Socrates' walk

In a forest near Arnheim there lives a man who spends his hours trying to make his picture of the world fit coherently and perfectly. He turns ideas in his mind like a many-layered puzzle - its teeth jutting this way and that, carved from logic and hard and square like marble - and like a rubik's cube each twist yanks one piece from rest. The day I met him, he was trying to make night into day. I asked him why. He said all was one under the Lord God. I asked him why. He said the Lord God is and made all, and so all is one. He seemed so certain I dare not question him again. I once found a man I thought ridiculous so I questioned and questioned him 'til he finally snapped. Absurdity dribbled out of him like melting blemonge, seeping through the cracks in his skull. It wept with a silent howl. I wouldn't do that to this man. I was in awe of him. The vast weave he held before him, and only he could see, was so magnificent and fragile. I saw the focus and intensity in his concentrated stare. If he lost it for a moment it would smash upon the frosted flooring. I moved towards the coast.
In Prague I met another man who only ever held one belief at a time. 'Consistent but inconstant', he told me proudly. There was something natural about him, perhaps the warm, contented smile that lashed across his face like sea-rain. He was friendly enough, but aloof verging on cold. He greeted you with a warm hand and left you to leave with eyes like shining stones. Those who lived and worked in the harbour said he never moved, or not that any of them saw. He stood all day, smiling into the ocean. He ate fish or bread without looking at his meal, just tearing out chunks with his teeth, still staring straight ahead.
In Athens a man was jumping frantically from step to bench to table, screaming and pulling at his hair. He yelled 'DO NOT STAND' until he fell flat with exhaustion, then he'd quickly raise himself again. 'DO NOT STAND OR SIT OR LIE! LYING IS DEATH, ONLY THE DEAD LIE!'. I felt irked by his exertion.
What had happened to these fools gripped by ideas, passions, fears and furies? What makes a man abandon normal human motives and behaviours? I thought perhaps their minds had become divorced from their bodies, and so they never felt the passions of the animal, or that they had been so flooded by these passions that they had become confused and lost all reason. One was so evidently intelligent yet turned his mind to an obviously futile puzzle of his of devising. Another lived in limbo to avoid the tangled web of life. The third was pure energy and vivre, afraid of the very contemplation which had gripped the first and stunned the second. Were they related, as I had made them? Why should they be, I am going as mad as the first. Perhaps I oughtn't consider it, like the second. No, I mustn't consider these three. They'll drive me insane. I know, I'll go make a drink. Best keep busy.