William James Sidis, The Smartest Person Ever?

The following essay is about William James Sidis, whom Robert Persig (Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) discusses in his novel, Lila. Sidis's one great passion in life was collecting street car transfers.

The account comes from a web page I saved to my hard drive. Before uploading it, I checked it and found it dead, but still want to give credit, so here is the obsolete URL--http://members.aol.com/popvoid/TOC.html. Jim Morton, the essayist, uses Peridromophilia as a term for Sidis's love of street car transfers.

Peridromophilia Unbound:William James Sidis
By Jim Morton

The great geniuses of mankind are often said to be "born ahead of their time." William James Sidis, on the other hand, seems to have been born out of his time completely; on the wrong world, in the wrong dimension. Perhaps someday the world will understand "Willie" Sidis's strange genius, but that day is far off indeed.

Sidis was born in 1898. His father, Boris Sidis, taught psychology at Harvard and was considered one of the foremost psychologists of his day. The boy was named after William James, a leading psychologist and brother to author Henry James. Boris argued that traditional approaches to child-rearing obstructed the learning process. The elder Sidis was determined not to make the same mistake with his son.

He started by stringing words together with alphabet blocks above the child's crib. He eschewed the usual "googley-goo" baby-talk that adults lapse into around infants, speaking instead to the child in the same way he would speak to an adult. If the boy showed any interest in a subject, Boris encouraged his curiosity and study.

The effect of all this on the boy Sidis was astounding. By the time he was two, Willie was reading literature meant for adults; by age four he was typing letters in French and English; at age five he wrote a treatise on anatomy and dazzled everyone with a mathematical expertise few adults could match.

Loren Eiseley & Milan Kundera : Consciousness & Mystery

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Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Loren Eiseley (1907–1977) was a prairie child growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a hardware-salesman father and a deaf mother, his parents living together but estranged. Something in their relationship made a tortured poet out of Eisely, for in his books there is a quest, a haunted imagination of eternity and the infinite, all of it filtered through the long shadow of geological epochs and black outer space. After years, I can pick up The Immense Journey, Darwin's Century, The Night Country, and other books to find myself enrapt by captivating prose evoking the long shadows of an evolving Earth and its tiny, whirling track among galaxies.

In The Immense Journey, he recalls a moth under an opera tent, a seemingly insignificant subject, but in his prose he provides a metaphor that reaches above the tent into the night sky, up toward the stars. Here it is.

• While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. “He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.”

Zerah Colburn, Eighth Wonder of The World

 I won't be posting for a while. In the meantime, click on the red dice at right for a chance read.

So many fascinating lives are lost to popular history, such as the life below. They came, walked their minutes on the stage, and then were gone.

For many, Zerah Colburn (1804-1839) was regarded as an eighth wonder of the world. In 1810, his father, Abia Colburn, heard his 5 year old son reciting multiplication tables while playing among the wood chips in the workshop. Zerah had been at school for about six weeks.

The Machine In The Ghost

Descartes said "I think, therefore I exist."

You don't need the "I think" part. That part is an object used to prove a subject, I exist. No object is permanent, certainly not your thoughts, and it proves nothing.

Just ask yourself, How do I know I exist?

All you can finally conclude is, I don't know how. I just know it. That is all of which I can truly be certain.

No object can be found in the I am. There is just knowing it.  Pure subjectivity.

Once that is understood, REALLY understood,  the search has ended.

I am.  One without a second.  Just this. Forever this.

The ghost is not in the machine.  The "machine" is in the "ghost". Forever unidentifiable but unmistakably present.

Paul Lafargue: The Right To Be Lazy

Written in Saint Pélagie Prison, 1883.

"A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny.