Joe Gould’s Teeth: The long-lost story of the longest book ever written (2015)

> “The fallacy of dividing people into sane and insane lies in the assumption that we really do touch other lives... Hence I would judge the sanest man to be him who most firmly realizes the tragic isolation of humanity and pursues his essential purposes calmly”

Tragic isolation indeed. The story of Savage, the African American sculptor, rings with as much tragic isolation as Joe’s. The author and the reader share the emotion, which is probably the measure of success in any writing.

It’s somewhere around this age of mine when one realizes one will be forgotten - and quickly. A few database columns here or there and then what? Subsumed by billions of the equally forgotten. So, I pursue my essential purpose; is there anything else?

When I was in university I worked for a year as the News Editor of the school paper. Every couple of weeks or so, we would get letters from a random guy. They were papers that had text written on almost every inch of them, sometimes both front and back. They were grammatically correct, but mostly just ramblings about topics like philosophy and war and politics and science. They started coming before I was there, and sometime during my tenure they stopped. Some were thrown away for sure, but I managed to collect what I could in one place, and when I left I took them with me. There are around 150-200 pages total. They are just cool.

Anyways I couldn't quite pin down what would cause someone to write such letters, but now I possibly have a name for it. Hypergraphia.

Samples: https://imgur.com/a/9nRzL6o/

Retelling this story would make an amazing HBO series.