Around the fireplace in my childhood home many stories were told.
One of our frequent visitors was a psychiatric nurse. Well, she had been such before her marriage, when she had to resign under the marriage ban, i.e., the rule that required women to resign on marriage. She was one of the people from Lusmagh that, in the early years, my dad had helped to find a job in Dublin. On marriage, she had to resign her job and bring up her family on her husband's meagre earnings, which were a lot less than hers, because that's the way it was. Nevertheless she was a jovial, sociable, happy person with a great flow of talk, and she added brightness and sparkle to the fireside palaver.
She often said that genius is close to madness, and gave us examples from what she had witnessed in her professional life.
At one time she used to visit, as a friend and old neighbour, a patient in the psychiatric hospital who was a very intelligent man with a mental problem.
One day, when she came in to see him, he showed her a card on which the following was printed in pencil:
She could not read it. He said, "Take out your looking glass, from your handbag. Now look at it in the mirror." Then she read the reflection in the mirror:
At times full of wit and little tricks, this man told her that "the pain of the mind is terrible."
It appears that very intelligent people can get so involved in thinking out scientific or mathematical problems that the wheels of their brain won't stop turning, and then they can get no rest. This sometimes happens to brilliant students who, as a result of excessive book-work, (and insufficient rest and relaxation), suffer a sort of mental break-down and end up in psychiatric care. Treatments like electric shock or tranquilizers are common, but we also heard how some psychiatrists were trying out cigarette-smoking as a possible therapy to calm the mind. This bears witness to the fact that my father's generation did not know the damage that smoking was doing to people.
Of course, the mental stress we are talking about might have been avoided by giving the body sufficient physical exercise, relaxation, and rest, and allowing the subconscious, hidden, mind, time to catch up with the work of the conscious mind (through adequate sleep).
Historically, many great scientists have walked a tight-rope between brilliance and madness.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the great philosopher who once said "God is dead," ended up mad. According to Karl Jung, the psychologist, this madness may have been caused by the conflict that arose between the denial of God in his conscious mind, and his subconscious mind in which, as with all mankind, God was a hard-wired fact, as Jung said, "A psychic reality."
18th Century mathematicians never talked of "Infinity," but only of values "approaching Infinity." This is because "Infinite" means "Endless," and you can never get to the end of an endless stream. However, in the 19th Century, Georg Kantor, a sincere Christian, thought that, since, (he said), "God is Infinite," there is such a thing as "Actual Infinity," and he could prove it in mathematics. Nobody was able to refute (or, perhaps, even understand) his complex arguments, or show the madness of his thought, and he achieved fame for exploring Infinity (along with Set Theory). He thought he had come to terms with Infinity, but, as Aristotle had correctly pointed out, Infinity does not have actual existence. The concept continued to plague Kantor's mind, eventually causing him to be irrational and paranoiac. He had to be put into, and kept in, an asylum, despite his pleading letters to his wife begging to be allowed home, and died of malnutrition in the asylum during the deprivations of the First World War.
Well, I suppose we could find madness for similar or other reasons in other walks of life. These illustrate the view around our fireside as I was growing up, that genius is close to madness.
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