Madness and Civilization in Cambridge, MA

The Geniuses, the University, and the Asylum

by John Kaag

www.thetowner.com

Cambridge is Boston’s brainy twin. Born at almost exactly the same time, to the same
aristocratic parents, the two have grown apart over the years. Boston is now the place where
history and tradition are worshiped at all costs, even at the expense of political correctness
and fashion.

Cambridge—home to dozens of Nobel Laureates and two of the best universities in the
world—is too smart for this sort of conservatism. Of course, Harvard and MIT have
conventions and rituals, but, for the most part, Cantibrigians worship the legacy of genius.
Whoso would be a man or woman in Cambridge, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “must
be a non-conformist.”

The tour guides who shepherd thousands of visitors through Memorial Hall’s transept each
year like to say that it houses the world’s largest collection of secular stained glass. In
Cambridge, England, the windows of the colleges are filled with martyrs, saints and saviors, but
in this Cambridge—the one fashioned by Emersonian self-reliance—they are filled with
scientists, writers, artists and leaders: Homer, Dante, Virgil, Charlemagne, Columbus.

Tourists aren’t granted access to its most hallowed halls, or for that matter, the vast majority
of Memorial Hall, including Sanders Theatre, the glorious, cylindrical 1000-seat performance
hall modeled after Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre that sits at the center of Oxford
University.

Folks also aren’t permitted in Annenberg Hall, Harvard’s freshmen cafeteria—evoking

something out of Hogwarts—that serves 3400 meals daily. The elevator in Memorial Hall is off
limits as well; this lift takes the chosen few to the gallery overlooking the great hall and to the
tower steps.

From the outside of Memorial Hall, looking up, you can see two small windows at the top of
the grand turret. These aren’t for show. They are there to ventilate and brighten a classroom
at the very top of the tower. It was, many years ago, for three delightful and disturbing
semesters, my classroom.

The freshman composition course was entitled “Imagination and Genius” and traced the
concept of genius through the Western philosophical canon—from Plato’s criticism of the
poets, to the Enlightenment and Romantic renderings inspiration, to the fate of genius in the
post-modern age.

I was—somehow—the visiting instructor and came to learn what the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant meant when he said that, “genius cannot be taught.”

The class was a case study in self-selection: a small coterie of young savants who had come
with the not-so-veiled purpose of learning about themselves. They had come to Cambridge, as
many do, to perfect themselves.
There was the 17 year-old concert pianist who had played at Carnegie Hall when he was
eleven; the Olympic swimmer who spent time in West Africa treating victims of Ebola; the kid
from Silicon Valley whose first start-up was featured in Forbes; the woman from the middle-of-
nowhere New York who dropped out of biochemistry (because it was too easy); the young
Indian man who dropped out of Harvard in his first term (because it was too easy).

Their talents were so diverse, so natural, so unforced that it was easy to understand how the
Romans understood the Latin word genius as something innate and begotten. Trying to slow
genius down, or constrain it, or force it to turn things in on time was a grand exercise in futility.

Goethe’s Faust is a force of nature. At the beginning of the play we get to meet a man whose
talents are matched only by his aspirations, but we also get to know a member of Faust’s
supporting cast: Wagner.

Wagner is no genius. He has modest — pathetically modest — ambitions, contenting himself

to make his minute contribution to human knowledge. He’s the sloth of the academic world.

Following Faust, a reader tends to pity and disdain Wagner in equal measure. One of my better
students looked up from his Goethe and gave me a half-kidding-but-mostly-not smile: “Dr.
Kaag, you’re a little bit like Wagner.” Then he went back to his reading.

As I walked down the steps after class, I couldn’t really argue with him. Teachers are, by
definition, part of the supporting cast, but as I stood on the gallery overlooking Annenberg
Hall, watching young Charlemagne and Dante eat their lunches, several things struck me about
this place at the heart of Cambridge.

