Hermit 'scribblings' of Alexander Grothendieck made available to researchers
Grothendieck&#x27;s non mathematical work has always fascinated me, he really has a great style of writing (judging by “recoltes et semailles”).<p>The great thing about reading the works of people that are as close to mental illness as he was is that they seem to be unable to establish any emotional distance to their works.
When someone like him writes about evil, you know that he was looking directly into the devil&#x27;s eyes when he wrote about it. He didn’t leave his desk that they to watch Breaking Bad, he couldn’t have. His gift of extreme perception haunted him. Awake and asleep.<p>Grothendieck’s mind became used to the kind of thinking that made him such an outstanding mathematician. He was all about finding the essence of everything. Distill every idea and every concept to find its underlying core. He was always obsessed, always all-in.<p>Most of us perceive the world around us in two different dimensions. One abstract and rational, and one subconscious and shaped by culture.
What made Grothendieck so special is that his conscious thinking almost immediately reshaped his subconscious concept of our world.<p>I felt similar about Ted Kaczynski when reading the Unabomber’s manifest. Kaczynski could not walk away from thoughts that most of us would contain in the &quot;intellectual theories” corner of our mind. But just as with Grothendieck, he had just such a loud inner voice that he couldn’t help but to always listen to it. This voice controlled his feelings, this voice controlled his world.<p>It must be hard to life like that, but it also creates extremely potent literature.<p>Every sentence born in pain.