My Athenian Madness

Yesterday a rather spectacular thing occured. A gentleman of respectable stature and clear intellect approached me at my workplace and introduced himself with:

'I have never read a book.'

He grinned, aware that this was clearly the challenge that I had been waiting for.

'I can read, I read the newspaper everyday, but I've never read a novel. I feel that I've been missing something.'

'You are,' I agreed 'do you know the story of the mad Athenian harbour-master?'

I proceeded to spin the yarn of the Thrasylaus.

This man was seized with a form of insanity which made him think that all the ships which put into the Piraeus (Athens' port) were his property. He greeted their arrival with the greatest delight, and when they departed bade them farewell and watched them sailing away. In a word, he was thoroughly happy, just as though he were really the owner of such great resources. If a ship was lost he did not miss it; if one arrived safe, he was full of glee and boasted of his good fortune to other people, until his brother Crito, returning from Sicily, took hold of him and handed him over to a physician. All the same, on returning to his senses, he maintained that he had never lived so pleasant a life as when he was in the grip of his delusion; for while enjoying so much happiness, he said, he had never suffered a moment's uneasiness.
(Taken from Adages II, vii 1 to 3 by Desiderius Erasmus)

I didn't put it as eloquently as Erasmus, but in making this point I myself realised the importance of fiction. That hour or so a day of happy delusion is vital to our sanity. If we must suffer 23 hours of slings and arrows then we surely deserve an hour to imagine ourselves at the head of a vast fleet.

Anyway, after twenty minutes or so of highly thoughtful discussion I convinced him to buy The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. A work of singular genius, which I felt best epitomised an accurate analogy of the happiness of delusion.

I would recommend this book to anyone, whether you've read before or not, as would anybody else who has read it.

The happiness of delusion and the absurdity of invention. These must be the defining parts of my life nowadays.