Post #3367556

2026-06-21 19:48 UTC

@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @vnikolov@ieji.de I don't know that much about van Gogh, but I read the Pirsig book at least twice. I just listened to a podcast interview with Laurence Gonzales about his book "Surviving Survival". Gonzales says that we often comment that talented people are crazy, but what we should say is that crazy people cope by burying themselves in satisfying work. That insight strikes me as obvious in retrospect, and applies to both men.

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@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz 2026-06-21 20:21

@alison@burningboard.net @vnikolov@ieji.de The final time I reread Pirsig, I lightly annotated it and wrote a short index for my annotations (on an empty page in the back), which I intended as a barebones essay to myself. Fortunately that worked, and seemed to kill off any later temptations to read it again. Sounds like I should look into Laurence Gonzales and "Surviving Survival". I see that it gets a very respectable 4.21 stars on goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17573683-surviving-survival It's worth emphasizing one point that is often taken for granted by all of us currently present cognoscenti 😉 but not by General Audiences: there's "crazy" in the psychiatric sense (where they prefer avoiding that term in favor of more neutral and more specific terms), and "crazy" in the much looser sense meant in nontechnical common usage. In the latter, "crazy" can mean *many* things, typically including a figurative square peg idiosyncratic individual being hammered into a too-small round hole in society demanding a perfect fit without regard for wider context of contributions to aforesaid completely ungrateful society. (not to imply any *criticism*, of course!) It obviously also can mean someone widely misunderstood and widely under-appreciated, who hears a siren song inaudible to everyone else, but irresistible as a powerfully insightful Muse on subjects that others may not appreciate even exist. That's the way that I think that van Gogh, and certain other people, are "crazy". It doesn't always also mean "genius", but when we're lucky, it does.

Open ##3383879