In the film version of his life, John Nash’s character played by Russell Crow, sees people who really aren’t there. The real John Nash, like most 1)schizophrenics, did not imagine people, he heard 2)bizarre voices.
Interviewer: Did aliens speak to you?
Nash: When I began to hear voices I thought of the voices as from something of that sort.
Interviewer: What would they say to you?
Nash: Well, you see it’s really my 3)subconscious talking. It was really that night because I know that.
Interviewer: People described you back then as 4)brash and arrogant.
Nash: Yeah. Those are two words that have been used.
Harold Kuehn was one of those classmates. One of his best friends is responsible for the title “The Beautiful Mind” and the full quotation goes something like this “John was 5)obnoxious, but he had a beautiful mind.”
Interviewer: Your arrogance back then was said to be 6)monumental. “You don’t know, crap” you would say to some of your fellow graduate students. “How could you?” Accurate?
Nash: Well, I think the first one is probably invented but the second one might be accurate.
Interviewer: And you took yourself quite seriously and your work.
Nash: Well, of course I took myself seriously.
By 1958 John Nash seemed to have it all, a beautiful wife, a remarkable career, but shortly after his thirtieth birthday, that same year, the same year Fortune Magazine named him one of the country’s 7)mathematical stars, it all began to fall apart. He began to see 8)conspiracies and hidden messages, where there were none.
Interviewer: What happened when you went into the mental illness?
Nash: Now, you know that it’s mental illness if you’re coming out of that reality. It’s like the movie you see, at first the signals in the newspaper, the codes, and all this is the true reality which has been discovered.
Interviewer: But when you are in that reality you are in that reality, and you don’t realize that you are schizophrenic.
Nash: You’re not mentally ill, you’re rather extra-normally alerted to hidden truths. You’re enlightened, you’re exceptionally enlightened.
And then one day two decades later, a mysterious man showed up to speak with Dr. Nash about his early work.
It was Jurgen Voeble a visiting economics professor from Sweden on a secret mission for the Nobel Prize Committee.
Voeble: When we stood outside 9)the Faculty Club and I met him, I had never met him before, he was nervously smoking and then I introduced myself and invited him to go into the Faculty Club and have lunch, and then he asked me, “Can I enter? I’m not faculty.” And I was so moved by that and I felt that this was such an injustice.
Voeble reported back to Stockholm that this man who had changed the face of economics in his twenties deserved the Nobel regardless of his mental status. And in 1994 Dr. Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, which his friend Kuehn wrote about years later.
Interviewer: Recognition, you write, is a cure for many ills.
Kuehn: Absolutely. I did. John, was a person who wouldn’t meet your eyes, after the prize he was a changed man. People would GREet him on the streets of Princeton he would react and answer, and it just made the difference and it, it continues.
Interviewer: Russell Crow played you in the film. Would he have been your choice to play you?
Nash: No, I guess not.
Interviewer: Correct me if I’m wrong but you had the 10)notion that maybe Tom Cruise would be the right guy?
Nash: No, that was their idea, I said, no, no, no. He’s associated with these action movies and he’s rather short.
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