"Here’s a post that I found very interesting by my friend Tim George. It opens up a lot of questions about the nature of insanity. That’s a topic I’ve wanted to write about for years, and I have tried, with two completed but unsuccessful novels to show for it. The problem is, I wanted to explore what’s happening inside an insane mind, but to reveal a person’s thoughts in a novel the first person point of view is usually required, yet first person from an insane point of view is nearly impossible for a reader to understand or follow. After all, If one could fully understand a crazy person’s thoughts, that would mean one was also crazy.

"Dostoevsky learned this too, when he wrote Crime and Punishment, which was originally written in first person. It was a total failure, so unsuccessful that he burned it. Then he converted it to third person, and of course it became one of the great classics. Maybe some day I’ll do the same thing and resurrect those two unsuccessful novels in a different format. Even so, insanity is a very difficult topic for a novel, but in this post Tim has offered us a fascinating glimpse into the fact that madness doesn’t always look like what most of us expect. Enjoy!"

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In The Professor and the Madman, author Simon Winchester tells an amazing tale of two men born worlds apart but brought together by their common love for words. One was an uneducated bank clerk whose love for words eventually made him the driving force of the seminal reference work for the English language. The other was a highly educated Civil War Surgeon whose descent into madness left him with little else but his love of reading and one outlet to share that love with the world beyond his asylum’s walls.

James Murray – Professor and Editor

Born in 1837, James Murray was the oldest son of a tailor whose formal education went no farther than his 14th birthday. In spite of this, by the age of 20 he was headmaster of a village school. School was soon left behind as he had to move to London for his sick wife. In spite of this, he never lost his thirst for learning. Though he worked as a bank clerk Murray became somewhat of an expert on the English language. Self taught, he was proficient in a number of languages and soon was lecturing on various literary and philosophical topics. It was in these circles that the bank teller who never went to college came to be recognized by men with Oxford credentials as the logical choice for the monumental project they had in mind. So on April 26, 1878, James Murray was tasked with overseeing a project that would outlive him many years over – The Oxford English Dictionary.

William Chester Minor – Wordsmith and Madman

Unlike James Murray, Minor was Yale educated and became a doctor. Raised by his missionary parents in what is now Sri Lanka, Minor was beset by inner demons he managed to somehow keep under control throughout his teenage years and medical school.

It was only when he entered the Union Army half way through the Civil War that the demons finally broke their chains. North and South had been at war 800 days when William Chester joined the Union Army. A few months later he found himself a surgeon during the Battle of the Wilderness, America’s first and only experience with systematic destruction. Weary of war, General Grant abandoned age old methods of prisoner exchanges and sanctioned Sherman’s “March to the Sea”. This was war on a scale and with results neither side had ever seen before.

The horrors William Minor saw left him a broken man. His paranoia and obvious mental instability eventually caused him to be discharged from the Army after which he traveled abroad in the hope that he would find a cure. Sadly, his anticipated cure never materialized. Instead he murdered a man in a fit of paranoia, thinking that someone was trying to break into his room to murder him. Before long he was sentenced to an institution for the criminally insane which would be his home for many years to follow.

The Professor and the Madman

When work on the Oxford English Dictionary began, advertisements were placed in various periodicals for readers everywhere to submit entries for the work. The idea was not to just give a definition of the word but rather to also add uses of the word in literature and common language. One applicant that ultimately caught James Murray’s attention was a Mr. Minor from the countryside of England.

For seven years Mr. Minor contributed thousands of entries for the new Oxford English Dictionary – more entries by far than any other person on the planet. So many entries that 17 years later, James Murray decided it was time he met this most scholarly and dedicated wordsmith. But William Minor offered one excuse after another for not coming to London. Finally, James Murray took it on himself to go to the man who would not come to him.

The meeting that followed must have been one to remember for both men. For 17 years James Murray had received entries for the seminal work of the English language. He assumed they came from an elusive elderly scholar who loved his books too much to travel to London. Instead he found a man who had gone through years of cycles of brilliance and madness so intense, hope for a cure had been lost.

The professor and the madman had finally met.

