Play Your Own Tune

Remember the mad genius mathematician in A Beautiful Mind? I've been reading that book about John Nash by Sylvia Nasar because my biography-in-progress is about a woman who conversed with spirits and was hospitalized--against her will.

Nasar quotes an item found in Nash's mother's scrapbook, which she placed there when Nash was a child, no doubt in an attempt to reassure herself. Mrs. Nash is quoting Angelo Patri:

"QUEER LITTLE TWISTS AND QUIRKS GO INTO THE MAKING OF AN INDIVIDUAL. To suppress them all and follow clock and calendar and creed until the individual is lost...is to be less than true to our inheritance....Life, that gorgeous quality of life, is not accomplished by following another man's rules. It is true we have the same hungers and the same thirsts, but they are for different things and in different ways and in different seasons....LAY DOWN YOUR OWN DAY, FOLLOW IT TO ITS NOON, or you will sit in an outer hall listening to the chimes but never reaching high enough to strike your own."

I don't know who Angelo Patri is or was, but he's onto something there.