I Dream Awake

It was from Alonzo Church that many years ago I took a course in mathematical logic for which I was unprepared — unprepared, that is, for the discipline of mathematics, unprepared for the demands of argument, and unprepared for Church’s glacial and remote style. Church was an enormously distinguished mathematician. The material was very difficult, so difficult that someone had occasion once to complain about the complexity of a proof.
Church rotated his large torso away from the blackboard and toward the ten or so of us in the lecture room. “Any idiot,” he said calmly but with immense conviction, “can learn anything in mathematics. It requires only patience.” He seemed curiously moved; a film came over his eyes. “Now to create something,” he said, “that is another matter.” In that queer moment of insight occasionally vouchsafed the very young, I understood instantly that Church was not reveling in his own accomplishments, but, with his own eyes fixed on the unattained goals to which he had aspired, was confessing obliquely to us, an audience of impossibly callow young men, that when it cam to mathematics he, too, belonged in the company of humanity’s idiots.
As do we all.

~ David Berlinski, A Tour of the Calculus p.281