The Air Loom, for all its florid...

The Air Loom, for all its florid...

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The Air Loom, for all its florid craziness, can be seen to have a function and a rationale: as a miraculous, if temporary, fix for a breaking mind, a coping strategy for a life that had become too brutally contradictory to sustain otherwise.

- Mike Jay
A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
biography history psychology

Other quotes by Mike Jay

But, mad or sane, Matthews was a man of no ordinary persistence. He was not prepared to renounce the peace plan, any more than he would be prepared to renounce his madness a few years later. A month later he was back in France, this time for an extended stay.The optimistic dawn of his revolutionary adventures was coming to an end, and his dark night of the soul was about to begin.

- Mike Jay

Come the revolution, however, mesmerism was reconceived once more. From its beginnings many had seen it as an aristocratic fad: Mesmer (by this stage long gone to Germany and Switzerland) had made a fortune from the nobility, charged the huge fee of 100 livres for admission to his Society of Universal Harmony, and even been offered a pension for life by Marie-Antoinette.

- Mike Jay

We are now edging across the boundary - always a porous one - between self-justification and fantasy. Matthews' story is by no means a complete fantasy: we can recognise every event. But the frame of reference is somehow shrinking, and momentous world events being rewritten around the actions of a minor player.

- Mike Jay

Haslam leaves us in no doubt what we are supposed to make of Matthews' mental world: this is gibberish and nothing more.

- Mike Jay

The French revolution, he concluded, had not produced any new principles of truths, merely a mass of examples of how things could go wrong.

- Mike Jay

If history is written by the victors, conspiracy theory is typically written by the losers, and there were few greater losers in the revolution than the French church and especially the Jesuits.

- Mike Jay
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