I am smelling connections between things I didn’t notice before.

Joseph F Smith and James E Talmage once went golfing. It was not something Talmage usually did, but Smith made him. Talmage was too booky. He needed sun and to have have “fun.” Talmage’s first drive was spectacular, inciting praise of prodigy from Smith, and Talmage asked if he could go back to his studies already. Autism?

JD Salinger struggled with anxiety his whole life for strange reasons he articulated in his writings, especially in Catcher in the Rye, but everyone missed the point and made his life so weird for him that in his later years he was a total recluse and even sued relatives to keep them from publishing biographical statements about him. Autism?

HG Wells explained in between his science-soaring enthusiasm his disappointment with and disgust of how the mass of humanity operated. In First Men in the Moon, he has a character on the spectrum and the narrator who is not fight over the purpose behind going to the moon. In the Invisible Man, he plays with the ideas of most people’s ability to assume abstract concepts based on social cues and what it does to a man when he disconnects himself from his own ability to perceive himself in the eyes of others. He sneaks ideas that, if not about autism, seem to apply very well, throughout his high science fiction.

Sir Issac Newton was one of the most brilliant men who ever lived. But he was a social recluse vulnerable to criticism and manipulation. He required the support of a dear friend, Haley, to publish his greatest breakthrough: calculus, or how to calculate the motions of the planets with an equation. He discovered this and other things just for fun alone in his house. He once said of women that it would require too much of his conscious energy to make a relationship work. Definitely autism. No question about it.

There are great men scattered throughout history that I feel affinity with. Even Joseph Smith in a way. Smith was brilliant in his right, but lacked formal education. I don’t condone polygamy or lying to people or any of the questionable things he did, but I had glimpses of his mind here and there through his writings, especially the restoration scriptures and the king follett sermon, which have stayed with me to this day. He loved learning, esteeming it as communion with God in and of itself. He loved knowledge, wanting desperately to be part of the serious academic world which his humble beginnings and social connections precluded him from, at least according to the Fawn Brodie’s assessment. I think I sensed that from that many hours I’ve spent over the course of my life immersed in his writings. I wonder. He was fascinated with how religious social norms are set, almost like it was all intellectual to him.

They call it a spectrum because there are many ways of being on it. Anyone who falls outside the bell curve of traits associated with socio-emotional informational and stimuli processing is “autistic.” That just seems to be a word we’ve made up for a specific collection of deficits to be invoked when all other explanations fall short. It’s not a different “thing,” so much as it’s many things which are human but that fall outside of what is typically expected in neuro-development. You can have autistic traits but fall outside of the severity needed to diagnose you. You can also be so severe that just learning how to verbalize your thoughts is impossible because your skin feels like it’s on fire all the time or whatever extremity is driving you nuts. And then there are many shades of grey between those extremes.

No one knows what causes it exactly. There is no cure. But there doesn’t need to be. In every case, the traits both good and bad behind “it” define the person in question. It is who they are. Much of their inquisitive nature would not, perhaps, have formed the way it did if their deficits did not torment them in such personal ways for their entire lives, but they were brilliant men determined to figure something out and compensate or just think about the universe and communicate their melancholy thoughts and/or their sheer intellectual joys to other people.

Perhaps I’ve thrown some names into the pile which don’t belong. But if the boot fits, I’m gonna take liberties the same way some people like to imagine gayness throughout history even where it wasn’t readily obvious from the historical record. What if I painted a psychological portrait of my life and mind and soul using what these men wrote?

Cold-Dodger, you've done very very well!

The episodes that make us maybe odd are the part-combo that helps to make us all so durn adorable, too.