smile. Then the phone would ring. Ben would pick it up… and the good person on the other end of the line didn’t know. Ben had to explain. A pall fell over the room and in silence, we listened to Isaac’s dad explain one more time that Kristyn delivered in her twenty third week the night before, and Isaac didn’t make it. We’d hug a little more… as if I hadn’t really noticed until now, I felt it more intensely than ever, our daughter’s husband has become a man. A good man.
The next day brought a hollowness I can’t say I remember experiencing before. I took a shovel and a pick and attacked the decomposing granite out back with a new vigor, until I dug two holes bigger than necessary and planted a couple of peach trees. It was the only thing I did all day that felt right. The rest of it was just plain empty. Motivation left me, I felt like a human ghost town.
Kris and Ben had a tough day, too. They decided to get out of the house. Maybe wander through some model homes up the road just the two of them in an attempt to get back in touch with their hopes and dreams and a future they could welcome again with a measure of anticipation. It helped some, they said, but still the melancholy lingered on as they roamed from room to professionally decorated room. When they returned home later that afternoon, they found a surprise waiting.
Their good friends from college days somehow managed to get inside the house while Kris and Ben were gone. Bearing gifts from their own kitchen, they fired up the oven to keep a hot lasagna and garlic bread warm. They tossed a Caesar salad. They set the table… linens, crystal, china, candles, silver and a single long stem rose in a vase. Kris and Ben hugged, and sat down, knowing they are loved.
So many friends and family members have reached out to them with the same kind of tenderness and sensitivity. There is a fundamental goodness out there that transcends the ugliness of the headlines. It’s a depth of caring that becomes real when disappointment hits.
It is truly a gift from God.
* * * * * * * *
Somewhere in the chase after mathematical greatness, Dr. John Nash slipped right over the edge. The thin line that separates reality from madness could no longer serve as a boundary. Dr. Nash could no longer do the dance. He slipped into the recesses of his formidable mind, and snapped.
He did not understand that the characters who appeared in his life with advice and perspective and direction and instruction, were imaginary. That his fears had become paranoia. That the connections he saw as a high level code-breaker in the Pentagon were fictitious.
The
film-maker drew us in, too. As we are taken into John Nash’s world of intrigue
and order, we develop a liking for and a belief in the same imaginary
characters. They are real to us, too. The government
agent, Parcher, who hires Nash in secret to break a
Soviet code. The Princeton room-mate, and mathematical colleague, ever
present voice of conscience, Charles, and his
lovable niece. Soon there are spies in trench coats on look out. Secret drop
offs. Hidden cameras and microphones.
Tapped phone lines.
These imaginary characters, we realize later, are Nash’s personal demons. They’ve got him. Not even the affection of his beloved Alicia can free him. He becomes delusional.
In a Princeton lecture hall, he snaps. Imaginary hit men infiltrate the crowded room, Nash flees from the stage and out the door, into the waiting arms of Dr. Rosen, the psychiatrist.
The empiricism of abstract reason, the isolation, the obsession all escalating to an avalanche of cognitive noise, land him in a padded cell, under leather restraints, the subject of an insulin treatment that could only have been applied in the Fifties when the “science” of psychiatry was free to unleash its questionable cures on victims who were more laboratory experiments than patients.
One would think Nash’s life over. It wasn’t.
* * * * * * * * *
It’s the love of a woman that becomes the man’s anchor.
Alicia asks… “Do you believe that the universe is infinite?”
“Of course I do,” answers Nash.
“Have you been there out there to the edges to see if it really is?”
“No, I certainly have not.”
“Then how do you know? What is your empirical evidence?” She presses him.
“There is no empirical evidence,” he confesses.
“On what basis do you believe it then?”
“I can’t answer that. I just believe it,” he says. Knowing he’s been trumped.
“I believe that love’s like that,” and she reaches across the table to touch him.
* * * * * * *
There are historical inaccuracies in Howard’s film. John Nash (portrayed brilliantly by Russell Crowe) was not nearly as likeable in real life. His wife Alicia (in an equally compelling portrayal by Jennifer Connelly) in fact divorced him (though they remain married throughout life in the movie) and they remained single for several decades until they remarried later in life.
It is true, however, that when Nash returned to a rich and productive professorial role at Princeton, he believed that it was his wife Alicia who brought him back to wholeness. The terrors of his paranoid schizophrenia would not have been overcome without her attentiveness, and unconditional love and affection.
In a moving scene, just after a horrible episode at home knowing that he was lost in a world of fantasy and obsession and fears, she leans toward him and she touches his face with her fingertips and tells him, “This is real.” She takes his hand, and with it touches her own cheeks and the tears in her own eyes, and she says again, “This is real.”
Dr.
John Nash, who to this day, continues to walk from home to his office at
Princeton, a Nobel Laureate, came back to reality from the “crystalline world
of perfect platonic forms” because of the lifelong love of a woman who could
see in the tangled web of empirical illusions a beautiful mind.
In his 1994 acceptance speech, before the world’s tuxedoed intellectual elite, he clearly gave her all the credit.
* * * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
We are learning some lessons from John Nash. His capacity for empirical knowledge, for formulas and problem solving is now legendary. His discoveries and theories have advanced an entire field of knowledge as few of us ever could. But his quest for ultimate meaning left him hopelessly lost, until someone set him free from the prison house of pure logic.
He admitted to his students in a Princeton library that mathematics is an art form. An art form.
In our recent and very personal contemplation of the meaning of life and loss, we’ve learned that love transcends logic. That formulas fall short. That complexity doesn’t always demand an answer. That one can make verdicts even without all the evidence.
And our verdict is that love prevails. That in spite of our lack of understanding these three live on: Faith. Hope. And love.
But the greatest of these is love.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
LeaderFOCUS is brought to you by Good Stewardship Associates
Special Thanks for Design by my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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