The Cormac McCarthy I Know

The Cowan Campus of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is a renovated extension of the adobe home of Patrick J. Hurley, the United States Secretary of War from 1929 to ’33 and Ambassador to China in 1945. Hurley is one of the company of martial personalities who occupy the landscape of Northern New Mexico, coexisting with atomic physicists, visual artists, off-the-gridders, assorted new-age worshippers of the Egyptian sun-god Aten, and admirers of the resonant frequencies of minerals. The campus bevels down metamorphic crystalline rocks off the Western face of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I have always assumed that the premise is that elevation engenders elevated thought.

In 1984 a group of illustrious scientists convened a meeting to determine what a radically new approach to mathematical science might look like when it takes the complexity of the world seriously. What kinds of personalities and talents would be required, and the culture necessary to support the effort. In one the founding documents of the Santa Fe Institute, Murray Gell-Mann who had won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1969 for work in elucidating symmetries required to classify subatomic particles, set out his recruitment criteria. In doing so he employed a classical, epic, taxonomy.

You could say that it’s a problem of personality types, that there are people who like cold logic, reason, analysis, and careful structuring of problems, especially in their work … There are other people who like syntheses, qualitative considerations, general remarks, natural history, and description. Finally, there are a few people who try to combine both. Some people call these Apollonian, Dionysian, and Odyssean types … If one can find just a few people who can combine these various characteristics, it would make an enormous difference.

—Murray Gell-Mann, “The Concept of the Institute,” Emerging Syntheses in Science

One of the places Murray would go hunting for Odysseans is at the annual meetings of the MacArthur Fellows. Murray was himself an avid reader and more than once expressed regret at the inordinate time he had spent reading books in place of making new discoveries. Murray’s favorite authors included Conan Doyle, Mary Shelley, Jorge Louis Borges, and . Murray was