A Beautiful Mind | 1st book I read for this year 🥺

My claim of being a bookworm has sounded off to me for the past few years. I am just really hoarding books now, that, I always tell myself. Book sales and book fairs are just my few hours of escape from the reality that having the time to enjoy and read a book is now a luxury for me. But, last year, I was able to bid goodbye to my slump. I wrote about my little victory of being able to read four books last year, The joy of reading books and a peek of my little library, it was a good starter for me. However, I went again on another slump! This year, I can only read a few pages of the book I'm trying to read and then forget about it for a week or two.

I thought, maybe I'm still waiting for that curiosity of what happened next to finally kick in. Or should I just try to go back to the other books I have tried to read but not able to finish last year? I remember that time when I have so much time to kill during our travel to a far island from the city where I'm living the pandemic chunk of my life. We had to board on a ferry for two hours and endure another five hours of long drive to our destination. The ferry ride was an exquisite experience for someone who had been stuck in her apartment for months already. The sea was calm and yet I could just feel the strong winds trying to knock out my balance. It was a perfect place for me to catch up on my reading. I started reading a digital copy of the book A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar. I had so much fun reading an auto/biography book at that time, which I also shared in this community. There's something about getting a glimpse of who the person is or was through the pages of a book. Sometimes, I get so fixated on the things happening to me that I often forget about how life can be looked at from a wider lens. Some famous people get to write or have others write a book about how they lived. And we readers, get to learn from them.

I had my interest in this book simply because I wanted to read another biography book. It was about John Forbes Nash Jr., a genius who suffered from schizophrenia for decades, and bravely shared his story through his own lens and through the stories told by the people around him. During the mid 1900s, there was always a stigma associated with mental illnesses. It was emphasized in the book and could be felt by the readers who would read it. That was all I know about Nash when I started reading the book. Not until when I was reading this book on the ferry, the prologue was quite lengthy, but wrapped gracefully. John Forbes Nash was a Nobel Prize winner. I am pursuing a career in science, a Nobel award always ring awe to me. But it wasn't just that, like I said, the book has the most beautiful prologue I have ever read, yet.

I was born mid 1990s, I was a kid in the early 2000s where life for me was easy. But there were things I remember at that young age, when people see someone dealing with problems that significantly affect how that person feels, thinks, behaves, and interacts with other people, everyone just label them as a crazy person. Mental illnesses, despite having their unique names based on diagnosis, are looked as just being crazy. Mental illnesses are health problems that do not have a face, that people didn't want to look at it or talk about it. This was my experience in the early 2000s, I just can't imagine how severe the stigma was during the time when Nash was suffering from schizophrenia. The fact that he was a genius and that he was famous even at young age, a lot of people praised his works, he was at the center of a spotlight.

The book gave a generous narrative of who Nash was before he had his illness. He was a fine genius who would make your jaw drop with his way of thinking, solving problems, and his originality. But as I read through the different stories from his family, colleagues, love interests, mentors, and friends, I thought of how I wouldn't want him as a friend. Haha. He was really rude, but that's just me. I like his genius and little quirks though, I think that it's his charm.

I found some similarities I had with him, the one in particular was his venture on the stock market. The work he was known for was the Nash equilibrium, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences for it. It was a work he did very early in his career, it was his PhD dissertation but his earlier years in Carnegie Institute of Technology greatly contributed on his mathematical genius for this work of his. He lived most of his life at Princeton University, as a graduate student, fellow, professor, and the Phantom. Just like the candlesticks that show the rise and fall of an asset in the stock market, Princeton was the stage that witnessed all Nash's transformations.

The narratives and interview snippets on the book broke my heart page after page. Their stories were stitched seamlessly into telling about the tragedy of being hit by schizophrenia. What caused Nash to suffer from this illness? The book tried to pinpoint some factors but today's science contradicts those views. It was difficult to cure something that is unknown at that time. The medical science lacks the data on what treatment can properly address Nash's illness without further ruining his brilliant mind. Relationships were torn, bank accounts were emptied, love turned sour, and a lot of sacrifices and hard decisions were made. But, throughout the long three decades of being consumed by his illness, people were kind to him. Although at some point, some just do it out of pity. It was really a hard time for Nash and the people who love him dearly. That could happen to anyone, to me, or you, that I thought if I'd be anything, I hope I could also be kind.

When the night has been long already, don't we just want to see the sun rise again? That's what everyone wants, but not Nash. When his reawakening came, the way he looked at it was again very insightful. It was like welcoming a victory despite all the loss that you just couldn't look away from. There were lost years and opportunities and present time was like being set on the start line again. It was a huge setback in his career but as what others say, sometimes, hard work can match or out-do genius. He tried. Nash tried to move forward, not just in career, but on the other aspects of his life too. The way he connect with people was changed, there was this new Nash that is more open to people now. Just like how the great heights of his life crumbled, the walls he had since childhood fell down too. We all change at some point in our lives, we can even be different from that version of us when a minute passed. But there are transformations that happen in our lifetime that we'll treasure until we live in this world. And that's something worth looking forward to.

This book genre will always have a chunk of my heart. I will always be wanting to learn what life is from someone's journey. The book was so authentic when it comes to telling the life story of John Forbes Nash. Even Nash himself wanted to have his life written in book pages, not because he thought of his life to be glamorous and so worthy of being told to the world. His reason was just simple, it'll bring him the nostalgia of looking back to his past. Even though he had his fair share of rough lanes travelled, there were things worth remembering. Indeed, he had...a beautiful mind.