Friedrich Hölderlin: The Man With an Eclipse in His Mind – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Madness has a strange, bad rap. There’s nothing saner than a madman, often just a guy who wants to escape this planet, overrun with cold hearts, slumbering lives, and events that disgust still-warm, sensitive skins.

A glance at history: Nearly all geniuses were mad; the rest settled for booze, a worse kind of madness, because it kills the genius slowly and then, after you wake up, drags you back to the slump of a blank page, the wasteland of imagination, or the silence of an untouched piano, with the great melody trembling, absent, at your fingertips. No artist has made history drunk on sanity. None has made history trying to make history. 

More than once, I’ve crossed paths with those hollow-eyed, crooked-mouthed, bright-foreheaded lunatics. They pierce your sanity and appeal to your madness with the force of vultures clutching carrion. They seek it in the depths of your eyes, and I think they can see it, they know how to spot it in your reason, even if you don’t. From somewhere, the worst of consciousness’s chimeras peeks out.

Since ancient times, madness has been a splash of color in the strange monotony of life. Maybe that’s why so many poets lost their minds long before their talent ran dry; that, or because they didn’t sell books, for there’s no one poorer than a poet. Take Hölderlin, who wrote his best verses when he’d already lost the main sail of his consciousness. Those who knew him say that, at his desk, surrounded by the singularity of his pen and a pile of papers, Hölderlin rediscovered his greatest sanity, forgot his recurring delusions, and reached towering heights of intellect, sensitivity, and art. Poems of Madness is the wildest example:

When pale snow beautifies the fields
And a high glow lights up the vast plain,
The Summer that passed seduces, and delicately
Spring approaches as the hour wanes.
Splendid vision, the air is purer,
Clear is the forest, no man
Walks the streets, now so distant, and silence
Becomes majestic, and all laughs.

I reread these verses, free of rational coordinates. If this is the rapture of poets’ solitude, sign me up for that soul-storm, that madness that led Hölderlin to seal a secret pact with rhymed beauty.

Without trivializing the bleak wasteland left in families by elders whom time or life strips of reason, there’s a certain poetic justice in forgetting, especially in this era with so much to see and little to gaze upon. Too many things to know and few to remember. Too many hands to shake and too few to hold. There’s magic, of course, in surviving bohemia in such shallow, frivolous, extreme times. In times broadcast live between TikToks and Instagrams. What saves us is that, after all, humanity’s great creations come forth with a certain claim to eternity, like love or dreams, unmoved across centuries and generations.

A formula, a poem, the haphazard inner world of a novel’s character. Geniuses devote such intense time to these things, to a single cause, that maybe it explains why the rest of their brain ends up shadowed, until the inexorable twilight of reason invades and conquers their time and space. And then they’re lost, their little motor idling on a raft surrounded by water and fog, in that cursed, no-return destiny.

So, there are two kinds of madness. The silent kind, like someone walking in a ceremonial procession through life, and the talkative kind, those lunatics who, angry or joyful, must show the planet all the eccentricity and loquacity of their exaltation. Against either, dialogue is useless. Talking is futile in the realm of delirium. Nothing said from reason reaches the shores of their consciousness, and any attempt to feign madness is seen by the lunatic as a grotesque act of hostility, which can unleash most violent aversions in their heart. It’s natural. They don’t want understanding or complicity, just, perhaps, a path to silence, solitude, and the absorbed gaze of someone who knows how to offer security without trying to fathom the oddities flowing from a mind that’s begun to break free from logic.

In the end, many lunatics have only built a great insulating wall against the acidic reality that afflicts them. Perhaps it’s a beautiful metaphor for sanity, because in this century plagued by the worst remnants of the Enlightenment — from yesterday’s rolling heads to today’s cancellations — the smartest way to survive is to step away from reason now and then, stop the train of the ordinary, and descend slowly, like Martians, into the strange, alien world we’ve always had here, under our feet and our urgencies, waiting for us. Thus, savoring the beauty of a sunset, the smell of wet fields after summer rain, or the autumnal scent of a chimney’s white, slender, dense smoke — these are things only lunatics, evicted from this loud, arrogant world, have time to enjoy daily. They’re inhabitants of a better, quieter, happily irrelevant, hopeful future, like the sleepy yawn of a baby.