Nineteen Eighty Four

I found a book that the government officials didn't take.  I almost wish they had.

When I was a young man, entering into the first few years of what would be a very drawn out and tumultuous college education, three books had a very significant impact on my young psyche.  Those books were Milton's Paradise Lost (I had a whole class on it,) Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (don't mention Ayn Rand in polite conversation, it WILL turn ugly,) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four.

The book I found was George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four.

Like all books that used to belong to Henry, Nineteen Eighty Four is filled to overflowing with marginalia.  When I first found it, I hugged it tight against my chest.  This must have been the feeling that Winston (the main character of 1984) felt when he discovered the blank journal.

The first time Winston writes in the journal, he hides in a small alcove out of view of the telescreen in his tiny apartment and enters a fugue state of furious scribbling.  Henry had a lot to say about this telescreen:

"Winston, my friend, we must always be vigilant.  They are always watching.  They hate what you cherish because it gives you hope.  I envy you, Winston, for though you face death for your tiny treason, the Lords that watch for me can excise hope with surgery like it was a cancer. By their knife I cannot love, cannot cherish, cannot hope.  I can only pine for the days when such vivid emotions colored my world.  Now I see the world as if through a thick haze, as if the windows of my eyes were distant from the perception of my injured soul.  What colors do you see?  Love, Winston, and do not fear your death.  Oblivion is more merciful than the purgatory of my existance."

Were those men that came for Henry's books, were they really trying to help him or are they responsible for his disappearance?

It seems to me that they took his books not to find some clue to his whereabouts, but to conceal any evidence on where he might be taken.

Does this sort of thing really happen? Does our government really do this sort of thing? It is more than I can comprehend.

I think I've been reading the trade forums, too much.  Their conspiracy theories are getting to me.  Our government can't even balance a budget, a topic taught in junior high school.

Good luck Henry, wherever you are.

A.P.B.

Though I left Henry a message on our book trading website, I ended up posting a general forum message about Henry's sudden disappearance.  Immediately the whole forum leapt into action.  A subforum was even created to discuss Henry's disappearance.

I'm floored at the forum's reaction.  It is clear to me, now, that my life isn't the only one that Henry touched.  All of these men and women who had these brief interactions with Henry, he had left a mark on all of them.  I wonder if it was his earnest enthusiasm for books that touched them, his blunt, honest-to-a-fault demeanor, or something else.

I don't know.

Some of the threads on the forum have begun to speculate on what happened to Henry, where he went.  Of course, it's the internet, and so dozens of conspiracy theories have been posited. I don't really believe any of these, of course.  I think it's just a case of Henry failing to realize that there are people that care about him and that he should communicate his moving to them.

Whatever the case, I know Henry's still out there and I have faith that we will contact each other, again.

Still Blown Away

I'm still stunned at Henry's sudden and unexplainable disappearance.  I'm certain he wasn't kidnapped or that he fell in a ditch someplace.  His house is completely empty, every bit of it.  His car is gone.  Those aren't signs of an accidental disappearance.  He left.

I don't know his neighbors well, but I felt obligated to ask.  No-one on the block knew Henry, few had ever seen him, and none of them remembered seeing any moving trucks or anything being carried out of his house.

It is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen.

I've left a message for him on our book trading site.  I'm certain he'll come back there after he gets settled in.  I'm not even sure he knows how leaving like this could upset someone.

Marginalia

Marginalia isn't just for the inane ramblings of pretentious readers or the scribblings of bored school boys.  It is a method of communication that has been practiced for centuries.  The marginalia of several authors and critics have been published as books in their own right.

With the advent of Kindle and electronic books, the habit is in danger of disappearing.  I did notice that my Kindle offers the feature to highlight passages and comment on them.  These comments join a cloud of similar comments from similar readers online.  I have the option to choose to read my ebooks with these comments enabled.  Somehow the feature does not have the same charm as classic marginalia.  The "in-line" nature of the comments is also somewhat distracting, though some methods of classic marginalia do involve the mark-up of passages "in-line."

What is marginalia, Nick?  You may be asking yourself that.

