THIS MORNING, out for my regular constitutional, I was called Adolf and accused of being a Nazi by a man with long orangish hair carrying a purse. I saw him coming down the block, and I nodded to him, for he had turned up some months ago at a book promotion talk I gave at a nearby Borders. During the question-and-answer session, as part of an otherwise less than clear general statement, he’d quoted Emerson–almost always, in my experience, a sign of nuttiness to come.
But now, beyond mere quaint nuttiness, the man was screaming at me. “We don’t need people like you in this country,” he yelled. “Get out of the United States–now!” He was missing several lower teeth. Reasoning with him was not among the responses available to me. I voted with my feet, walking, actually trotting, away, leaving him cursing me on the otherwise quiet street. I walked on, unnerved.
Five mornings previous, out again for my walk, I ran into a homeless woman I have occasionally met in the neighborhood. Usually I find her, with three suitcases, sitting in her blue raincoat on the side-entrance steps to the library, waiting for it to open. One day, as I held the door to the library for her, she revealed that she knew who I was. In the calmest of cultivated voices, she told me that she had read my stories and essays, and that she was honored to meet me. Clean in her person, she, too, was missing lots of teeth, uppers and lowers.
When I saw her last week, with her luggage and her raincoat, she told me, in her habitually calm voice, that she was very worried, because she knew a great wrong had been committed and she felt that she had to do something about it. When I asked her what the wrong was, she mentioned the death, roughly nine months earlier, of a local newspaper columnist, who was found in his car in his carbon-dioxide filled garage, apparently a suicide. She didn’t think it was a suicide. She thought that powerful interests in the trucking industry, which the columnist had been attacking, had murdered him. Knowing this, she couldn’t, she said, stand by and do nothing about it. I implored her that nothing was precisely what she must do about it, though my advice didn’t get through. Crumpling a twenty in my pocket, I offered to buy her breakfast, which she politely turned down. We parted on good terms.
Another neighborhood character, an older man who sits selling a homeless paper in front of a local supermarket I patronize, used to engage me in conversation on a wide variety of topics. “What do you know about Nietzsche?” he once asked. Every so often he would drop a resounding name; he once mentioned having met, in a hotel in St. Louis, Casey Stengel (clang). We had these brief, pleasant interchanges for a number of years.
Then suddenly I noted him turn away when I passed. After a few weeks of this, I asked him if I had done anything to offend him. “You know that conversation we had in the library?” he said. (We had had no conversation in the library.) “I know you reported every word of it to the police.” And then he went off into a tirade about the local police being out to get him. We haven’t spoken since.
Reading these paragraphs you will think I live in Bedlam. I don’t, but there are in town two halfway houses for the undangerously mad. Some walk along muttering to themselves; others, drugged to the gunnels, silently trudge the streets through the day. Somehow one notices them more during the quiet hours. They all were–many may still well be–other people’s children.
Who knows how many came into life with the wretched luck of bad brain chemistries and other disastrous mental jigeroos? Many others may have been battered by life itself into their various paranoias, hallucinatory states, ungodly mental dishevelments. For all, the price of a reasonably tranquil life proved exorbitant.
What purpose can insanity serve, either for those afflicted with it or in the grand scheme? The mad were once considered saintly, in touch with higher things, but surely no longer. One would like to think that there exists a segment of the happy mad, who hallucinate only lovely things, but I doubt it.
When a maniac is yelling in my face, as the orange-haired man did yesterday, I am made to realize the unexplained terror life can hold and the great good luck of all of us who, for now, are on the right side of the divide between the mad and the sane.
I, who believe in the existence of evil, who do not consider a just world in the realm of possibility, who grow more and more impressed with the mysteries of life, nonetheless find madness a deep affront to my rationality. Is this because the mad remind me that the notion that the world is itself a rational place might just be the greatest hallucination of all?
–Joseph Epstein
