Nash was leading all these separate lives. Completely separate lives. — ARTHUR MATTUCK, 1997
ALL THROUGH HIS CHILDHOOD, adolescence, and brilliant student career, Nash had seemed largely to live inside his own head, immune to the emotional forces that bind people together. His overriding interest was in patterns, not people, and his greatest need was making sense of the chaos within and without by employing, to the largest possible extent, the resources of his own powerful, fearless, fertile mind. His apparent lack of ordinary human needs was, if anything, a matter of pride and satisfaction to him, confirming his own uniqueness. He thought of himself as a rationalist, a free thinker, a sort of Spock of the starship Enterprise. But now, as he entered early adulthood, this unfettered persona was shown to be partly a fiction or at least partly superseded. In those first years at MIT, he discovered that he had some of the same wishes as others. The cerebral, playful, calculating, and episodic connections that had once sufficed no longer served. In five short years, between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-nine, Nash became emotionally involved with at least three other men. He acquired and then abandoned a secret mistress who bore his child. And he courted — or rather was courted by — a woman who became his wife.
As these initial intimate connections multiplied and became ever-present elements in his consciousness, Nash’s formerly solitary but coherent existence became at once richer and more discontinuous, separate and parallel existences that reflected an emerging adult but a fragmented and contradictory self. The others on whom he now depended occupied different compartments of his life and often, for long periods, knew nothing of one another or of the nature of the others’ relation to Nash. Only Nash was in the know. His life resembled a play in which successive scenes are acted by only two characters. One character is in all of them while the second changes from scene to scene. The second character seems no longer to exist when he disappears from the boards.
More than a decade later, when he was already ill, Nash himself provided a metaphor for his life during the MIT years, a metaphor that he couched in his first language, the language of mathematics: B squared + RTF = 0, a “very personal” equation Nash included in a 1968 postcard that begins, “Dear Mattuck, Thinking that you will understand this concept better than most I wish to explain . . .” The equation represents a three-dimensional hyperspace, which has a singularity at the origin, in four-dimensional space. Nash is the singularity, the special point, and the other variables are people who affected him — in this instance, men with whom he had friendships or relationships.1
Inevitably, the accretion of significant relationships with others brings with it demands for integration — the necessity of having to choose. Nash had little desire to choose one emotional connection over another. By not choosing, he could avoid, or at least minimize, both dependence and demands. To satisfy his own emotional needs for connectedness meant he inevitably made others look to him to satisfy theirs. Yet while he was preoccupied with the effect of others on him, he mostly ignored — indeed, seemed unable to grasp — his effect on others. He had in fact no more sense of “the Other” than does a very young child. He wished the others to be satisfied with his genius —“I thought I was such a great mathematician,” he was to say ruefully, looking back at this period — and, of course, to some extent they were satisfied. But when people inevitably wanted or needed more he found the strains unbearable.