| I've
been reading a lot about William James Sidis. I still can't decide
if he's a tragic figure - or a heroic one. Most probably an anti-histrionic
mixture of both.
He
was a child prodigy, by 5 he could speak and read several languages.
By 9 he passed admission exams in Harvard and M.I.T. and could
learn a new language in a matter of day - by 11, he gave a presentation
of a paper he'd written on 4th Dimensional mathematics at Harvard
to a bunch of confused mathematicians. Society considered him
a novelty when he was a child, a geeky-oddity when he was a teenager,
by the time he was 18 or 19 he had more or less decided to become
invisible. He took on pseudonyms, wrote under alliases and moved
from city to city whenever the media tracked him down somewhere.
At
20 - he wrote a book called 'The Animate & The Inanimate'
- predicting the existence of Black Holes long before Einstein
thought of them - this was around 1920.
At
30 - he wrote a book called "The Tribes & The States".
It's about the Native Americans - he traces their oral history
back to 100,000 years. Not only that, but he asserts in it that
all the values that Americans are mostly proud of are actually
taken from the Native American. He even traces the whole notion
of Democracy and government to them. He talks about how it wasn't
George Washington that's the 1st President of the US. He talks
about a revolution that put a guy called John Hancock in the presidency,
and that was later coup-de-eta'ed by what people now consider
the American Gov.
He
talks about a tribe - tricky name - something like okamatamista
or something - and according to one biographer - he was practicing
one of their values - they had a notion of 'anonymous contribution'
- they were weary of fame and status, they were more or less socialist,
I suppose - effectively - he was being invisible, and contributing
what he could/would. Something like his own secular monk - belonging
to a Native American tribe that no longer existed. This was in
1934 or so - when Mass America still found it perfectly acceptable
to depict Native Americans as barbaric villians.
At
40 - they considered him a burned out failure. The paper had found
him working in a clerical office. Operating an adding machine
(like a primitive pre-computer calculator - a machine he could
out-perform in his sleep...) and they said he'd totally burned
out. They didn't know anything about his books, his writings were
under pseudonyms, and the actual BOOKS - never really got into
print. America was simply not interested in the content.
And
so it goes...
It's
a tricky kind of world.
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