David Edelstein and Nell Minow

I think Dr. Laura would approve of my working three days a week since I returned to the office following a longish maternity leave more than 14 years ago, leaving me time to be a Cub Scout leader and go on field trips and read the back issues of Reader's Digest while I wait in the orthodontist's office. And I even think that domestic labor can be ennobling. But I don't think that Martha Stewart's regimen leaves much time for the family. I'd like to see Martha Stewart and Dr. Laura do a Breakfast Table and debate their priorities.

Maybe because I spent this beautiful weekend cooped up fixing typos, I spent some time thinking about madness. In movies, crazy people are usually smarter and happier than sane people are, often with greater insights and abilities than everyone else. The King of Hearts, Harvey, Benny and Joon, A Fine Madness, Outrageous, and a dozen others portray mental illness as charming and delightful. Real life is messier, more complicated, and usually very painful.

People magazine has a poignant essay by David Kaczynski about discovering that his brother was the Unabomber and turning him in to the authorities. He describes first realizing that "there's something about Ted that I really don't know, that I really can't understand," in the mid-1970s. Later, he concluded that Ted "was without an internal mechanism to heal, so every emotional hurt from childhood on had accumulated." His decision to call the FBI was uncontestable, but wrenching. He did the best he could for his brother by arguing that he should be imprisoned but not executed.

Yesterday's Washington Post reviewed two books about mathematical geniuses who raise questions about the nature of sanity. A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar, is a biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., who had thirty years of severe mental illness between his thesis on game theory and the Nobel prize he was awarded for it. Because Nash had produced such important work before he became ill, the Princeton community took care of him, tolerating him as something between a mascot and a shell-shocked war veteran. "Nash blamed his collapse on the mental effort of resolving contradictions in quantum theory, as if his mind had blown a fuse" and he refused medication, saying that it stopped the voices he wanted to hear. If he had not been a genius, would he have been forced to seek treatment sooner? If he had, would he have produced pioneering work?

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, by Paul Hoffman, is a biography of Paul Erdos, who had no home, no family, and no possessions outside of "a shabby suitcase and a drab orange plastic bag," but who wrote or co-wrote 1500 brilliant papers about prime numbers. According to this biography, he was so single-minded that he refused to have the eye surgery he needed until the hospital agreed that he could have a mathematician come to the hospital to talk with him about prime numbers. What would his grade have been on a typical mental status test? If he had taken Prozac, would he have been happier?

Should society support madness because it is productive, and are we able to intervene before it becomes dangerous? Yesterday's "Outlook" section had a piece by Pamela Gerhardt about her sister, who is a paranoid schizophrenic. She points out, however, that when she tried to have her sister committed, her sister was released in three weeks, with no follow-up to discover that she threw her pills in the trash after she left the hospital. Patient confidentiality rules prevented Gerhardt from even talking to her sister's doctors. Her sister was arrested several times, once after a high-speed chase on the highway, before being committed again, then released three months later. "A day or so after the Capitol shootings, my sister called, as she does whenever a paranoid schizophrenic makes the news. Always, she is upset, agitated, afraid. 'Do you think I could kill someone?' she asks." Gerhardt tells her to take her medication, and hopes for the best. I also read an article in a lawyer's publication this weekend about Larry Klayman, the man who has filed at least 18 lawsuits against the Clinton administration (and at least one against his mother). Slate's own Jacob Weisberg once wrote that "Klayman is off his rocker." The article gave me a sinking feeling he might be right. It reported that his blast faxes to the press now include, in addition to hyperbolic third-person grandiosity, discussions of his relationship with his beloved grandmother and his thoughts about God.

I was very moved by David Kaczynski's view that listening to the victims was an important part of his own recovery: "I had a sense there was no way I could emerge from my own pain without understanding theirs a little better." Mental illness can provide enormous focus. It can free up people like Erdos and Nash and even, for a little while, Ted Kaczynski, to ponder the secrets of the universe without complications from human relationships. But the way David Kaczynski handled an unbearably painful situation is what sanity is all about.

I'm really going to miss Shari Lewis, the second beloved baby boomer television star to die in the past few days. The bubbly enthusiasm and sly humor of her programs have given me great joy.

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