Acute perception of something immense and yet very delicate at the same time
I am reading When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, and he writes about the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, describing his ability to concentrate for long hours:
He could begin working out an idea in the morning and not move from his desk until dawn the next day, squinting under the light of an old kerosene lamp. "It was fascinating to work with a genius," his friend Yves Ladegaillerie remembers. "I don't care for that word, but for Grothendieck there is no other. It was fascinating but also terrifying, because this was a man who simply did not resemble other human beings."
And his ability to abstract concepts:
His capacity for abstraction seemed endless. He could make unexpected leaps to higher categories and work in orders of magnitude no one had dared to explore before. He formulated his ideas by removing one layer after the other, breaking down concepts, simplifying and abstracting until there seemed to be nothing left; there, in that apparent vacuum, he would discover the structures he had been searching for.
Labatut quotes Grothendieck on his motivation:
"What stimulates me is not ambition or the thirst for power. It is the acute perception of something immense and yet very delicate at the same time."
His remarks remind me of writers: Nabokov and his butterflies, Sylvia Plath's ability to pull from the edge of her consciousness, and my recent interest in noticing the shimmering interestingness of mundane things.
In an interview with The Guardian, Labatut mentioned something close to this himself:
"The people I admire the most in every field have this wondrous ability to let their unconscious bleed into what they do. I really think that the highest form of intelligence is possession from outside. I knew that I didn't have that, so I did a bunch of very irresponsible things trying to kickstart that. And when you put yourself through that sort of ordeal, you never know what shape your mind is going to have at the end of the day. It was catastrophic for me in many ways, but it also helped pave a personal path to writing."
