The Daemon's Logic

Ben was a middle-aged guy, thin, with grey hair pulled back into a tight ponytail and strained neck ligaments.  I met him in the Mud House café in Charlottesville when I used to go there and grade engineering exams, and he took an instant liking to me, partially because my papers had differential equations on them, and partially because I was able to nod at the right times when he spoke to me.  But I have to be honest here.  I think he also liked me because I was probably one of the very few people willing to listen to him.  

Ben was obsessed, and after years of working on the same exact thing, he had become so immersed in it that it was his world.  His obsession was logic.  When I met him, he let me flip through the eighty-five-odd pages of a logical proof that he was building to show that… I don’t know, I never understood.  I just knew that there was a book on the foundations of logic that had extremely difficult and mostly unsolved problems in it, and Ben had set out to rigorously solve every one of them.  So far, he had spent seven years on it.  The book, and the logic, was his life’s work.  

When I think of Ben I always think of geniuses like Einstein and Newton, artists like Picasso and Van Gogh, and writers like Hemingway and Faulkner: the greats after whom I would fashion my own destiny, were only crafting a legacy that simple.  These men were utterly obsessed with their craft, very much like Ben.  So what, if anything, set them apart?  Was there some sort of invisible daemon inside each of them which dictated what feats they could achieve?  Or was their success merely a matter of hard work?  And anyway, who was to say before all the dust had settled whether, forging off into the crypts of their own dusty logic books, these men would achieve anything other than delusion?  I don’t think it’s possible to have known, which means that these men dove headfirst into their paths without a clue of the outcome.  Perhaps it is that boldness in itself which led to their greatness.

Ben once told me about his talks with a few other logicians, university professors who scoffed at the style and form of his work.  They don’t get it, he proclaimed, with a heat in his eyes.  Other logicians use language that’s obfuscated and incomprehensible, while I write my proofs in plain English.  How can you follow a proof where the terms aren’t defined rigorously in natural language?  You can’t!  I didn’t know enough about his field to judge for myself the quality of his proofs, but when established practitioners of a craft disregard someone’s work because it is done in a strange way, I’m usually suspect.  But then again, it is they who work outside of a paradigm who have the power to overturn it, and delusion is only considered such until it turns out that the person is right.  

The question is, how far outside of paradigms ought we to go?  Life is uncertain and we only get one of them.  If we’re unwilling to ever step outside of the patterns set by others, we will certainly achieve nothing.  But step too far outside, fall too deeply into our own books about logic, and we’ll soon find that the life we left behind us is no longer available.  No matter what we do, we are going to be choosing some paths and giving up others, and the heftier our ambition, the farther away from the coffeeshop we’ll go when we delve in.  We must ask ourselves: how deep of a tome are we willing to open?  And then, having opened it, will we have the guts, the skill, and the dedication, to go all the way?