A Beautiful Wife
It is worth remembering that Mrs. John Nash, Alicia Larde, was no slouch herself in the intellect department. Still, the competition and classwork at MIT revealed her own limitations that she herself was too smart to simply deny:
“I was no Einstein.”
Back from the Abyss
Nash’s brilliant career was interrupted by the onset of schizophrenia. The condition robbed him of nearly three decades of work, potentially the most fertile three decades of his life. Coming back from the edge of nearly losing it all is put into metaphorical language instantly understood through the familiarity of literary allusion:
“It is a life resumed, but time did not stand still while Nash was dreaming. Like Rip Van Winkle, Odysseus, and countless fictional space travelers, he wakes to find that the world he left behind has moved on in his absence.”
Falling in Love
Were it not for the fact that Nash managed to fit in a marriage before schizophrenia hit hard, his story might be simply tragedy. Without Alicia to stimulate romance into this tale, in fact, it could well be simply too relentlessly depressing to withstand. Alicia’s presence changes everything and so it is only appropriate that when poetry enters the narrative, it mostly focuses on her:
“A profile, a look, a voice can capture a heart in no time at all. Alicia gave away hers in the space of a single calculus lecture.”
The Storm
Marriage to a genius in any field is rarely something that is described by the spouse as perfect under even the best conditions. Allowances must be made and sacrifices must be expected. Surely, it must be true that the marriage of the Nashes was never at a state comparable to a peaceful sunny day with perfect temperatures, low humidity, and a lack of unwanted precipitation. The arrival of schizophrenia comes with a weather metaphor that seems appropriate regardless of the state of things before:
“It was like a tornado, you want to hold on to everything you have, you don't want to let anything go.”
The Phantom of Fine Hall
Nash ascent into the middle of the tornadic vortex of schizophrenia ultimately turns him into a living, breathing metaphor. A legendary, semi-mythic, half-tragic/half-comical metaphor known as the Phantom.
“Among the students, the Phantom was often held up as a cautionary figure: Anybody who was too much of a grind or who lacked social graces was warned that he or she was `going to wind up like the Phantom.”
