Theos-Talk Archives (September 1996 Message tl00178)

Chuck the Heretic:
>I find it difficult to keep an open mind on things that bring my area of
>research into disrepute.  Hodson's diaries reveal the workings of mind that
>was fundamentally disfunctional, probably schizophrenic judging by the
>symptoms, but clearly ill.

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential
liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
R. D. Laing (192789), British psychiatrist. The Politics of Experience, ch. 6
(1967).

The world has always gone through periods of madness so as to advance a bit on
the road to reason.
Hermann Broch (18861951), Austrian novelist. The doctor, in The Spell, ch. 11
(1976; tr. 1987).

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!
George Bernard Shaw (18561950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. Poulengey, in
Saint Joan, sc. 1.

Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic
person is not a little mad?
Isadora Duncan (18781927), U.S. dancer. My Life, ch. 11 (1927), of Grand Duke
Ferdinand of Hungary.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.
Aristotle (384322 B.C.), Greek philosopher. Attributed by Seneca in Moral
Essays, De Tranquillitate Animi (On Tranquility of Mind), sct. 17, subsct. 10.

-Ann E. Bermingham