Charlemagne and Dante still had to eat. But they didn’t cook their food. Or clean their dishes.
Or their bathrooms. The cult of genius seems to arise naturally and miraculously from the
deep recesses of human culture, but, in fact, it depends in no small part on the mundane labor
of domestic help. This, I thought, is the other side of genius, the other side of Cambridge. The
neighborhoods to the north and east of Harvard Yard are decidedly less swanky than Memorial
Hall.

Earlier that year an African American student had admitted to me his insecurity about being
admitted to Harvard. “I just don’t fit in,” he had said. Another freshman was an undocumented
student and faced deportation to Mexico after the semester concluded.

Ultimately, after a long and media-frenzied fight, he was allowed to stay as a “Dreamer,” but
he too had to work hard to “fit in.” As lunch finished up and the students shuffled off to their
next class, a squad of black and Latino workers stayed behind to take care of the mess so that
the dining room would be spick and span for dinner.

I’m not the first to make this observation about the nature of genius—that it depends on the
structural and institutional forces of oppression.

Linda Nochlin, the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at NYU, has spent her career,
among other things, explaining why there are no black men or Latina women in the beautiful
windows in Memorial Hall: too often, they were expected to serve or facilitate the brilliance of
others. The naturalness of genius is a convenient myth put in place by those in power.

There is more than something to this. When women (the historical caretakers of genius) did
make it into Memorial Hall’s iconography they were represented by Cornelia or Andromache.
Cornelia: a supposedly modest woman, whose primary claim to fame was siring the Roman
tribunes, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. Andromache: a supposedly devout wife, whose primary
claim to fame was mourning her husband Hector. Today, thankfully, women and racial
minorities can gain access to the inner intellectual sanctum of Cambridge (and aren’t just
expected to be servers, mothers, and wives).

I looked down from the gallery at three women who were still sitting by themselves finishing
their lunch in Annenberg. Or not finishing. Two of them picked at their food, dicing it up into
ever-smaller pieces. One student finally broke down, left her uneaten meal at the table, and
slunk out of the cafeteria with a half-eaten donut and a barrel-sized Diet Coke. Another—a
skeleton draped in a bulky sweater—rolled up her sleeves, as if to make a final go at the burger
she hadn’t touched, exposing horizontal scars that ran in perfect parallel from her wrist to her
elbow.

After a minute, she pinched off a piece of bread, put it in a zip-lock bag, and gave the rest of
the sandwich to the trashcan. I took the elevator down to ground level and followed the
student outside as she simultaneously lit and smoked two cigarettes. “I am a sick man…”
admits the nameless narrator from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, in 1864, the
same year that planning began for Memorial Hall. I wandered back to my office on Prescott
Street and changed clothes to go for a quick jog before an evening lecture at the Humanities
Center.

____________

In the late 19th century there was still the hope that genius could be enshrined in stained
glass, but this hope was fading quickly. Dostoevsky anticipated Nietzsche and Rimbaud in
suggesting that the brightest flames are often the most destructive and short-lived. This was
always the case with genius, but in previous generations, as Michel Foucault explains in
Madness and Civilization, intellectual and artistic outliers were regarded as being possessed
with a kind of divine wisdom.

They were, like religious prophets or shamans, marginalized but also respected. In the
Enlightenment, however, this changed. In the 18th century, Kant had warned that genius
could, occasionally, be confused with what he called “original nonsense,” a dangerous
rejection of rational standards, but, a hundred years later, there was no mistake: genius was
(and still is) inextricably bound to madness.

Wearing my running kit, I made for Cambridge Street. If you travel away from Memorial Hall
on Cambridge Street, you’ll come to a small hill before you reach Charlestown. This is where
the Asylum for the Insane was erected in 1818, an institution that, over the years, was
renamed McLean Hospital. “For nonconformity,” Emerson explains, “the world whips you with
its displeasure.”

Well, not exactly. It sends you to McLean for “moral treatment.” No whips will be used, but
you’ll be confined in a hotel-like setting at the edge of society and strict care will be taken, as a
chronicler of the McLean planning wrote in 1811, “not to be returned home too soon.”

