A touch of madness

Sem a loucura que é o homem
mais que a besta sadia,
cadáver adiado que procria?

Fernando Pessoa

(attempt at translation:
Without madness what is man
but the healthy beast,
adjourned corpse that breeds?)

This is a beautiful sentence from one of our greatest poets; never mind the king he was talking about was a dimwit that verged on the moronic that led the country to lose its independence. But when he talks about madness, he means the unconventionality, the thinking outside the box, the grain of genius that makes people stand out against the dreary, common thinking. That kind of madness is good, it can be the sign of genius (again, not in the case of king Sebastião, but that's another question).

But then there is clinical madness, the kind that makes you lose touch with reality, the kind that makes you suffer. And there's nothing romantic or visionary about that. Madness is not Sylvie de Nogaret playing solitaire and chatting with her dead brother in Durrell's Monsieur (even if I like Durrell immensely); it's Virginia Woolf drowning herself because "the voices were coming back and this time they weren't going away", or a girl shivering in panic in a hospital room in a foreign town listening to the staff planning unspeakably horrible pranks to humiliate her.

Fortunately, I never experienced true madness. Anxiety, depression, panic, irritability, bad temper with loss of control, all that I've known, but never lost the sense of reality, never found myself in an alien world whose rules I could not understand or felt my sense of self shattered to smithereens. I watched it happen, and few things have scared me as much.

So, I guess a touch of madness is alright, even desirable, and I've known the liberating feeling of not caring at all about what other people think, but one must always be able to stop and not to lose control. And true madness, the psychotic kind, is never good, it always means too much suffering and can be literally fatal.