The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

“Every chaos is a wrong appearance,” wrote Gödel; he was of the firm belief that there was a reason for everything. If you think that way, it’s a small step to begin to see hidden machinations and agents operating to manipulate the most common, everyday occurrences. But it was not just a psychological imbalance that undid him, he was also affected by the ideas that he brought into the world, ideas from which we have yet to recover. Truths that cannot be proven, contradictions that cannot be avoided—these self-referential nightmares of logic preyed on him as powerful demons that, once called down upon us, could never be truly banished, demons that also gnawed away at my dear friend Janos. There are many secret ties between Janos and Gödel. Even in death, they are still connected, buried in the same cemetery, a few feet apart from each other. Jancsi’s reaction to the great Austrian’s ideas was hardly noticeable at first. After all, even if his grand project had been ruined, it was not in his character to get depressed. He went along with things almost as if nothing had happened. But the affair had affected him, in a very profound way. I don’t know if others noticed it, but I certainly did. He was never the same. After he came back from Königsberg, I soon realized that there was something missing in him, something lost, and this injury, this sudden sense of emptiness, did not remain limited to his ideas about mathematics, but began to permeate his entire worldview, which b...