Strange Bodies by Theroux Marcel

Author:Theroux, Marcel [Theroux, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780571279814
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2013-04-30T05:00:00+00:00

I sat, damp and troubled, among the plastic chairs and the routine gloom of the waiting area. For the first time, I had been forced to acknowledge openly the strange and specific character of Jack’s delusion.

All madness has a touch of death to it. Here, in the Dennis Hill Unit, I’ve come to see that reality is not as robust as we think it is. Of course, there are things that are indifferent to human opinion – gravity, the moondriven motion of the tides, the boiling point of water. But the finer details of reality – the state of a marriage, artistic merit, a person’s true nature – have something delicate and consensual about them. That lurch to the wrong, a noble mind overthrown, even Ron Harbottle sacrificing the good judgement he had lived for: it is more than disquieting. Each time someone opts out of our collective reality, it weakens a little.

To me, Johnson’s recognition of that is part of his acute modernity as a moralist. I think he saw the relation between individual and collective delusion: the threat of madness to the human mind and the body politic. He knew that it was a small step from religious mania to religious wars. Madness is part of that turn away from the real that Johnson was so vigilant in confronting wherever he found it – not because of his confidence in reason, but because he knew from his own experience how fragile the rule of reason is.

No one more embodies the illuminating potency of reason. Johnson was devastating in his capacity to sniff out the fake in its different guises, to know what the real is, or the réal, if you follow Hunter’s comical etymology. But this very power was riddled with its opposites: melancholy and uncertainty; fear of his own loosening grip on the nature of reality.

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