The MANIAC

The affair began with his wife’s tacit permission: at the onset of the relationship, Tatyana would even send Nelly her regards. She was as worried as anybody else about her husband’s mental breakdown, and thought that an extramarital adventure, while clearly a risk, could perhaps soothe his mind and turn him away from his obsession with chess and the never-ending list of hobbies—the model aircraft he built, the now-rotting herb garden, the abandoned stamp collection, the homemade telescope, the artisanal brewery in his basement—on which Paul fretted away his time to avoid finishing his physics investigations and long-overdue articles, because the mere thought of sitting down to work on them would often send him into a spiraling panic. (Location 186)

looked. The most basic concepts behind geometry seemed completely inadequate when faced with the inexplicable shapes of non-Euclidean space, populated with bizarre objects that suggested the impossible: parallel lines—which should never intersect—would meet at a point of infinity. It made no sense. Suddenly, (Location 722)

thesis was an early demonstration of the style that he applied to all of his later work: he would pounce on a subject, strip it down to its bare axioms, and turn whatever he was analyzing into a problem of pure logic. This otherworldly capacity to see into the heart of things, or—if viewed from its opposing angle—this characteristic shortsightedness, which allowed him to think in nothing but fundamentals, was not merely the key to his particular genius but also the explanation for his almost childlike moral blindness. (Location 804)

I now shudder at the accuracy of some of his prognoses, prophecies that no doubt came from his incredible capacity to process information and to sift the sand of the present through the currents of history. That gave him a certain sense of security, an overconfidence that would no doubt have betrayed a lesser man. But Janos was many moves ahead; he behaved as if he was looking back at things that had already happened. As we waited for the train to pull into the station, he patted me on the shoulder and told me that I needn’t worry, because there was still time. We will enjoy Europe, he announced, and especially Germany, to the very last, because he doubted that there would be much left if the Nazis continued to gain power. (Location 919)

He believed that our country’s outstanding intellectual achievements were not a product of history or chance, or any kind of government initiative, but due to something stranger and more fundamental: a pressure on the whole society of that part of Central Europe, a subconscious feeling of extreme insecurity in individuals, and the necessity of either producing the unusual or facing extinction. (Location 1508)

You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that. (Location 1737)