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<<I know a shepherd. I don't know how he found himself faced with some mathematical tables. He started to write down the numbers, to do calculations; eventually he reached the point of gaining his doctorate in mathematics. And so now he does calculations ... He could have had a little farm and lived quite comfortably while still living with nature...he would have been happy. Ali, well! Now he is with his numbers. He is no longer concerned with sheep. He no longer knows anything about life, In fact, it would astonish me if he were still to know anything of the outside world. He studies, I don't know what after all; I no longer know what he does now.
In the end, he abandoned his down-to-earth job, something natural that gave him a certain amount of physical exercise and kept him alive and breathing. Whereas here he is now, enclosed in a laboratory doing calculations. He suffocates in figures ... He thinks mathematically. Well, I don't know, ultimately ... we are mad ... we are mad.
In the end, we have little chance of getting to that level. That's how it is, A well! Lunatics in the end ... People say that certain children who know how to calculate roots to what ever power were mentally deficient ... oh, well! Fortunately, there's little chance of our going mad, because not many of us become top mathematicians.>> |
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From the opening "I knew a shepherd" to the final "I don't know" he moves on to a more impersonal "we" when it comes to the subject of madness. This fear of madness, or more plainly this "risk of no longer having your feet on the ground" may surely be explained by the fact that for certain individuals, the need to invest energy in abstract representations, which have not yet been incorporated into their psychic reality and into their own mental mechanisms, seems to constitute a traumatic experience. It breaks relationship with reality, and cuts off a channel of instinctive discharge - that of the flow of sadism sublimated into an activity of mental control of the outside world. The ego finds itself somewhat disconnected, in danger of a loss of meaningfulness and of depersonalisation |