Prior to the 18th century, the physiological causes of insanity were traced to disorders of the
spleen, intestines, and liver, but with the findings of the American physician Benjamin Rush, in
1812, madness began to be regarded as a fever “affecting that part of the brain that is the seat
of the mind.”
The Asylum, at the border between Somerville and Charlestown (which was originally part of
Cambridge), was designed to ease this fever of the mind: a long orchard-lined driveway led to
gardens, pools and gracious neo-classical buildings that looked more like a country club than a
hospital.

The 19th century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, suggested that a human being
finds joy in life “just in proportion as he is dull and obtuse.” Those who are not dull or obtuse
find it unpleasant, and those who are brilliant find it unbearable. In the 20th century, McLean
Hospital became the notable resting place for dozens of intellectuals, the true geniuses of our
age: David Foster Wallace, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, John Nash, Anne Sexton, among others.

Many of these thinkers became famous for the ways their mental illness fed their genius. In
the 19th century, however, the luminaries who visited the hospital were generally more
discrete about their time at McLean.

In the early 1870s, as the windows for Memorial Hall were being commissioned, William
James, the father of American philosophy and psychology, was in the throes of his darkest
depression. His polymathic abilities were, at least in part, responsible for his divided self—part
poet, part biologist, part artist, part mystic.

He was a young man of disparate parts. In his later life, James describes an individual, all too
common to Cambridge neighborhoods, who is, from birth, psychologically vexed: “There are
persons whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags, as now one tendency and now
another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles,
wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of
repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes.”

These are, in James’s words, the “sick-souled,” who are just as likely to graduate Harvard as
they are to commit suicide at McLean. Rumors have swirled for more than a century that
James had a stint at the hospital, but if this is the case, the James family has been very careful
to redact it from his biography.

What is verifiable is that in the 1880s James developed The Principles of Psychology, widely
regarded as the first textbook in modern experimental psychology. It was an ostensibly
academic project with hidden existential and psychological motives. It is a handbook to cure
the sick-souled. Developing the Principles was, for James, a matter of life and death. James is
often described as a man who faced mental illness without the help of doctors. This is, of
course, completely absurd: he was the doctor.

As I finished my run, and headed back to the Yard, I thought to myself that mental illness and
genius continued to live side-by-side in Cambridge. And at times—as was the case with
James—genius slipped into the original nonsense of madness, and madness occasionally
revealed itself as a moment of insight or originality. But as Foucault suggests, and Cambridge
demonstrates, there is another, more disturbing relationship between insanity and modern
civilization: madness is modernity’s outside, its necessary shadow, its delimiting condition, its
“other.”

The evening lecture, a talk on decolonization organized by Homi Bhabha, was at the Mahindra
Humanities Center. Everyone, including me, was dressed in some variation of tweed and
corduroy. We talked for more than an hour about the “sub-altern,” “radical difference,” and
the dark side of globalization. The conversation continued as the group of intellectuals
sauntered out into the night air and made their way for martinis on Massachusetts Avenue. A
block from the pub, a one-legged man with dirt under his nails tried to join our conversation,
screaming headlong into the night about the injustices of capitalism.

We quickened our pace, closed ranks to make one phalanx of tweed, and elevated the
conversation above the madness that threatened to disrupt us. At its core, civilization depends
on this sort of elevation. Cambridge boasts the largest collection of secular stained glass, but
also among the highest concentration of homeless people in New England.

_____________

Next to Memorial Hall is a 15-story humorless skyscraper called William James Hall, or WJH. It
is straight and narrow in a way that James never was. It is home to Harvard’s psychology
department, which remains one of the best in the world. The building is on the bike route that
I take to our apartment in Charlestown. But on a chilly February morning, Kirkland was
cordoned off and WJH was closed to the public.

The fifteenth floor is one of the saving graces of this monstrous building. In its central seminar
room hangs a portrait of James looking out a window. The view from the fifteenth floor is
spectacular and its balcony, at 170 feet, provides a fresh vantage point of Memorial Hall. At
this height, it takes a body a little less than four seconds to hit the ground. The last time that
happened, a professor who worked in the building reported that, “we found it hard to go
about our daily routines.”