According to Webster:
mar·gi·na·lia noun plural \ˌmär-jə-ˈnā-lē-ə\

Definition of MARGINALIA
1: marginal notes or embellishments (as in a book)
2: nonessential items <the meat and marginalia of American politics — Saturday Review>

In very simple terms, marginalia is someone writing in the margins of their books.  Historically, this has been happening for a very long time.  It can be as simple as a student highlighting passages in his text book (a specialized form of marginalia known as scholia) or a reader penning his thoughts and critique in the margins as he reads.

This latter form is particularly note-worthy.  Reading a book with this type of marginalia is like watching a DVD with commentary.  Often times, this will be that readers first time with the book and you can watch as that person's opinions change and mature through the course of reading the book.

Edgar Allen Poe published a number of his musings, reflections, and fragmental poetry in a volume titled "Marginalia."

Voltaire penned an entire book in the margins of another while he was in prison, due a lack of paper.

Several authors have written "Annotated" volumes, their commentary of other authors works, with passages that could be described as marginalia.  Of course I'm a fan of Asimov's Annotated series of books.  As was Henry.

Perhaps most famously, Samuel T. Coleridge was renown for his habit of marginalia and a number books edited with his marginalia have been published.  He was a fairly serious opium addict and some of these passages are very enlightening into the mindset of the barely lucid.

I would post a scan of one of Henry's mark-ups but sadly I do not have those books any more.  He was very much interested in the concept of human love.  I used to own a copy of Malory's Le Morte De Arthur in which he had heavily annotated.  He had extreme difficult understanding the concepts of love as described in those pages.  Particularly troubling to him was the story of The Lady of Astolat.

I remember this in particular not because he was troubled at The Lady's death, but at how he envied her capacity for emotion.  No, he was troubled that he had never felt even a fraction of the love and devotion that Elaine had felt.  It was a sensation he found so alien and so enviable at the same time.

He often spoke of emotion as a spectrum of perception.  Just as some peoples' vision is more keen than others, perhaps some people experience vivid or muted emotions.  In this metaphor, Henry described himself as emotionally blind, unable to experience the vivid and moving colors of emotion that others cherished.

His was a world without light.

I remember that comment in his marginalia in particular.  "Mine is a world without light."

Gone.

Henry's Gone.

He's Just Gone.

He's Just Disappeared.

This happened a few weeks ago and until now, it hadn't occurred to me that I should keep blogging about him.  My blog is due to be reviewed by my professor soon and I suppose I don't have any choice but to keep going.

It's like he's just took off.

I'm very upset.

Though I know Henry could not care for me in the way I care for him, that doesn't make this any easier.  He should have said something, anything.  He should have let me know he was going.

I'm not the only one who was shocked.  The police... no, they weren't the police, they made certain to repeat that several times.  Some kind of government officials visitted my appartment, a few weeks ago.  They were looking for Henry, too.  They asked if I had anything of his, anything that might give them some clue about where he'd gone.  One of them noticed a book I had open on the kitchen table.

They took them all.  Any book that Henry had written in, they took them.  I suppose I should have argued, but they said that any of them might contain clues on where Henry might have gone.  They assured me that I'd get the books back after they reviewed them.  They gave me a blank cared with a number on it.

I'm supposed to call if I remember anything.

I'm so upset.  Here is a scan of the article in the paper describing his disappearance.

Over tonight and the weekend, I'm going to continue blogging about Henry.  This will be in part due to my obligations to my Technical Writing course, but also in honor of him.  Wherever he is, I'm sure that he will find a place to squirrel himself away and hide from the world in a satisfying manner.

My next blog will be about marginalia, a habit that Henry adored.

Mk Ultra

Project Mk Ultra was a CIA program into the manipulation of human behavior through a variety of methods for the purposes of controlling individuals and extracting information from unwilling interviewees.  Several methods were experimented with at a huge assortment of civilian institutions including prisons, hospitals, and colleges.  The methods utilized involved psychotropic drugs, verbal and sexual abuse, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation.  This was all done without the knowledge of the President, Gerald Ford, and he even launched an investigation into these programs with chilling results.

I had asked Henry to describe to me the most difficult part of his condition was.  He was lax to call it a condition.  Though he had seen a psychologist many years ago who diagnosed him with this condition, he felt that it was more a way of life or a philosophy.  Still, Henry describes a frustrating element of his life.  From his viewpoint, people are inherently unknowable.  Their behavior is confusing to him to the point that it seems alien.  They are emotional and interconnected.  People define themselves by the relationships they have and it is a concept that is difficult to for him to identify with, being a largely solitary person.

