The very first definition of insanity
I ever heard was in a Psych 101 class
and I was so young that I guess it really
stuck with me, the way first impressions
often do.

The old professor told us that insanity
often manifested as somebody taking just a
single aspect or slant or angle of an idea
or perception and then expanding that tiny
bit of a fractured fragment or fraction into
encompassing an entire world-view, and thus
mistaking the part for the whole, as it were,
you see.

He likened it to enlarging a detail of a
photograph with an enlarger or looking through
only one facet of a diamond or viewing the
world out of a single lens of an insect`s
compound eye.

He digressed a lot. And his thick gray hair
was always such a mess and his glasses would
always be so smudgy.

Anyhow, the concept has had its echoes and
stayed with me over the years, knowing as I do
how fiercely attached some people can become to
any minor but tasty morsel or piece of an idea
or a fanciful bit of imagery, and also all the
tricky ways people have of turning anything of
truly great importance into a triviality, into
just one more stale old familiarity, to be viewed
by the audience with contempt and loud, hollow
laughter (but no smiles) and then too, there are
all these slick little characters I see twitching
their whiskers and running around looking for new
and original ways to fit themselves through the
tiniest and tightest getaway loopholes they can
find.

But today, as I write this, I am also asking myself
whether that old professor was all there himself,
and I was sort of laughing just now when I remembered
his lectures and the way his hands would practically
appear to have an independent life of their own, how
his hands would be constantly in motion while he
delivered his lectures, his hands searching through
his pockets while he went on expounding about this
and that in his heavily accented English, searching
for something he never ever found.

I mean, I did enjoy his talks very much, which were
about highly interesting stuff, of course, but I
never did see him find anything at all in his pockets.
Not once. And what the hell did he lose?

My theory, for whatever it`s worth, is that when the
professor was a child he had lots and lots of marbles.

11/12/2018