There is such a thing as too much Pi

  The movie Pi starts out with the quote, “When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six I did. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal. I was terrified, alone in that darkness. Slowly, daylight crept in through the bandages, and I could see. But something else had changed inside of me. That day I had my first headache.”  It is about a man named Maximillian, who is extremely good with math. He is a genius but in turn, it makes him go mad. He goes crazy trying to figure something out and once he does begin to realize the true nature of things, he starts to be in a state at which he cannot survive. He becomes obsessed and paranoid.  He thinks he has found something special when he finds this sequence of 216 numbers and there are people that think so as well, but for different reasons. Max, I think, has problems deciphering what is real and what isn't as well. 

Throughout the film he has strange headaches with a very loud, piercing, shrieking noise all the while and he pulls at his hair and rubs a certain spot on his head. He uses a lot of drugs to try and remedy his headaches but nothing works. He also has weird visions. One was of an empty subway and a brain on the stairs. He poked the brain and there was a loud noise and he saw a train and a bright light coming towards him and then he woke up on the subway with a bloody nose. There is also another scene in which there is a brain but this time it is in a sink. In the end, he rids himself of his madness by drilling into his own head. When the movie ends, Max, smiles and I think it is the only time throughout the movie that he does. He is finally happy even though he thought that finding those numbers is what would do so. Is it because he doesn't have that pressure weighing on him anymore? I was also curious as to if he remembered everything he went through.  I have seen this movie three times and each time, this movie still tends to confuse me because it is hard to tell what is really happening at times, compared to what is only in his head. There are some scenes that are obvious, such as the ones with the brain, but there are other times where it seems less obvious. His senses confused him about what is real and imaginary. It is probably because he stared at the sun at a young age and when he could see, “something changed inside of him”.  It’s almost as if he was challenging his senses. Or maybe he was just rebelling against his mother. Who knows? But it is crazy to think that all because he stared into the sun for too long, it messed up his mind so much.  

Hume says, On the Immortality of the Soul,   “Having found such contradictions and difficulties in every system concerning external objects, and in the idea of matter, which we fancy so clear and determinate, We shall naturally expect still greater difficulties and contradictions in every hypothesis concerning our internal perceptions, and the nature of the mind, which we are apt to imagine so much more obscure, and uncertain. But in this we should deceive ourselves. The intellectual world, though involved in infinite obscurities, is not perplexed with any such contradictions, as those we have discovered in the natural. What is known concerning it, agrees with itself; and what is unknown, we must be contented to leave so.”

Max, instead of accepting things in the intellectual world, like math and the numbers that he finds, he decides to bring math into his metaphysical world. Because he had done so, he made things that he should have just accepted have bigger expectations. In turn, this makes him go insane because it is not natural. He needed to get out of what he thought was his reality.