I want to make the point about mental instability in a different way, with a passage from J. D. Salinger’s “Seymour: An Introduction.” The scene is in Manhattan, at the magic moment of dusk.

Two boys are playing marbles while a third, Seymour, a brother of one of the players, is watching, then commenting on the play. “ ‘Could you try not aiming so much?’ he asked me, still standing there. ‘If you hit him when you aim, it’ll just be luck.’ He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. ‘How can it be luck if I aim?’ I said back to him, not loudly (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn’t say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. ‘Because it will be,’ he said. ‘You’ll be glad if you hit his marble — Ira’s marble — won’t you? Won’t you be glad? And if you’re glad when you hit somebody’s marble, then you sort of secretly didn’t expect too much to do it. So there’d have to be some luck in it, there’d have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.’ ”

The perfection of a truly transcendent or transfinite performance, the scene illustrates, involves no luck or accident. One can almost hear the voice of Yoda indicting the failure of Luke Skywalker to raise his X-Wing fighter from the Dagobah swamp: “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.”

There are other, less mystical forms of not-trying. Homer Simpson to Bart and Lisa: “Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.” The difference is that Seymour’s not-aiming and Yoda’s not-trying are themselves forms of action.

In other words, we go beyond our sense that it would be a good thing or a happy thing if something happened, some outcome was achieved, to a certainty that it always has happened, is happening and will happen.