AN ENLIGHTENING ENCOUNTER WITH A "CRAZY" PERSON

One wintry day many years ago I was sitting, feeling depressed, on a cold rough step in front of the New York Public Library.  It was rush hour and below on the street people were hurrying about, with, it seemed to me, no reason but to rush.

Above me at the top of the all the steps there was a man gesturing, throwing his arms wildly about and shouting, an apparent madman.

Too depressed to get very afraid, I kept looking over and up at him.  After a few minutes I was surprised that he seemed to notice me and he came down the steps.

He sat down on my step, about six feet away, and didn’t look at me.  Both of us were not looking anywhere but forward, towards Fifth Avenue.  Clearly though, he was focused more into his own mind and speaking from it.  He was in the middle of delivering a passionate lecture on Hannibal and his armies’ crossing of the Alps.

Nearly weeping, now shouting, then imploring, he evoked tragic losses - of men, elephants, horses, quoting, from memory, passages in both Latin and English. 

Never had I heard such an emotional recounting of history. The real fate of Hannibal’s war weighed on him as much as perhaps his own inner wars.

I felt history come alive more than ever and my heart as well.  My troubles receded in the face of Hannibal and his troops’ tremendous losses.

He spoke on and on of the agonies suffered through war, the shocked and fearful deaths of animals and men.

Then suddenly he paused briefly.

“Am I going too fast for you?”

I said, “No.”

And he proceeded.

I saw then that I was the acting student body of one for his loud laments and his eloquence on behalf of sufferings of the world.

Years later I was shocked to see that man again, in Boston on a bus, sitting ramrod straight, now dressed up with a stiff white shirt on.

He said nothing, just sat up very straight.  I didn’t say anything. But the heartbreaking history he had evoked back in New York had memorably made my own sufferings at that time as if they were next to nothing.

That in turn made him, and this appearance on that bus, almost like an apparition. It made him also into a kind of strange, silent guardian or angel or centurion of the heart, of men, of Hannibal, of animals, and of me.