People are strange

To some the goal may simply be the possibility to witness a flawless sunrise lying on a fine sandy beach in solitude. To others it may be a life of hard work. Some may find their dreams fulfilled by reaching old age healthy and with a good many grandchildren to care for. Others are engaged in continuous fights, others need to boast about their many accomplishments, and there are those whose only purpose is to help people without nobody noticing. Some find the meaning of life in a flower, or a photograph, in the smile of a child, in the colour of money, in friends, in an unexpected instant of happiness, in a cold-blooded act of revenge, in a penalty kick, in greed and thirst and hunger, in the pettiest events of ordinary days or in the most solemn ceremonies that punctuate a handful of significant days from the cradle to the grave. People are strange, a fact that does not prevent the world to revolve around its axis.

Motionless, a silent mathematician stares gravely at his computer screen. His chin rests on his left hand, its index finger stretched halfway across his cheek. If looked at from the doorway anyone could get the wrong impression he is dozing. His computer screen is a calm white and towards the top corner on the right there is a large black rectangle. That geometrical shape is the subject of his stare. All through the day people walk past his door. His posture does not change, eyes fixed on a large black rectangle outlined against a monotonous white. His mind is about to infer something he still cannot grasp. It will happen out of his own mind's will, as if he had no real control on the process of creation. He will keep looking at that basic black geometrical figure on the screen with stubborn dedication, as salmon swimming a river upstream, as an ultrarunner keeping a constant stride for hours on end, as the ebb and the flow of the tides in planet Earth or the burning of hydrogen into helium in a main sequence star. Motionless both, the man and the rectangle, the ticking of time goes unnoticed. And then, without a warning, all fog clears up. He writes down the key result, hardly a scribbled line of symbols and numbers and clauses only he can understand. That humble line did not exist before. It contains a solid result, something which no one has previously found. The passage from the place where the abstract unknown lies to the concrete world of mathematical truth keeps being a mystery to him. After the stare and the thinking the day has offered a line to be proud of.

People are indeed strange, and involved in the strangest things, facts that do not prevent the world to revolve around its axis.