The old woman and her grandson went to the house where he had purchased the camera, only to learn their family had no connection whatsoever with the people living there, and nobody living there knew anything about the birthday party in the photographs, and nobody could remember how the camera had come into their possession. It was just an old camera one of them had bought, or found, or been given too long ago to remember.

Of course, this was mere coincidence. It was coincidence when someone took that photograph at a party long before the young man was born, and coincidence that the photographer never had the film developed or removed it from the camera. It was coincidence that the camera was never thrown away, and coincidence when it passed from the photographer’s hands into someone else’s and eventually somehow into the possession of someone who offered it for sale. It was coincidence when that particular young man bought that particular camera, coincidence that the film had not been ruined with age, coincidence that he thought it might be interesting to have the film developed, coincidence when he sorted through the stack of old photographs and left one particular image on top of the stack, and coincidence when his grandmother happened by and for no particular reason decided to look closely at the people in the image, nearly thirty years after her son’s death.

Strange stories such as this lead to many questions.

Are these kinds of coincidences really all that rare, or is the rare thing in this instance simply that somebody noticed? In other words, although the odds against this seem incredible, could it have been merely a glimpse of a something happening around us all the time?

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This is an excerpt from the new forward to River Rising by Athol Dickson, soon to be re-released in both eBook and print format.

IT WAS A BAD WEEK. My last living aunt had passed away. Her name was Liz, and she was a hoot. If you’re old enough to remember Phyllis Diller or Carol Channing you’ll have a general idea of how much fun she was. I’ll miss her so. Then the next day I had lunch with a friend whose wife had just filed for divorce. My friend has a drinking problem, and his wife decided she couldn’t take it anymore. After lunch I spent time with another hurting friend whose only child was down to one last hope—an experimental therapy—to beat his cancer.

 

Meanwhile, I had to write 1,000 good words that day, and do it again the next day, and every other day until September if I was going to meet the deadline on my next novel.

The word count wasn’t the real problem. I’ve been at this writing game a long time. I’ve written amidst the distractions of airports, coffee shops and shopping malls. Even with all of this emotional turmoil I could probably still deliver 5,000 or even 10,000 readable words a day. But good words . . . aye, to quote the Bard, there’s the rub.

It’s tempting to lose focus and begin to wonder why I bother. In a world like this, excellence in the arts can seem like such a trivial pursuit. Indeed, never mind excellence, the reason art matters at all is sometimes questioned. With grief, loneliness, addiction, pain and fear all around us, what’s the point of literature? Why paint? Why sculpt? Why dance, or act, or sing? Why not devote oneself to something practical instead?

Near the end of the book of Job, after that unfortunate man’ many sufferings, he learns nothing of their reasons. He gets no answer to Rabbi Kushner’s famous question, ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’ Even so, in the end Job is satisfied. God appears, and Job says, “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.” God appears, and his appearing is enough for Job.

My friend Brad, a professor at a well-known college of fine art, tells me it’s been fashionable for many years in the art community to question the existence of beauty. Not to question beauty’s definition or value, understand, but to question its very existence. It is an old idea. It is the lament of Ecclesiastes. Everything is meaningless under the sun. Yet not everything, for Job saw God and that was enough.

Once I suffered from severe depression. Like Job I cursed the day of my birth. I was saved from the temptation of suicide by snowcapped mountains, golden birches, and the sparkling Milky Way. I was saved by reflections of God’s beauty.

I don’t mean to say God is beautiful. No mere adjective applies to him. St. John tells us “God is love.” God is beautiful in exactly the same way. Like love, beauty is God’s essence. Beauty does not describe God; it is the fact of God. It is his glory, his weight, the very thing the prophet Moses begged to see on Sinai.

Beauty exists because God exists. To reveal beauty is to reveal God. Therefore, if our art is beautiful, if we struggle to write good words instead of merely readable ones, then sometimes, just for an instant, God appears and God’s appearing is enough. In a world of grief, loneliness, addiction, pain and fear, no act of man could be more practical than that.

The original version of this essay was first published May 20, 2010 at Novel Journey