He insisted on denying logic. We couldn't tell if it was intentional, but because
we couldn't talk sense into him, he was easy to dismiss.
He didn't defy science, not in the traditional way, so he didn't qualify as a wizard. Everything he did still fell within the bounds of scientific laws. It's just that so many of his ideas stretched
the limits of acceptability and sanity.
If you told him something he didn't like, he would act like you were lying, no matter how much proof you had. We had no clue what he truly believed, how much of it was pretense, how much of it was real. Some suggested that it wasn't so much that he was choosing what to believe, but that
he believed in nothing at all, so evaluating the truth or lack thereof wasn't even something he spent time on.
He was building a fantasy world for himself, where the ultimate narrative was determined by him and him alone. It was pointless trying to get through to him. As time went on, he got increasingly better at dismissing whatever arguments we tried to bring to him. If
he decided he was going to fly one day, he would just insist he had wings that nobody, not even himself, could see or feel. And he would insist that the cobble he was on was just a hallucination, that he was in fact already soaring among the clouds.
Was he secretly laughing at us? We could never tell. It didn't show on his face. He made a great show of denying whatever reality was around him. You tell him a law had changed, and if he didn't like it, he would continue to act as if
the old laws were still on the books. Throw him in the clink for a few months, but if he felt like walking out, he would just start acting like he had already walked out. Was inprisonment still a punishment if the inprisoned acted like they were free? Putting him in a madhouse didn't change anything either.
It seemed to be a curious case of full-on rebellion against reality. His narrative of his own life increasingly diverged from what could be reasonably possible. And
the more he repeated his own narrative, the more consistent he became with previous retellings of his fantastical experiences.
He made me second-guess myself. My narrative of my own life was a collection of stories that included things I did not like, because I believed them
to have the value of truth. His own narrative did not value truth at all, but consisted of only things he wanted. Who was I to judge that he was the crazy one? Despite his time in confinement and in trouble with the law, he seemed to enjoy his life more than I enjoyed mine. Of course we couldn't really tell what was going on inside his head, but he was certainly putting on a great act if he were truly suffering.
But what could we do with someone who regularly ignored the facts, ignored social limits, and ignored any attempt to reason with him? He wasn't a hostile person, and was friendly enough as long as he still enjoyed the conversation. But
once he changed his mind, reality would disappear again, figuratively anyway.
He could accomplish anything he set his mind to - I think he took that a bit too seriously. He didn't even need to do anything negative if he could just claim to have already done it. Burn down the manor of a magistrate he disliked? Already did that
five years ago while riding his dragon.
There wasn't much we could do. We weren't even sure there was anything we should do. He wasn't totally harmless, but not a real threat either. Perhaps nuisance would be a better word for it, unless you were trying to understand him. If you were, then he was a fascinating subject, a source of endless tales that were impossible to believe, but if you wanted a spot of amusement,
there were worse ways to spend an afternoon. I might even miss him when he departs from this world.