It is an issue for people who try to get close to him, too.  I am not the first.  Many people have reached out to him over the years, thinking that he was merely shy or reserved.  What they found was an emotional coldness and a profound lack of interest in developing personal relationships.  Most painful would be those individuals who sought romantic relationships with Henry and who would struggle against his isolation and emotional coldness in a futile attempt to connect with him.

He described a relationship he had with a woman, once, a beautiful, patient woman that he thought possessed the long-suffering virtue required to cope with his emotional distance.  He described, as if relating a story from one of his books, in cool, calm, unaffected tone, of a sexual encounter with this woman, where he sought to give her what she desired.  She had given so much of herself to him and he appreciated it, he wanted to give back to her.  Feeling that she valued a sexual relationship with her, he submitted to her advances.

He was there, he said, physically, but the intimacy she sought was not.  His mind, the real part of him, had withdrawn into his interior space.  He could perceive that things were happening to him, potentially wonderful things, but his reaction to her intense emotional vulnerability caused him to recoil from her and escape into his own mind.

In the end, these clumsy, passionless encounters would fail to satisfy.  She would tell him that she could look into his eyes and see that he was not with her anymore and it frustrated her that she could not follow after him when he retreated like that.  He could recognize the pain in her, but to him is was nothing more than the confusing, alien behavior of people he could not understand.  What he felt was relief from the anxiety of constantly trying to be for her what he could not.  He would staunchly refuse the advances of any woman for the rest of his life.  He was in his late twenties at the time.

Henry described a story he once read that used Project Mk Ultra as a plot element. The Project in this book removed the emotional capabilities from the subjects they experimented on in an effort to make them cold, calculating killers.  The book explored the lives of these pitiable subjects and the relationships that fell apart around them when they were unable to emotionally connect with the people in their lives.

Henry identified with these fictional characters and joked about the same, that he had had his emotions destroyed and lays in wait as a sleeper agent for the government to activate his hypnotically implanted assassin training.

It wasn't a very good joke, but I laughed.

Schizoid Personality Disorder

First and foremost, Schizoid Personality Disorder, while it shares common causation and mechanical characteristics, is distinct from Schizophrenia and Schizotypical Personality Disorder. In particular, it lacks the delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia that typify these other conditions.  It is -not- dangerous.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Schizoid Personality Disorder is characterized by the following traits. To be diagnosed with this condition, a patient must have four of the following:

1. Emotional coldness, detachment or reduced affect.
2. Limited capacity to express either positive or negative emotions towards others.
3. Consistent preference for solitary activities.
4. Very few, if any, close friends or relationships, and a lack of desire for such.
5. Indifference to either praise or criticism.
6. Taking pleasure in few, if any, activities.
7. Indifference to social norms and conventions.
8. Preoccupation with fantasy and introspection.
9. Lack of desire for sexual experiences with another person.

 In my interactions with Henry, numbers 2, 3, and 8 were almost immediately apparent.  Even in my email and message-board conversations with Henry, it was clear he had little interest in interpersonal exchange.  Where most of the message-board was alive with discussions about new and interesting acquisitions, Henry's visits were short and to the point, brokering a book trade and signing off.

It became clear to me that the fictions he imagined and populated with these books were far more valuable to him. Indeed, I would find that his books were littered with marginalia.  As our trade forum was routinely fond of lamenting, printed books seemed to be on the way out, replaced by a Kindle era.  Kindle seemed an ironic name for the e-reader du jour, as it may be turning our books into kindling.  With the passage of printed books from vogue, marginalia would disappear as well, a practice Henry engaged in with passion.

I now own a few of Henry's books (including my Hitchhiker's Guide) which include his marginalia in them.  The conversations he has with these texts are fascinating to the point that I've suggested he publish his own series of Annotated Works in the vein of Asimov's.

Now that I have had an opportunity to know Henry for a good while, I believe he rates a 9-out-of-9 rating in the DSM for Schizoid Personality Disorder.  In later entries in this blog, I would like to focus on a few of these symptoms, the ones that may be particularly difficult for friends of those with SPD to deal with.